Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Omar Suleiman: Bridging Beliefs, Rediscovering Islam

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

In this month of Ramadan, imam Dr. Omar Suleiman calls us to contemplate and reflect upon Islamic virtues and values in the face of the current challenges: the misinformation era of social media, the misconception surge of bigotry, and the mistreatment response of tech advancement. Dr. Omar Suleiman is an American Muslim scholar and human rights activist who is also the founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute and a professor at Southern Methodist University. The host Gita Wirjawan is a proud Indonesian educator, entrepreneur, and currently visiting scholar at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #OmarSuleiman ----------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.idhttps://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: https://endgame.id/wanderingscientists https://endgame.id/spirituality https://endgame.id/thetake Visit and subscribe: https://youtube.com/@SGPPIndonesia https://www.youtube.com/@VisinemaPictures

So Joshua is my best friend from first grade. I didn't have any Muslims in my school. Joshua's uncle is a preacher. And everyone around me is deeply Christian, right? So I'm talking to Joshua and I say, listen, like, let's figure out life together. And so we basically both decide that we're going to become a religion together. My parents have no idea this is happening. Wow.

We're 13. Wow. So we're reading the Quran together. We're reading the Bible together. The breakdown of humanity also reflects in the breakdown of family. The importance of family. Family has been so deprioritized now in our discourse that to see the virtue of functioning within a family

is becoming a preposterous idea. You never burdened the oppressed to come up with the solution. You've got your foot on my neck. remove your foot from my neck and we can talk. So the language of peace is often used to suffocate the voices for justice. Hi, friends and fellows, welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be

of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far. and welcome to the special series. Hi, friends. Today I'm honored to be with Dr. Omar Sileman, who is the founder of Yaqin Institute, and also a professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Omar, it's an honor.

Thank you. Salamu. It's wonderful to have you here. Wadikamana. Welcome to our home. Thank you. And to your home. I hope this gets to be a long conversation.

and I want to start out with your childhood. How did you grow up and how did you become what you are? Tell us. So I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, where there weren't many Muslims. It's an interesting place. It's probably one of the most unique places in America. My parents are Palestinian refugees,

but they both actually had very unique journeys here to the United States. my father is five years older than Israel. I like to make a point that he was born in Palestine, a free Palestine, al-Hamderina. And he went around the world in search of an education. He actually graduated from one of the few schools in Palestine, taught in various disciplines in Medina, not in the Islamic University.

There was no Islamic University actually at that time. So it was schools that were named after companion. So he taught everything from math to Quran memorization for several years in Medina, then went around the world looking for a good university to pursue his studies, ended up in Houston, Texas, and became a distinguished professor in chemistry in Houston. He met my mom, may Allah have mercy on her in Houston. My mother was actually born in Damascus in 1951, so after Israel.

Presumably Syrian? She's Palestinian. Palestinian. So she also was kind of born in the midst of the turmoil. Okay. But then found her way back to Palestine. Grew up in Palestine, actually in Bethlehem and came from a very interesting family. It was considered sort of one of the royal families, if you will, is the Hashem tribe. So the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, obviously. So she's from Benu Hashem.

Her grandfather was the last Mufti of Palestine under the Ottoman Empire. Mufti Munibh Hasham, may Allah have mercy on him. But her family was kind of all over looking for new places, looking for new opportunities. So she had a very open spirituality growing up, also found her way to Houston. All of her siblings came to Houston, University of Houston. And they got married in the one mosque in Houston at the time. Houston now has hundreds of mosques without exaggeration. and they settled in Louisiana.

So my father is a professor of chemistry. My mother had studied Arabic literature in Beirut, and she had a degree in Arabic literature and a degree in finance from Houston. So I'm born in New Orleans, and New Orleans was at the center of many developments in the United States. You know, the South obviously takes a long time to catch up with the rest of the country in many ways,

especially when you're talking about the 80s, the 90s, and race relations, right? You're still, you know, less than 20 years removed from the 60s and the era of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers. And New Orleans is this very interesting place because people are racially ambiguous. So you don't really stand out, which was good for me. People just assumed that I was half black, half white. You know, I was mixed race because that's very common. Creoles are in New Orleans. So I didn't really have that problem. Of course, to racist, you know, white supremacists, you're simply colored. And so, you know, you have to deal with that

kind of reality in Louisiana. Now, going between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, seeing sort of this strange reality, right, of a very inclusive, welcoming place, you know, when you're in New Orleans, but then don't get caught outside of your city. You know, don't get caught in the wrong neighborhood. Don't find yourself where you've got still Ku Klux Klan rallies. David Duke at the time, the head of the KKK. True story, my father actually threw him out of the masjit when I was a kid because he came trying to masquerade as an ally of the Muslim community

by using, you know, sort of this, I'm against Israel too. So just like you all are against Israel, I'm against Israel. And my father was able to see you right through that, Hamda, and throw them out. It was an interesting reality. So I really had this typical, whatever that means, Louisiana upbringing in one way. But in another way, knowing that I came from a place that I did not get to actually experience, which was Palestine.

So as I grow older and older, I'm recognizing the Palestinian reality. I grow up and I see videos, the Intifalva, 1993. So much is happening now in my household to where I'm starting to recognize, wait a minute. My parents came out of a violent reality and, you know, we have a connection and a duty and a responsibility to this place. But the power of it was that my parents were deeply humanitarian. So my parents were connected to every cause that they were exposed to globally and locally. Before social media, my mom, may Allah have mercy on her, was a poet. So she used to write poetry about all the oppressed peoples around the world.

I had the opportunity to go to Bosnia last year and to read her poem for Bosnia in Sadeo. A poem she wrote about Sadeo, in Louisiana, right? A Palestinian woman in Louisiana wrote a poem about Sadevo. I was in Sarajevo for a genocide tribunal for Kashmir. Some Palestinian-American reading my mom's poem in Sereyevo at a Kashmir genocide tribunal about Sariyevo, about the Bosnian plight. You know, I remember my father donating our car to Somali refugees. I remember coming home and finding refugees from Kosovo in my house.

I remember the weekends going out to habitats for humanity, going out to local soup kitchens and shelter. I remember my father debating on Palestine on campuses. Sometimes he'd be the one side on the Palestinian side or the one person on the Palestinian side. I'd have four professors, you know, spewing, you know, anti-Palestinian bigotry and some, you know, typical Zionist talking points.

And he's out there arguing. And then I remember him sort of elevating himself and becoming this incredible professor in his field, a distinguished professor of chemistry, and he chooses to build one of the best laboratories in the entire South at Southern University, which was a historically black college, and HBCU.

And he builds an entire graduate program in analytical chemistry. So we're connected to this idea of excellence despite any obstacles. We're connected to plights wherever they are. We're not ignoring what's happening in our backyard, nor are we ignoring what's happening across the world. And that's something I see from my parents. Now in the background of all of that,

and also front and center, was my mother, may Allah have mercy on her struggling with cancer. So my mother struggled with cancer. She had four strokes. Each stroke took something away from her until eventually she passed away. And my father always kind of tried to hide that reality from us. My mother, you know, tried to ensure that we still had as normal of a life as possible. But as a child, it was a lot for me to go to school, come home, mom's in a coma for 14 days, the longest two weeks of my life, even though I was a child.

How old were you, find me? I would have been at that point nine years old. Michelle. Yeah. So I'm kind of coming home. Where's mom? She's at the hospital. So I'm going to school every day,

and I'm wondering, like, I hope mom's not in the hospital again, right? Chemotherapy, and obviously the methods of cancer treatment, and back then were a lot rougher, right? They've come a long wave, you know, in the last few years. What, Hamdurna, you know, for people that would have the same cancer that my mother had. So struggling with that and trying to understand why is it that my parents, who are the best people in the world, are going through this plate? So we're helping the world, and then my mom's in a hospital. It's not clicking for me.

It's not making sense. So what happened is I was a very anxious. angry kid. So it's funny when people asked me, you know, like, you know, what were you like growing up? I'm like, I had a hot temper because I'm not known for having a hot temper. I was angry. I was lashing out. So I was empathetic because we had a home of empathy, but I was very angry. And I was mad because I was mad because it seemed like we were doing everything we should be doing as people. And whatever was happening in the world was all against us, right? Like, why is this happening to us? So it was. It was interesting.

interesting because I was having conversations as an 11 and 12 year old. I remember I used to sit in a room with my dad. And, you know, 11 and 12 year old shouldn't be weighing in on philosophical discussions or religious discussions. And my dad is giving sermons in the mosque. My dad is sort of the peacemaker in the community. He's just an incredible human being. You know, he still is. May God preserve him.

Incredible human being. So he sits in any room and, like, commands the respect. And here I am 11, 12 year old. And I always just jump into the religious conversations, the philosophical conversations. and people kind of look at me first and foremost, like, why is he talking? But I didn't care. I just talked. I got into it.

So I'm reading books as a young child, asking questions. I am learning at that point that something has to give. I also went from being 5 foot 4 to 6 foot 2 when I was 12 years old. Oh my turn of 11, 12 years old. So I grew out of all my clothes. I played a lot of basketball. Sports became my escape. And I think that that doesn't resonate with so many people, but I think it's important to understand that when you're in sports, when you're playing a team sport, you're forced to be in the game. Your thoughts can't wander. And so for me, sports was an escape. So I played every sport I could possibly play as a kid. I played basketball, football,

baseball. I never wanted to do anything but just be on a field or be on a court. And the reason was, actually a mental reason. I wanted to escape. So it was the funnest and most relaxing place for me because that's where I could go. I didn't have a place of spiritual fulfillment yet. It was really just that. And then, you know, I'm 13 years old. I look like I'm 18, 19, 20. Seriously, I could actually drive a car when I was 13. I had facial hair when I was 13. That was a very strange 13 year old in that sense, right? Now, what helps is that my best friend from first grade onwards, his name is Joshua. Okay. Also is physically, extremely large. And so we're both the same height. He's on the football side.

I'm on the basketball side. So I was tall, lanky, skinny. He was just built like alignment. So he plays football. I play basketball. So Joshua is my best friend from first grade. I didn't have any Muslims in my school. Joshua's uncle is a preacher. And everyone around me is deeply Christian, right? So I'm talking to Joshua and I say, listen, like, let's, let's figure out life together. And so we basically both decide that we're going to become a religion together. My parents have no idea this is happening. Wow. We're 13. So we're reading the Quran together. We're reading the Bible together. I wasn't, you know, I did sneak into probably some places I shouldn't have as a 13-year-old. So I'm not going to claim to be an angel or claim to be innocent, but

one of those places was going to churches, asking preachers questions, asking pastors questions. My father-in-law, who will become my father-in-law, was the imam of the mosque. I end up marrying his daughter later on in that journey. So asking him questions, going to the halakas, these little breakfast halakas. I was a 13-year-old and I was in a halakha. So it's this Saturday morning breakfast group where they read 10 verses of the Quran together and they discuss. I was 13 years old.

I mean, everyone there was 25 and above. They let me in. So I'm asking questions. And we decided together that, look, we're gonna embrace a religion together. So let's figure this out together. Al-hamderina, I embraced Islam. He embraced Islam.

Joshua became Yusuf. He's still my closest friend and my brother. He converted when he was 13? Yes. So he's also a 13 year old that looks like an 18 year old. Okay. All right.

So for me, that was a renewed religiosity. But I really look at that. Like, this is when I'm starting to convert to Islam, right? Like 13, 14. That time, right? I'm in middle school. But I'm like all in, locked in, right? When he does that and when I sort of take that step,

that next step we'd become like this Da'a team where we're converting like 13, 14, 15 year olds in middle school, high school. We used to hang out at the high school, not in the middle school. All of our friends were in high school. We played basketball at the high school.

We'd hang out at the high school. So all of our friends were 17, 18. And we looked 1718. And we were mature to that level as well. So we're just giving Da'a to people at that point. Members of his family are becoming Muslim. Schoolmates are becoming Muslim. Some of them went on to become rappers and NBA players.

And their shahada story originates in a small school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Their first shahda story. And so I see them now and they're famous and I'm like, you know, I remember you. You know, and we remember those days when we're like literally in a school cafeteria talking about religion and trying to get people to become Muslim. And Joshua actually Yusuf really becomes a member of my household. So he moves in. in a way. I mean, he's at my house more than he's at his own house. My parents refer to him as

their son. So, like, when my mom passed away, it was like his mom passed away. And he still has a relationship with my dad. He calls my dad Pops. That's how we all affectionately refer to my dad Pops. He still has an independent relationship with my dad that's independent of me and my blood brother. So we're three brothers. We're actually two blood brothers, but we're three brothers. And my father will always joke and say he's the only son that actually, you know, stuck around in Louisiana and would still cut the grass and like hang out with him and spend time with him because we moved to Texas. His parents were cool with us?

So he was raised by a single mom. Okay. And his mom became Muslim in Hamdaddad. Eventually, she initially was very opposed to it, but she became Muslim too. So sometimes now for our Eid prayer, we'll all have our families together at Hamda-Lah. He's married with kids now as well. So it was just a fascinating turn of events, right? At that point in my life, that's when I'm like looking overseas

and I want to study an Islamic universities. I want to go to college. I actually skipped two grades of high school. So I tested out of high school, tested out of two grades of high school. And I got situated in the United Arab Emirates. So I started studying Islam in the United Arab Emirates. And I took the IGCSE. So I passed everything I needed to from a high school perspective.

I started memorizing the Quran. And I started attending the traditional ma'ahad in Sharraqa, in Sharjjad at the time, learning my basics and my fundamentals of Islam, came back, went to universities, and then continued my study of Islam, parallel to my academic pursuit,

just independent academic pursuit. At the time, the idea was, you know, I asked my father, I was like, hey, my father's very serious about school, about academics, right? I'm like, you know, I want to study Islam. At that time, you're talking about 2001, 2001, 2002, not just the 9-11 era, but you're also talking about a time where being an imam meant that you were not going to financially be able to sustain yourself at all. So the deal was, all right, look, I'll let you go study for a few years.

And you can develop relationships with teachers here and abroad. I'll help you with that. Right. But you need to promise me you're going to pursue your. your secular education. So I still had to do my degree in accounting. I never used my degree in accounting. Al-Hamda-La, never did taxes. But you would have gone to college at the age of 16? Yeah, so I actually started freshman year turning 17. So I finished high school, finished my whole high school experience. So I went overseas. I left out of ninth grade. Okay. Yeah, I started then

memorizing the Quran, al-hmm. You know, and that's really where, we're, we're, we're, it takes off from. So it's a it's an interesting story and interesting turn of events. And when I got back and I kind of just did my accounting degree just because I had to, it kind of just like, all right, fine, but I continued with with teachers, with different messiah with different institutions. And so I kind of now mirrored, you know, a pursuit of of the secular education with pursuit of religious education. And a lot of other things happened after that. You spent some time in Southeast Asia.

Yes. Talk about that. So I actually did my PhD at IAUM at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. I initially enrolled in ISTAC and then moved over to IAUM because my advisor had moved over to IAUM. So I wanted to stay with him, Dr. Aksson, at that point. Malaysia represents to me just this beautiful place where the people's character, their adab, their goodness, their natural humility and sweetness, matches with just a natural love for Islam that exists there, that I absolutely loved. So Louisiana is one of the kindest places in the world.

If you go to New Orleans, it's one of the most hospitable places in the world. So I grew up in an environment where everyone says, hi, how are you, where you talk to everybody in the grocery store. where people smile at you. And that's why when I go to the northeast, where most of Islamic conferences and things happen, I kind of get looked at weird because I'm used to that. That's the reality I grew up in, right?

So Malaysia represented this beautiful place to me where the people's adab, their character, their manners, their morals, just beautiful, the treatment, the humility. And I love seeing Islam embedded in the culture there. And I love the university, I. IUM, UIA, of course. If you're there, you call it UIA outside.

You call it I-A-UM. the professors that were there. You know, one of my favorite authors, Dr. Hashem Kamali was there. And I remember, you know, that was one of the first books I read on Fik was Dr. Hashem Kham Kamali's book on Fik, on Islamic jurisprudence. So getting to meet him. So I immediately fell in love with that reality. And honestly, saw Malaysia as a second home pretty quickly.

And so for five or six years, five and a half years, I'd go there twice a year, spend some time there, enjoy it. My family feels half Malay. So my kids love Malaysia. We still decided that we're going to go every year, inshallah, because we really enjoy our time. And hopefully now sort of branch out from our second home of Malaysia,

go to Indonesia, inshallah, go to the Philippines. We've been to Singapore a few times, al-h-h-h-da-la. So really start to explore the region since I'm not bound by the PhD studies anymore. I can just go there, give a few classes, meet people that I love over there. And, insh-ah-law, do some other things. I think we would be happy to host you. I'm really looking forward to it, insh-Shallam. It's not as small as Malaysia.

It's slightly bigger. I've heard. No, I'm, you know, actually, so interesting enough, LSU, Louisiana State University, LSU had a lot of students from Indonesia and from Malaysia. So I actually knew many people from Indonesia and Malaysia growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, LSU students. And the climate in Baton Rouge is very similar to the climate in Indonesia and Malaysia. It's hot and it's humid, you know.

This is cold for us. All right. You've been asked this a lot. Explain how Islam got misunderstood by so many people. And explain how you think we could do to remedy that. Well, I think that Islam is misunderstood, intentionally manufactured in a way. that scares people from it from a religious perspective from a social perspective from a political

perspective everything about Islam represents the foreign and the scary and the you know the the intent to dominate and and overtake and I think that it starts first and foremost by removing Islam from the realm of religion and theology Because I think that the theology of Islam is incredibly appealing and beautiful to people. It really brings together all of the prophets in this beautiful, unified fronts, all calling to the idea of Tohide, of monotheism. And all of the messages coming together and all of the messengers coming together. And I think that if people started from that, then they would really appreciate its beauty. I mean, it's coherent.

It makes sense. It intellectually is satisfying. It's spiritually satisfying. It combines much of what people would seek from the coherence of, you know, the Abrahamic way and the spirituality that is found in many of the Eastern philosophies. It's a beautiful religion, first and foremost. Keneh Abdul-Jabbar, who's a famous player, obviously, one of the greatest of all time in the NBA. He was here at Texas Christian University a couple of years ago speaking,

and he said, I embraced Islam as a religion. Most people were embracing it at that time when he embraced it, you know, with other intent or with other factors. He said, for me, it was just the pure beauty of the religion that started that off. So I think that you remove it from the realm of religion. And then you turn it into an Arab Middle Eastern religion. And with all that has been done to portray the Middle East as this hotbed of violence and regression and craziness in Hollywood over the last few decades,

when you then bring that Hollywood depiction to the 9-11 reality, right, which is, okay, what we've been seeing on TV now has come to us in New York. Then what ends up happening is that there's this deep fascination with who are these people that attacked us. So you have all these hate groups that were founded and all of this money that was thrown at these hate groups, government money and other private donation money. And these hate groups manipulated that sudden curiosity people had about Islam and had about the Muslim world. And they founded these think tanks, these hate groups and think tanks with neutral sounding names, Center for Security, Center for, you know, it always has Middle East or global or security

and policy in it somewhere in there. Right. And so it's not obvious to the agency or to the corporation or to the university that's bringing them in that they're a hate group because it would take years for them to be classified as such. And then, well, they have PhDs, people that have studied the Middle East. But they're hate mongers. They're pure bigots.

And the thing about Islamophobes is that they never are just Islamophobes. They're always something else as well. But Islamophobia, especially in a post-9-11 world, is not a costly bigotry. You can be a bigot against Muslims. It's okay. You can hate Islam. You can hate the Muslims. But once you can show that they're actually not just anti-Muslim, then they can be disqualified in these arenas.

And that takes time. So they were able to manipulate the sudden curiosity, the Hollywood depiction, And now the 9-11 attacks, and this is what this world wants. So they are who we thought they were. They've always been trying to attack us. They've always been trying to overcome us. And so every sort of bigotry or subcategory of that anti-Muslim hatred has come from that place. Like they're trying to overtake the constitution.

They're trying to overtake our political arena. You know, they sort of inflate the power of Muslims and keep inserting this nifference. inferior ideology. Ta'iya, right? They're lying. They're covering who they are. That Muslim neighbor of yours or that Muslim colleague of yours at university that you thought was so kind, you know, don't trust their food.

Don't trust their smile. They all have this sworn, you know, oath to kill you and to dominate you and to ruin you. And they're all secret agents to penetrate. Like, that's sort of the way that this all got put out there. And that had a surveillance element that has a security element that has a security. the Bush administration was, I think, the most atrocious and it's Islamophobia from the perspective of shutting down Muslim institutions and targeting, you know, preachers and imams.

And then the Obama administration further incentivized that hatred and that securitization through the CBE programs, the countering violent extremism program. And then Trump is just Trump. He just blew the lid off, you know, and just made it all very plain. right in regards to I think Islam hates us and this idea of banning Muslims and really shutting them down so it had a policy implication the social implication to it is now that Muslims are looked at with suspicion from all sides yeah and Muslims are not welcomed to any table fully as Muslims and I don't want to say any or always I think

it's important to not be absolute here but what what often happens, right? Is that the Muslim community is looked at as a political entity that could be used for or against. And so some people will say we embrace diversity, we accept the Muslim community, but we hate everything about Islam. We hate everything about your orthodoxy. We hate everything about your theology.

We hate everything about your moral and social ideas. But we need you to check this convenient checkbox against the big bad Trump administration and the big bad right in America. So check this box for diversity. Just don't actually say anything about Islam. Just show up at the protest, where your attire, come to the table,

but we don't actually have any interest in your ideas as a Muslim community or your religion. So it's like a domesticated version of Muslims that's acceptable. And then the right now, obviously looks at us in a certain way. And so we're a convenient, tool for fear mongering.

Predominantly, I'm a minority community. We do have a lot of white American Muslims and a lot of white Americans that are becoming Muslim, actually. But predominantly African American international. So the racialization allows us to continue to be cast in that way. So how do we start to undo this? I think that we insist upon speaking about what our religion is and who we are. no matter what that's going to mean from a political cost and benefit analysis or from a social perspective,

this is who we are. We're a community that is enriched by our faith and that is driven by our faith. And we don't have to start on the basis of your misunderstandings of our faith. Look, you need to undo all of what you've heard and all of what you think you know about Islam. Let's start from zero. Who are we? We believe. in one God. Let's start from laelah, Allah. Who is the Prophet Muhammad Sallahri-Sel? Everything you've said about him, everything you've heard about him, let's remove all of that. Who is he? He is a descendant of Abraham, peace be upon him, through Ishmael, peace be upon him. And this is how the story happens. Like, we need to tell our story from the start and not operate

on anyone else's foundation and their misconceptions. And so the first thing that we have to do when we talk to people about Islam, I say, listen, it's important for you to for a moment remove all of what you think you know about Islam and the Muslim community, even if you deem yourself an ally of the Muslim community and an ally of Islam. You have to hear us tell our story.

And hear the Muslims that go to their mosques, that pray five times a day, that are deeply attached to their faith, and that are some of the best people that you could possibly have in your neighborhood, that are people of benefit, that are people that love their societies, that want to enrich their societies

in every way possible, because they love their faith, because they feel like God calls them to be a mercy to everything and everyone around them. So that's what I do. When I go to any, whether it's a church or a social gathering, I'm talking to people in the street,

I first and foremost try to make sure that we're able to have a conversation where we're going to start with the fundamentals and no assumptions being made. Because when people see me in an airport and I always wear my coofy and I'm usually, well, unless I'm going on a vacation and I got my baseball cap on,

we're heading to a beach or something like that as a family trip. But more often than now I'm traveling and I'm going to give a talk somewhere or something like that. So I'm almost always in my gear, if you will. And I'm going to pray next to the gate where there's the least amount of people in the airport.

When I go to a restaurant, when the flight attendant comes to talk to me, they're not expecting me to sound like this. Like, where's the accent? We thought you were going to be speaking broken English. We thought they're not expecting me to smile at them. They're not expecting me to sound like this. It's like, whoa, I get on the plane

and they're not expecting me to offer them. Hey, can I put your bag up for you? Right. To show courtesies. It's like, hmm. And I make it a point to welcome conversation. Welcome conversation. So as Muslims, when we're in public,

we shouldn't be trying to shy away from conversation. We should be welcoming it. Because you'd rather that person asks you about Islam than goes back to Twitter or Fox News or whatever it is and learns their Islam through there. You'd rather they ask you about Islam. So smile at people, be welcoming to people, be courteous to people, ask them how their day is going.

Let them ask you how you're doing. day is going, strike up a conversation. And if it leads to something deeper and people are wondering, and I'll share this as well by the way that I think is very important, I have never seen more people become Muslim in my life than I have right now. After the COVID era, people are searching for deeper meeting after that isolation, after that loneliness. And people are finding Islam, not because they saw on TV something negative about Islam. They're looking for faith. They're looking for God, they're looking for meaning, and they're finding that in Islam. And so I've never seen more people embracing Islam than I have in these last few years. You've talked about,

you know, focusing a lot more on similarities as opposed to differences. You've talked a lot about, you know, dignifying and glorifying our being the children of Adam and Ibrahimia and my Muhammadia, right? Adamia, Ibrahimia and Muhammadia. Right. There's 1.8 billion Muslims around the world, right? It doesn't seem like a difficult task, right, to basically trumpet the mantra or whatever

that needs to be trumpeted to the rest of the world with that message of peace, right? What do you think is making it not so easy? And I want to just throw into the equation, you know, this recent, complicating factor of social media, which tends to polarize conversations, right? Correct. I mean, just being cognizant of the fact that there's 1.8 billion Muslims out there who hopefully share the same idea that you've articulated,

it shouldn't be that hard to send or convey the message of peace. sure well this recent complicating factor of social media is actually a huge one especially with the COVID era right in particular people are increasingly determining their worldviews on the basis of customized algorithms that inflate their existing worldviews and that are meant to polarize and paralyze and then sell you something that you feel like will solve your problem. So the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, if you're listening to three people talk about Islam in a particular way online, your algorithm is sensing that. Your algorithm is being designed to keep feeding you that.

And so you're not hearing 1.8 billion people. You're hearing three people and those that sound like those exact same three people. And so you're only finding that your confirmation bias is driving you to an even further place from learning the truth about Islam. To penetrate that is not easy online. There has to be a concerted effort, and that's some of the work that Ya'in does in the digital space. There has to be a concerted effort to put that true message of Islam out there so it can be found. and to hopefully complicate someone's worldview enough to where they'll actually take a step back in humility

and learn Islam for what it is from Muslims. But an in-person interaction can quickly complicate that for someone. So it is going to be your grocery store. It is going to be your bus ride. It is going to be your subway ride. It is going to be someone on the street. It is going to be someone in a public place or a colleague at work or a student at your college

or university that sort of penetrates that and then makes you think, wait a minute, those aren't the Muslims I thought they were. Your doctor, we have a lot of Muslim doctors. So wait a minute, you know, this doctor is trying to save my life and deeply cares about my health. This nurse doesn't seem like someone who's evil and who is hoping to kill off as many non-Muslims as possible in the hospital they work in. That would be some conspiracy if that was a conspiracy put out there, right, that all the Muslim doctors in America are part of a single.

plan to try to reduce the population. I hope I'm not giving anyone ideas, right, in terms of conspiracy theories. But you can quickly complicate someone's worldview when you meet them. So the Quran calls us to start with people on the basis of similarity. Right. So if you're talking to a Christian, you start on the basis of not just belief in God, but look, you love Jesus, peace be upon him. in a way that theologically is offensive to us as Muslims,

but you claim a love for Jesus, peace be upon him. We claim a love for Jesus, peace be upon him. That's theologically offensive to you. But let's start with who God is. Let's talk about Jesus, peace be upon him. Let's start with the similarities. So with a good friend of mine here, Reverend Andy Stoker, we did a four-week class on Jesus and Islam and Christianity.

So we started off with, you know, we kind of divided his life into four. We started off with Mary and the birth story. And, you know, you could see everyone's eyes just light up like, wow, we're the save. And then the life of Jesus, okay, very similar. And then we got to crucifixion. Wait a minute. Departing narrative. And then, you know, resurrection, departing narrative.

However, the Christians that were in the church developed a great admiration for the coherence of the Muslim story and also the genuine love that Muslims have for Jesus, peace be upon them. They couldn't see it that way. So when we got to the departing narratives, there was a shared understanding like, okay, you actually care about this, right? If you're talking to the Jewish community, you talk about Abraham, peace be upon him. You talk about Moses, peace be upon him. You talk about sort of the importance of scripture and what that means in our lives. And then you talk about departing narratives. So you find common ground to start with, you know, so when the Quran mentions, you know,

come to a common word that we will only worship one God. It starts from that. Now, I'd say that unfortunately what ends up happening is that instead of making that an enriching conversation, instead of letting people authentically express themselves, we start to sort of take that context. of Ibrahimia, Abrahamic, and you have very nefarious political initiatives that are driving sort of this idea. Why don't we just, you know, all become Abrahamic from now on and forget the Islam, forget the Judaism, forget the Christianity part. And, you know, to not veer into that

too much just yet, I don't know if it'll come up in this discussion or not, but the point is, is that I believe in Islam. I love my religion deeply. I don't have to shed any of that theology to be an agreeable neighbor to you. In fact, a good neighbor to you. In fact, someone that wants to be a mercy to you. In fact, someone that cares about you being fed, someone that cares about you finding goodness in this life and the next,

it is not a condition for you to fit my mold of theology for me to treat you with dignity and respect and care and mercy. Because the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, is described in the Quran. We have sent you to ourhmane'a'u'a'a'a'a'a'a'an'an. we have sent you as a mercy to the worlds. You're not a mercy to the Muslims only. You're a mercy to the world.

And if that means that you're a mercy to that plant outside, you're a mercy to that cat, you're a mercy to that animal. A person went to Janna, an adulterous woman for giving water to a thirsty dog. What then when you walk past a homeless person who doesn't say, Allah, Allah, Muhammad, and Rasul-ah. How much more should you be driven

to care for that person? And so when you start from that, like, no, I really believe in my theology. I believe Muhammad, Sallah, a a. Is the last messenger. I believe the Quran is the word of God. I believe it's the truth, and I want people to know this truth.

Convey, not convert. I want to convey my message, convey the message of Islam, not force conversion. But in the process, I'm going to show you through my actions that I actually do care about your well-being. And I'm not gonna make it a condition

for me to treat you would respect that you embrace Islam because that's not the prophetic way. You know, you have to think of it this way when the prophet peace and blessings be upon him stood on Safa and he made his call to Islam. What did he start with? What was the basis of his credibility? If I was to tell you that there was an army behind this mountain that was coming to attack you, would you believe me? And they said, of course, you're the truthful one. You're the trustworthy one. So he's citing all of that goodness that he's shown to them, all the care that I've had for you in the worldly sense. So of course when I call you, you to something in regards to the afterlife, you should trust my character that I'm looking out

for your well-being in the afterlife, just as I've always looked out for your well-being in this life. So you can't claim to be wanting to save someone from hell in the hereafter if you're okay with their life being a living hell in this life, right, and not care about their poverty in this life and not care about their hardship in this life. So start with the basis of their dignity and then build on your commonalities. So when you get to navigating differences, you can do so with civility, but at the same time, you can insist on your orthodoxy without being a disagreeable person.

And that's what I hope and aspire to be, inshallah, when I talk to people that they can sense that I genuinely care about them, I genuinely want good for them, but I really believe in my faith, and I want you to know why I believe in my faith and see the beauty of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him,

and the message that he brought, and why it is such a compelling message for all of mankind. You've been very big on social justice, amongst many other things. And the message from Prophet Muhammad's mother, peace be upon him, was for him to be a world changer. Muhammad, who bin Rihullah,

and he changed the world. Right. By way of pioneering upon using scientific methodology to find solutions, pioneering upon the use of meritocracy for social order, pioneering upon the conservation of the environment, pioneering upon monotheism, well, rep pioneering monotheism, and also the free markets, right? I mean, he spent half his life as a very successful entrepreneur, spent the rest of his life basically socializing his ideas to the rest of the world. What's the hope for the future, you know, by way of what we have seen, you know,

what Prophet Muhammad did, you know, more than a thousand years ago, for the near foreseeable future and the long future? everywhere Islam went in the world it brought goodness with it it didn't just bring a theology it brought scientific inquiry it brought a set of ethics that unlocked the existing brilliance

in a society and culture in a society and then embellished it with even more and that is our history and we're very proud of that history you're very proud of that tradition and if you look at the current landscape of the world when someone says well, what about this part of the Muslim world?

What about this part of the Muslim world? Why is it that Iraq, you know, which used to be this hub of universities and hospitals and medicine is now this, you know? I'm like, well, it's been bombed by four U.S. presidents. It's been bombed to pieces. It's infrastructure destroyed, politically, socially, culturally. You don't fault religion for that.

That's not a failure of religion or the way of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. However, when I'm talking to Muslims, I say to Muslims, let's rediscover the beauty of our Islam and what it is meant to do to shape every single part of our lives. Socially, it calls us to not just change our societies by preaching a different way.

That's certainly part of it. We do have ideas that are in conflict and not all conflict is bad, that are in conflict with prevailing social ideas. That's okay. But if you live the universal ideas of service and goodness, it gives you a basis to then speak to people on the ideas that are contested and to demonstrate the superior value of what it is that the Prophet Muhammad peace and blessings be upon him brought. So certainly the Prophet Peace Be Upon Him transformed everything. What we shouldn't do is read other philosophies and ideas into a story.

to give validation to those ideas. We should be honest to go back and say, okay, what was the unique value of those ideas and what's the framework that can be built out of that foundation? Because the potency of that message was that when Islam went to Iraq or when it went to Abyssinia,

when it went to Andalus, it brought a pure creed that was not that was not in any way tainted by embracing the best of what cultural elements existed there. And it brought a set of ethics that could penetrate whatever existed already

in those societies and bring out these beautiful civilizations that we still benefit from today. So Islam, you know, in every part of the world unlocked something brilliant that we can collectively look back at and say, that was beautiful.

And then trace it back to something that was learned from the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. So it is unique. We have our own unique frameworks. We have a very unique foundation that we operate from. And that shaping of our worldview

from that one God, that idea of one God, which is a very powerful idea of one God. If you think about what it was that made Islam so objectionable to Quraysh, to the Meccan elites, It wasn't just that you were going to have Muslims

that are worshipping one God. It was the consequences to their idol worship and exploiting people in the name of that idol worship and all that it used to give them in terms of access to that exploitation. So la ilah to Allah, that idea of one God meant that you can't use these idols anymore to unlock the lowest impulses of yourselves and then place people in lower categories than you

and then humiliate them and manipulate them in the name of your idols. One God is going to cut through all of that. There is no superiority anymore of a Quraishi, of a person from Quraish, over a person from another tribe, of an Arab over a non-Arab, of a white over black that's gone. One God.

It levels the playing field of the rest of us to where we're all in pursuit of his pleasure and we're all going to try to do our best to bring about what is pleased. pleasing to him in every realm of our lives as it exists today. And so that's a very threatening message to a tyrant. That's a very threatening message to one who builds an entire career on exploitation, political, economic, or social.

And that is precisely what also made Islam so beautiful and so appealing to many of the revolutionary movements throughout history. It made it appealing to a Malcolm X, to a Muhammad Adi here in the United States, because Islam carries a certain dignity with it, right? That gives you this ability to not see the world as dictating of your views and dictating of the way that you're going to carry your life, but instead gives you the ability to forge principles

on the basis of that oneness of God, and then to persevere. And so it creates some of the strongest people in history and some of the greatest civilizations in history. You've talked a lot about Malcolm X. What were some of his experiences that really drew you or magnetized you or attracted you to him more than the others?

So it is a product. So in 1993, the Malcolm X movie comes out. Right. Spike Lee, Genzel Washington. Oh, my. Yeah. And so in Louisiana, everyone's walking around with an X necklace, the flea market in Baton Rouge. I remember people selling the X shirts.

Everyone had an X T-shirt. At that time, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, you know, there was Malcolm X all over that. Malcolm X had kind of taken over a culture in many ways across the United States, especially in South Louisiana. You're only seven years old. Yeah, so I'm a young guy. I am walking around. I'm like, this is awesome. So I'm watching that movie.

And I'm reading his autobiography. And I'm going, wow, this is incredible. And when I got to know about Malcolm X, I'll have mercy on him, the more I got to know about him, the more I resonated with his sincerity. First of all, he has like this impossible story. You know, like Malcolm in 1964

was the most sought out speaker in Ivy League universities. Actually, on public campuses, period, in the United States. He spoke at Harvard, spoke at Columbia, spoke at every one of them, Brandeis, all these universities, right? Malcolm is being called. Malcolm holds his own in the Oxford Union. When's a debate at the Oxford Union, nationally televised debate in the UK, eloquent articulate with a middle school education coming out of an absolute nightmare. His father murdered by the clan, his mother taken into a mental institution, shipped from house to house, manipulated, used, abused, the criminal life. And somehow you just see this incredibly articulate man who has clearly built himself to a potential that no one else saw in him.

Right. So he has this power, this charisma that was deeply inspiring. But then when I read his autobiography, what I really appreciated was his willingness to admit, and that's probably the greatest sign of courage, his willingness to admit where he was wrong in that pursuit of self-dignity. And so he kept growing. Malcolm at no point from his first embrace of the nation of Islam until the day of his martyrdom. At no point can you not trace growth in his life, spiritually, intellectually, politically. He's constantly growing. He's only 39 when he dies, by the way. He was 39 years old when he was assassinated. Right? So you have to keep that in mind. Neither, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Malcolm X.

Medegravers all were killed in their 30s. None of them lived to see the age of four years old, which is remarkable when you think about it. So it's also part of it, the youth of Malcolm. But growth, growth, integrity, sincerity, it keeps standing out. And those scenes of like haj and those scenes of, you know, Denzo Washington, you know, in Haram,

going through Mecca and reading and fatihah and coming back, that really struck me, right? So it hit me, right? So you had the message and you had Malcolm X. Those were like two movies back then that I'm watching. Message came out in the 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I still have that VHS of the message.

I still have it actually. So you have the depictions, obviously, and again, the culture. But once I got into his autobiography, I couldn't stop reading. I couldn't stop reading Malcolm and I couldn't stop reading about Malcolm because he was sincere. He's constantly growing. And I wanted to constantly grow. And I wanted to not be driven. buy my obstacles to a convenient theology and worldview that fit my obstacles, but I wanted to be

driven to the truth, whatever obstacles were in the way. And so that was my pursuit. How do you see what Allah is calling you to through all of the trials that have been put in your way? Malcolm overcame every single obstacle. You know, I teach a course and you can actually find a lecture I gave at University of Michigan a few years ago. It's actually, I think they're most watching. video on the University of Michigan channel on Malcolm and Martin intersects. I thought of what's your interface. Right, right. Like four times maybe.

I appreciate that. So I speak about Malcolm and Martin in their intersections. Dr. King came out of sort of the middle upper class African American reality where he's still, you know, he's a PhD in his 20s. He could have chosen to live a very comfortable life. Right. relative, you know, to what other African Americans have gone through. So he has to transcend that comfort to jump into the struggle.

Malcolm has the opposite reality. Malcolm has the nightmare reality. Malcolm is living the nightmare that most African Americans are living as a child. I mean, devastation after devoid. And he has to transcend that reality. All right. So you have Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Ph.D., Malcolm X, the middle school, you know, the kid that only made it out of middle school,

and reads the library, reads the dictionary, cover to cover in prison, reads the Quran covered, reads every book he possibly can, and builds himself to being this incredibly articulate, in my mind, the most articulate truth speaker that America has ever seen as Malcolm X, the most articulate truth speaker. It is incredible when you listen to this man's speech. And you can see that he's speaking from a place of experience. And that's what distinguishes us,

Even you know in our Islamic spirituality, in our tasquia, there is a saying from a great sage, Fadil, bin Ayad. He said, la y'anfa'u'u'n al-a-a-chraja min al-Qa. Nothing benefits the heart unless it comes from the heart. You can't script genuineness.

You can't script authenticity. A lot of preachers perform. A lot of pastors perform. I saw that in Louisiana. You know, we had a lot of charismatic preachers in Louisiana. But you can't script authenticity. When someone's speaking to you from the heart, you know it.

Malcolm spoke to people from the heart and you could see that when he was speaking on a stage or when he was right in front of you, that he was speaking to you from his heart. You were there. I hope so. Inshallah. But, you know, I want to draw this distinction between what you are doing

vis-à-vis what the famous athletes would have done, the Muhammad Ali's of the world, the Habibs of the world, the Islam's of the world. And if I talk to my... non-Muslim friends they tend to identify with these athletes right a lot more than they would identify with the omars of the world right what's your take on this I mean that's a good thing right you know what Muhammad Ali is done what Habib has done what Islam has done and all that right for not just a sport but for

Islam and hopefully the world yeah I love Habib I love Islam I love Islam my brother-in-law is actually an MMA fighter, Abdul Qarim, Al-Assaddi, the pride of Palestine. He tries to use his platform. Well, Hakeem Olajwan, you know, in the 90s, incredible. Mahmoud Abduroof, the documentary just came out about him. Incredible. I think Muhammad Ali was in the league of his own.

I don't think there is anyone, even of those men that would claim to be a Muhammad Ali. Because Muhammad Ali is the pioneer. of using that platform to make the greatest sacrifice purely on the face of the peak of his career most difficult circumstance lonely hated scorned and he did it all and he didn't flinch he's an incredible human being may Allah have mercy on him I am deeply moved by who he was I got to go to his funeral and it is one of the transformative experiences of my life was going to to Muhammad Ali's funeral.

Because when you went to his funeral, everywhere in Louisville, Kentucky, every single person had a story about Muhammad Ali, saving them, having a conversation with them on a street corner, coming to their school, the gas station worker, the bus driver, every single person had a Muhammad Ali story. So they say he never turned down.

This was a trait of his. He never turned down an autograph or a picture request. never. He also would autograph, and I have a copy of one of his Da'a pamphlets, he would autograph 200, 300 Taoist on a regular basis and send them to Taoism organization. He said, because they won't throw away a pamphlet if it has my autograph. He'd go after an event, he'd go in the street and start passing out all these Islam pamphlets with his autograph on it, so people would save them. I have a couple of them that I'm blessed to have. And To me, this man just, you know, again, he's in a league of his own.

I love him deeply. And, you know, I asked some of the brothers that washed his body, that did the ritual, and said he was shining like a king. I know some of his children, as kids, by the way, they, you know, Rashida and Mariam Me-May and, you know, Han'Ali and others, Jamila. they have that charisma, that beautiful character. They kind of shine with that as well. His grandson's boxing, Nico Ali Walsh,

mashallah, right now. Nico's a beautiful young man as well. But Muhammad Ali just, he's in a league of his own, that sacrifice. Now the others, not, and they would say, I think Habib actually rejected the association of Muhammad Ali. Like, don't compare me to Muhammad Ali. I can't be compared to Muhammad. He's on a different level.

I think what makes those people so beautiful is that they're not just saying the right things, but they're also living lives that are admirable in many ways. So they're representing the beauty of Islam and their family lives. They're representing the beauty of Islam with the stage, with the public platform. They're not perfect, but they're doing a great job. And I think that they have a platform that the preacher just doesn't have. Their pulpit is a greater pulpit.

comes with a greater responsibility and a greater opportunity. So two sentences that's said by one of them. And you got Badu Jack, Devin Haney in the boxing world, J. Rock, Julian Williams. So you got all these Muslims in combat sports and in the NBA and the NFL. What they can say in two, three sentences. So I can spend 20 years giving sermons, but what they say in two, three sentences. and under that light. You know, when Habib goes up on stage and he goes,

al-h-h-h-l-Lah, it's a representation of athleticism, but also the beauty of Islam. Right. And I just wish there were a lot more of those people that I think would convey the message of peace to the world. Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about the economy, and I want to tie it back to Islam.

If we take a look at the world population, Muslims make up about 23, 24% of the world population. But from an economic standpoint, we make up less than 5% of the global economy. How do you think we're gonna be able to reconcile? You know, the two numbers, right? You know, if I take a look at Indonesia being the largest Muslim country in the world

with 280 million people, you add up all the other countries and you add up all the GDPs of the respective economies or countries, they don't add up to any more than 5% of the global GDP while representing 24% of the global population. Is that a manifestation of the lack of unity within Muslims or the lack of education or a combination of both? I think it's a combination of multiple factors. It's hard to pin down what's holding back the Muslim world as one factor. but what you mentioned, I think, is a starred-link statistic that many people are not aware of.

Lack of unity is certainly a big part of that. And to me, I'm not just talking about lack of unity between Muslim countries. You know, it's not aligning the dictators. It's that thinking, you know, there's a new initiative, omatics, omatic thinking. I love the word omatic, bringing the omma together, the thinking of, you know, bringing us together and thinking about our collective elevation. I often tell people this, that just like, you know, the emphasis on my brother, my sibling brother,

does not mean to the exclusion of my Ummah, right? The emphasis on the collective welfare of the Ummah does not mean to the exclusion of humanity. We want to be a better Ummah for humanity. Kuntum Chayra Ummattin Uchrigat to us. You were the best Umba produced for people. So that Umma thinking, that Umma-wide thinking, that transcends nation states,

that transcends the individual success story. We have a lot of individual Muslims that have succeeded, that have made it, right? That have the wealth that they have, that have the power that they have. What are they doing to give back to their Ummah? And how do we incentivize it? How do we make that the culture

that when you succeed, you have a responsibility to also bring your people along? You see, the exceptionalizing of the individual story allows for the collective to still remain behind. And that's done to minority populations as a whole. But on the global scale, I think it's going to take for us to start seeing each other across these nation-state divides. To be a united Ummah, I think that one of the greatest litmus tests for this is going to be the refugee story. because with everything that's happening, the refugee population will only grow.

The refugee population will be disproportionately Muslim. And we remove front when Alano's best. I mean, of course, I don't know, but that's what the trend seemed to suggest because there could be an earthquake in another part of the world tomorrow, right? But, you know, what breaks my heart at times is when Muslim refugees are seen as invaders

and aliens and other Muslim countries. Look at the crime that's been done just to the Rohingya, who even talks about the Rohingya anymore, right? Because there's no political benefit to championing the cause of the Rohingya. So we have to impress upon our OMA, first and foremost ideologically, this idea of OMA thinking for the betterment of the OMA and for the betterment of all people. And try to institutionalize that somehow. In economics, you know, how do you bring up the economic part? How do we unite institutions and individuals that are successful to train entrepreneurs, to train your next generation,

of Muslim entrepreneurs out of Indonesia, out of Turkey, out of Malaysia. How do you bring about the next generation? How do you use your success to bring other people along the way? So there is an ideological and philosophical component to that. And then there is the next level of that where it's reflected in our institutional thinking and in our succession. In the short term, I think that we have to start by amplifying the story. that we hope will reflect

a broader mindset in the Muslim world. So when you have that person from Indonesia, from Yemen, from Syria, from Palestine, that was able to transcend and able to overcome all the obstacles ahead of them and then used that position, used that blessing from Allah

to be a blessing to other people, you want to amplify those stories and then make that your culture and creating culture takes time. But I do think it's possible, inshallah. I think that the world is shrinking. And so as the world is shrinking, we have to see each other,

inshallah to a equal stakeholders in that world and try to uplift, uplift our populations. You've stated quite a number of times that frictions are almost always politically motivated, not religiously motivated, right?

As with the Rohingya, as with the Uyghurs, as with, you know, the Crusades even, mentioned that, right? I'm sort of like at a point of observing

that it's getting a bit more difficult to find the interaction or intersection between talent and power. Interesting. Right? Yeah.

Where power is increasingly being filled with people of less talent than before, right? Whether it's social media driven or something else driven. And people tend to basically select talent a lot more based on patronage and or loyalty as opposed to meritocracy. Right. To me, that structurally exacerbates. the prospect of de-politicizing decisions, right, that would entail frictions. I'm just curious what your view is. Because I'm just not of the view yet that, you know, in the future we're going to

likely see the quality of leadership that we might have seen in the last 100 or 200 years, right? People of charisma, people of intellect, people of integrity, people of whatever, positive attributes. But now with social media that's complicating conversations, polarizing conversations, discounting the democratic process of many people and many countries around the world, it's becoming more difficult to, I think, see leaderships of good quality in the future within intuition. Yes.

Yeah. I think that you also have to take into consideration here. And this is where the faith part comes in. Yeah. That there are people that are going to come. out of these difficult circumstances that will have the edge because of how hard they had to work

to get to where they need to get, while others rely on the ever-convenient tools of success and the access to power that they have. I look at some of those people that are coming out of the refugee camps and coming out of occupation, and I see some of the most brilliant people in the world

that are learning a grit through life experience and learning manual means of elevation that people that have all of the tools of convenience will not be able to generate in themselves. And so I have hope in them that if we're able to unlock some of what exists of the brilliance

coming out of these devastating situations and then pair education with that natural God-given talent and generated grits and steadfastness in their experiences and then pave the way for a few of those individuals. Change always comes through the committed few, not through a transform majority, right? This is our history. And so I think that if we can find ways to create those pathways for those people by not

neglecting them and by cultivating an environment where we give them some of the tools that they need to take that next step, that you can see things change. You know, I always talk about how, inshallah, I always talk about how, you know, when I go to Silicon Valley and they're like, you live there, like this start in this person's basement, this person's basement. I'm like, well, in Texas, we don't have any basement.

So I'm not sure what's happening here. It seems like everything great started in somebody's basement in college, right? Or garage. To me, it's, yeah, we have garages here. We have garages here, you know. To me, inshallah, I pray that out of these devastating situations, some of these people that will rise up

will do incredible things. You know, I'll give you a story. So Hannah Lai talk about her. Because I think she's going to be a superhero one day. Her name is Rahaf. She's a Syrian refugee that lives on the border of Syria and Jordan. So, you know, I've gone to the refugee camps a few times. I haven't been yet after the earthquake. But, you know, you meet these people that have this incredible commitment to uplifting themselves, despite things that have had. happened to them that would make other people fall apart. Rojaf was 16 years old, earning for her whole family. Her father was killed.

She's the sole breadwinner. And when we take food and drink there, she would say, can I just have a bus to go to the nearest school in Jordan? I don't care if it's going to be an hour and a half, two hours. I just want to go to school. I said to her, what do you want to be? She said, well, I'm going to study to become a lawyer so that I can sue Bashar al-Assad for war crimes.

And I looked at her and I was like, this girl is special. What's being generated in her cannot be generated in the comfortable schools that we've been blessed to put our kids in. This is a school of life that produced the likes of Malcolm. Harsh circumstances produce some of the most brilliant people. So in our convenience, we have to try to cultivate pathways for them to then pair their brilliance with some of these tools. And I believe that those are the people that will create a next generation of institutional. an omatic upliftment, inshallahata for people around the world.

I want to bring up this sensitive topic of normalization. Okay. That's been, you know, talked about in recent years. What are your views about it? Look, I think that there are a lot of things that are happening with Israel right now that are in parallel

and that all play into, factor into a greater problem. So Israel is escalating its apartheid, its occupation, its settlement expansion. It's becoming more apologetic about its fascism, its treatment of the Palestinian people. Human rights organizations around the world are coming to a consensus.

Many people that would have before been staunch supporters of Israel have now switched. You have a growing sentiment of pro-Palestinian solidarity amongst young people. So in the West, public opinion is changing on Israel. Young Jews are challenging Israel from within and without. Now, the one thing that Israel needed to function in the Middle East was normalization with surrounding Muslim countries.

when you skip over the Palestinians, you participate in the dehumanization and the oppression of the Palestinians. When you now say we're going to normalize with the state of Israel and not make its occupation or apartheid consequential. You see, the United States of America has always given a blanket check to Israel.

Now when you have Muslim countries that are saying, continue on with your oppression, we might give some statements of condemnation the way the United States does, but functionally speaking, continue on with your oppression, and you will still get all of the economic benefits. And we're going to use the name of Abraham. We're going to call it the Abraham Accords.

It is deeply insulting to me as a Muslim, deeply insulting as a Palestinian, deeply insulting as a human being, and as a person who would hope to stand for justice. What a great injustice that you silence and oppressed people in the name of Ibrahim, ad-Isanam in the name of Prophet Abraham and then call this some sort of

great interfaith initiative when you are suffocating Palestinian Muslims and Christians by the way and helping make the chokehold tighter now on the Palestinians so I am deeply opposed to it

I think that people that live in those countries are deeply opposed to it I think that the Abraham Accords are nothing but apartheid deals and arms deals that are bundled into this warped new theological political worldview that simply means access to power, lack of accountability for power,

and they use the dressing of unity to actually further the occupation and the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people. But with all that being said, I am a person of faith. I also believe the Palestinian people have enormous willpower and strength. We're not going away. We're a hard-headed people.

I've learned that from my cousins that I've never met that live under occupation. They will work and they will exist and they will still live and they'll still go to their mosques and they'll still have their weddings and they'll still learn and uplift themselves. They'll work every odd job in the world to feed their families and they are married to the cause of Palestinian liberation and they will not succumb to even the most bleak of circumstances. So I have a lot of hope that the Palestinian people will survive and that their liberation will come, inshallah. I believe in that. But I also will openly challenge the hypocrisy of Muslim countries that use this warped notion of interfaith

and the name of Abraham for apartheid and arms deals. It's unacceptable. And it's important for Muslims wherever they are to put pressure on their countries. When they can, I understand, look, I can't tell you how many people that come from those countries will come to my mosque on Friday. All right. We'll come to the me on Friday and tell me after Jemah, look, I can't be seen in a picture with you

because you're criticizing my government for the Abraham Accords or something like that. But you know, all of the people, all of the people, they're like all of us, all of our families are critical of this. We just can't say anything. So the more you silence those voices of dissent, I think the more that that normalization will spread, which is why I believe that the imperative of the, BDS of the boycott divestment sanctions movement, is that great? Because it is the strategy that South Africans employed against apartheid. It's the only global strategy that I think will work.

Just from a pure strategic perspective, of course, we need God's help, you know, in all of this. But it's important for us to really actively engage that cause, actively engage that movement. Because the only way you can make a country like Israel accountable is through economic pressure because it's politically being given the green light to operate as it pleases with the support, the continued support, which has always been there, unfortunately, from the United States government, as well as now surrounding Muslim nations. I'm very encouraged, you know, you asked me, I'm being very open and blunt here about a place like Malaysia. When I tell someone in Malaysia that I'm Palestinian, they're happy, the love, the respect,

the solidarity that's immediately expressed. And I know that to be the case in Indonesia. The largest pro-Palestinian protests. The solidarity from Indonesia, the solidarity from Malaysia, the solidarity from Algeria, the solidarity from Algeria, the solidarity. You saw the Moroccan football team, by the way, holding the Palestinian flag. But guess what? The government of Morocco normalized with Israel. So the people are different.

or detached. The people are different. And I think Palestine is the cause that unites the Ummah. I do think, you know, when you think about like a cause that brings the OMA together, I think Palestine is in the hearts of most Muslims around the world, and it can bring people together. And I think humanity sees the blatant injustice in this holy place. How can a place that held prophets and that holds such sacred meaning to so many people,

be a place where an occupying military spews skunk water on people and steps on old women and shoots people to death, media people, burns down buildings, media buildings, shoots journalists point blank with absolutely no global consequence. The world sees this happening and the amount of unaccountable cruelty, I think hopefully will drive people to reject much of what is happening. So the whole Abraham Accords, and it's interesting because I meet people And I'm someone that's worked with other faith leaders to do social justice work.

We, you know, here in Dallas, our anti-homelessness, not anti-homeless, anti-homelessness initiatives, our poverty initiatives, our, you know, adopt-a-school initiatives, our work rejecting racism and bigotry together. Sometimes I'll have someone come up to me and say, what do you think about the Abraham court's great, right? And I'm like, no, not great at all. because it sells sometimes to the innocent

the innocent mind that simply sees unity which is of course an admirable thing unifying people and doesn't see sort of the political nefariousness here and of course I think you know

there's all sorts of problems with all of the implications of the Abraham Accords politically, theologically socially but the core thing driving it is definitely normalization with Israel, with the state of Israel. Look, my parents, we talk about the success stories. My father could have forgotten Palestine.

He's a distinguished professor of chemistry, loved, embraced, welcomed, has invented multiple things in his field. It was very hard being a child of a scientist of that caliber, you know, masah, love. But is an incredible human being, successful, accomplished human beings. but Palestine is always his heart and his mind. My mother, same thing. Palestine was always heart and mind. We have been nurtured. I've never been to Palestine.

I can't go there yet. But we have been nurtured with this idea that Palestine runs through our blood and it's in our hearts. And our success does not matter on an individual level unless we're able to continue to uplift the plight of our people in Palestine. And, you know, when Nelson Mandela said that our freedom is incomplete until the Palestinians are free. You know, a great anti-apartheid icon and warrior.

And one that was very inconvenient to pro-Israel advocates because Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and all of the South African anti-apartheid icons were pro-Palestinian, which is inconvenient to the narratives that exist here. No one sees the liberation of Palestine as more imminent and important than the Palestinian people themselves.

And the day after a bombing, they will still go to their mosques for Fajir. They will still have, in Gaza, what they do is they do group weddings. So I have family in Gaza I've never met. Because they can't afford to get their young grooms and brides married individually. What they'll do is they'll get a thousand people married at a time.

They'll still do IED. the day after a bombing. And of course, unfortunately, Israel intensifies the bombing every Ramadan, which always is something

that, that, you know, connects our hearts to that place. So the people of Indonesia and in Malaysia, Jazak Malau Haida, thank you for your solidarity.

Because, like, when we see that level of solidarity from people, protests in the thousands and thousands and thousands that lets us know that we're not alone. Yeah. because it's feeling lonelier in the Middle East for the Palestinian people.

And so they broadcast those images around now. You know, they have social media with the Palestinians too now. You know what goes around Palestine and WhatsApp groups? Indonesian protests, Malaysian protests. That's what circulates. Look at these people. Gaza is getting bombed right now. And people in Gaza are circulating videos of people protesting in Indonesia,

saying they're with you. They're with you. We're with you. And so that solidarity is that much more important now. You know, I've had the opportunity to visit the West Bank some years ago with my wife. And I can relate a little bit to what you've been alluding to. I want to push on this a little bit. You've said a number of times that, you know, there's actually quite a bunch of Israelis who are against the apartheid policy.

That's being basically, you know, enforced. And you've also been saying that there's quite a number of Zionists out there that are not necessarily Semitic. Right. And what do you think it would take, hopefully within our lifetime, for some sort of a solution? I mean, would one of them be hypothetically a two-state solution? Or, I don't know, what do you have in mind as a potential solution for peace in the region? Well, for one, you never burdened the oppressed to come up with the solution. Right.

You've got your foot on my neck, remove your foot from my neck, and we can talk. Yeah. So the language of peace is often used to suffocate the voices for justice. The equating of two sides here. You're not doing that, by the way. I'm not suggesting you are, but an American discourse that's often done. If only they would just talk, if Muslims and Jews this out of the table, Israel, Palestine gets solved.

Like, that's not what this is. This is a military occupancy. occupation, land confiscation, ethnic cleansing that is ongoing and enabled directly by U.S. tax dollars. So we need justice. This isn't two people need to talk because there's an imbalance of power here. So you don't burden the oppressed with trying to come up with the solution. So when people ask me, do you want a two-state solution or a one-state solution?

I say, I want my dignity. I want my people to have dignity. I want rights, full human rights, access to an Aqsa, al-Aqsa being liberated. You have to come up with that. So you're the ones that occupied and took our land and kicked us out and treated us this way. That's not our job to now give you a political solution. But I know that you keep encroaching and you're only expanding your settlements. And, you know, Palestine went from being this.

It went from obviously the full thing to now this, to now this, to now these isolated, disconnected pieces of land. So the whole two-state solution and the peace talks just don't really make sense anymore because it's always sort of hung over our heads. like this is what might happen. And we know you're never going to be able to dismantle the existing settlements on your, you're not going to have the initiative to dismantle the existing settlements of these crazy illegal settlers that walk around with guns and humiliate people and trash people under the full military apparatus right now, you know, under the occupation forces protection, watch fly. So can I conceivably see just from a pure material perspective that one day we're going assign an agreement, 1967 borders, Israel Palestine, side by side, two viable states, and Israel's

going to remove all of the confiscation and stop its occupation and let us live in peace with access to East Jerusalem. It doesn't really seem to be a viable way forward, just from a pure political perspective right now. I personally think it's a joke. I really do. I mean, I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but I believe it's a joke. I don't think that these peace talks actually mean anything anymore. And when you say we need a viable partner on the Palestinian side, you're crushing the Palestinian side. You have the Palestinian authority, which functions as your extended security arm, the Palestinians themselves can't stand. You know, anything that's happening, there is no viable political party. There is no viable government in Palestine right now.

What are you talking about? What partner are you talking about here? So I think the pressure should be put on Israel. Okay, you know what? How about, why don't you make it one state? Give everyone equal rights. No, but we have to be a Jewish state. But what happens if the Palestinian population now outnumbered the Israeli citizens? It's not our problem, right?

But what you're doing is unsustainable. And you're actually expanding your settlement activity and your occupation and your humiliation and your infractions on a Mazal-Aqsa. So the oppressor should be burdened, not the oppressed. You don't compound the burden. of the oppressed by saying, come up with a creative solution. We don't want a creative solution. We want to breathe. We want our freedom. And we're going to insist on our freedom. And so one thing that's always important from a liberation perspective, liberation never should depend upon your oppressor suddenly coming to some moral recognition that what they're doing

is wrong, comes through pressure. And so that's why I think the BDS movement, which there's been so much attempt to try to shut down the BDS movement. Criminalizing it. I mean, a school teacher in Texas lost her job because she refused to sign an oath that she wouldn't boycott Israel, right? Criminalizing BDS. Why are they doing that? Because that's the pressure they can't handle.

That economic pressure, that social pressure, that political pressure, it has to be insisted upon because you have to actually put pressure on the oppressor to stop. You know, I studied, I have a... masters in political history, the United States did not abolish slavery because it suddenly came to a recognition that this is wrong. That doesn't happen in history. No oppressor, a tyrant, says, let's stop this because we read a great book or we've decided that what we've been doing is wrong. So to sort of close this off, the rising pressure in Israeli society, Betaslim, which is a great, for example, human rights organization, well, at least in one hour,

aspect, right, and trying to liberate or insisting upon some of the harms of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians being removed. So they've sort of started to raise their voices in some ways. Young Jews in Israel, young American Jews, young people in America, period, because the American government's the grace enabler of the Israeli occupation. Palestinians can't depend upon that. They can't wait for that change to happen. while the occupation is so viciously expanding. So we have to find ways to insist upon our dignity and exist. Our existence is literal resistance.

The refusal to relinquish the land if you're there, the refusal to relinquish the cause if you're not there. We have been silenced or any Palestinian that has sought to raise their voice has ended up on weird list. online, blacklisted classed as an anti-Semite. I mean, the vitriol that I got after I gave the invocation in Congress, that was life-threatening. My, you know, SMU gets calls all the time and emails and pressure. I speak at a university, you know, pressure.

Don't let this, you know, anti-Semite speak. You know how the first people to say he's not an anti-Semite are Jews that know me here in Dallas, right? I'm not an anti-Semite, but I won't stop speaking for the Palestinian cause. And I think that it's important for Palestinians and people that support Palestine to never be intimidated by these, you know, shady lists or this pressure to be silence. We can't afford to be silent. Our brothers and sisters in Palestine can't afford us to be silent. And we support them in their struggle with what we can. So that's something I simply note, Almodan's coming up. I'm not going to purchase dates that have been manufactured in a settlement farm.

I'm going to boycott Israeli dates. Is that going to end the occupation? Probably not in isolation. But that mindset that even the dates that we eat are not going to be dates of oppression, that we will maintain our connection and our solidarity. I want my kids to be nurtured with that too, to understand we don't support occupation. We don't support apartheid. We never say, what's this one date going to do?

We never do that. Because collectively, and this goes back to the collective, collectively, we can put pressure instead of depending on, individuals to act alone. Wow. That's going to resonate well with a lot of people in Southeast Asia. I hope so. Yeah.

Inshallah. Let's be optimistic about this. Absolutely. Inshallah, just keep it up. I tell people that in Malaysia, I was like every political party is, you know, at least outwardly pro-Palestinian. I was like, this is incredible, right? Like you have people competing.

That's when you know the people are on board. when the political parties will champion Palestine because they know it's a popular cause, that's the type of that. That's what we want in Southeast Asia, for sure, and other parts of the world. I'm going to answer you a couple more questions, if you don't mind.

Go ahead. Artificial intelligence. Okay. You know, we live in an era of chat GPT. How do you think that's going to affect the social order of things? and, you know, from your perspective, is that going to be not good or not bad?

Well, as a Muslim, you want to make it net good. You want to try your best to see what's happening in the world and try to take tools that inflict greater harm and, you know, neutralize the harm and try to bring about good. I think any time we move away from our humanity, we move away from that, which is better, for us. And so I think social media is a net harm. You know, most people know me through social

media. I still would say social media has probably been a net harm to our world, right, in terms of our human interactions and just the polarization and so many other ways in which the self has been assaulted through the use of technology, the raising, the rising rates of depression, isolation, loneliness, or social media, anxiety. Yeah. So I think artificial intelligence gives me apprehension in that sense. You know, my father used to always say, he said, you know, in the realm of science, he said that anything that the public is finally getting, we've already been experimenting with it for 10, 20 years. So you've got to understand that whatever you're getting exposed to,

there's 10, 20 years of that still ahead of you that you haven't even seen yet. And so when I talk to people that Muslims that work at Google or something like that, they say just as much like, you don't know what's actually going on here, you know? So it's a scary thought. I think that we have to just do that much more to insist upon certain functions of humanity that have to remain human. We have to start to craft the ethics of artificial intelligence from now. Because if we, you know, relegate everything to that realm of artificial intelligence, then we are basically setting up for a world in which people cannot distinguish truth from falsehood

and they can't distinguish human from the inhumane. And what I seek to do and what I think is important for Islamic scholars to do is to start to ideate and start to put their pens to paper and start writing. out some of the ethical considerations that are important. And as more of it becomes available to us, more of artificial intelligence becomes to us, again, try to neutralize harm and see what can be used for good. Because ultimately, you know, when any tool first becomes available, the automatic reflex, and I think from a good place is, no, this is not okay. It's had a ram, right? But I think that we should probably see what's inevitable and then try to make the inevitable beneficial and try to neutralize the harms.

So be a little bit more forward thinking rather than waiting and then playing catch up. So it's important for us to try to grasp as much as we can, try to do the best that we can with what we can grasp. You know, in the words of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, when you educate a man, you educate an individual. When you educate a woman, you educate a nation. I heard that from somewhere. What's the role of women going forward?

Well, in bringing about more peace to the world. I don't know what to be a hadith, but it's certainly true, what you just said for sure. You heard it from somewhere. It just sounds great. It sounds great. Look, I think that um is an umma, you know, so even in the Arabic function,

the mother is a nation. So truly, that does play a function in our dean. You know, when you look at the imams, the great imams even, you know, Abu Hanifa, Malikas Shafari, Ahmed, were raised by their moms, you know it's it's just a reality now part of this is that both men and women have to find their way to god and their calling from god to be the best version of themselves for themselves and for

everyone around them and so there's a function of this that just applies to men and women educate yourselves grow yourselves and think beyond yourselves so that's there but certainly I would say, you know, the breakdown of humanity also reflects in the breakdown of family. The importance of family. Family has been so deprioritized now in our discourse that to see the virtue of functioning within a family is becoming a preposterous idea. So I think that we have to insist upon that. You know, and I teach, so this is where my.

my traditionalist side comes in, right? I study the lives of people in the past, almost obsessively. My favorite genre of books is autobiographies. I love autobiographies. I love to read autobiographies. I could consume them in audio format and written format. I'll read them on a plane. I'll listen to them on my commutes.

I'm constantly in autobiographies. And the biographies of the generation of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace and Blessings be upon him. What I love about it is that you can. find the different personality prototypes and then you can have people see themselves in those prototypes and then translate that into being the best versions of themselves for the world that's that's theirs now. So taking that inspiration and making it practical, humanizing some of those individuals so that you can see your full human potential and following those individuals,

I think is something that that's very important because the good examples in the present sort of become less and less, right? So you got to use the good examples of the past, just as we have to kind of pull institutionally, and I think from a civilizational perspective, from our Islamic history, and translate that into a better future. We have to do that with our individuals as well, our stories, individuals. The Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him was given the stories of the prophets before him as a means of giving him firmness, steadfastness, perspective, clarity. So we have those stories so that we could make our own story better.

And certainly with women, the consequences are far higher when it comes to what that means in terms of civilizational values and the transition and succession of those values. So we have to do a better job. And that starts with, I think, insisting upon the collective. And part of insisting upon the collective is the thing. family. We're living in a world where individualism leads your way of thinking, your way of being. And that means that there's going to be detriment in your relationship with the divine and detriment in your relationship with everyone around you, unless you consciously push back on that.

So if people are only looked at in terms of their utility and their function, and that's their only value, and people's dreams are individual dreams, then what happens to the elderly, what happens to the younger generations, what happens to the vulnerable, what happens to the poor, what happens to the refugee, what happens to the homeless,

what happens, what happens, what happens. So part of fighting back on that is having a family mindset, a community mindset, a collective mindset, an OMA mindset, a humanity mindset, right? So that's less and less about the individual and more and more about the collective. Wow. Thank you so much. Thank you.

And I'll do anything to get you out of Indonesia. I'm coming, inshallah. I'm coming, inshallah. Like I said, I grew up with a lot of folks from Indonesia and Baton Rouge, Louisiana at LSU. You know, so I have known so many wonderful brothers and sisters from Indonesia over time. And Indonesia in many ways is the pride of the Ummah. You know, it's not just this statistic to me when I would say to people, the largest Muslim country, I've said this in so many university settings, you know where the largest Muslim country in the world is? And it's not Syria, it's not Saudi Arabia. It's Indonesia. Like, wow, you know. But I've actually experienced now. We just got to speak up a little bit more. Yeah. We don't, we don't speak up enough. Your character speaks volumes, mashallah. The Indonesian culture and character is a beautiful, beautiful culture and character. So, Hamdhreda Allah. Keep that character and that great civilization.

And I'll share one more thing with you on that. When the tsunamis hit and some of the devastation. So being in New Orleans, when Hurricane Katrina hit, there was a spiritual resonance with our brothers and sisters in Indonesia. Hurricane Katrina wiped out, flooded. And a lot of those images that otherwise were just not accessible to most people of the tsunami, the post-sunami world. I think in New Orleans we got a little bit of a taste.

of that. And I remember walking into my mesjid, so I'll share this story with you and, you know, hopefully it'll be worth what it's worth. I walked into my masjid when I got back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And I went there right after the hurricane. I was coordinating

Muslims for humanity, relief work, humanitarian work. So they literally said, look, you're going to smell the stench of the dead 20 minutes out at Laplace. Be careful. Wear your masks. Things are still uninhabitable. There are still dead bodies that haven't been cleaned up. I walked in New Orleans at that time.

I went to my masjid. There was not a building with electricity within miles of my masjid. I walked into the masjid where 16 feet of water were. The masjid was intact. I flipped the light switch on. The lights came on in the masjid. I said,

Sapanalah, this is incredible. And I remember those images in Indonesia of the masadjid that still stood and the beauty of that. So that solidarity was really felt and that connection was really, for whatever reason, when Hurricane Katrina hit, I remember right away, because it wasn't too far after that. What year was the 2004? 2004. December 26, 2004. 2005, Hurricane Katrina. So it was less than a year and I remember, wow, right away because we're seeing the images of Indonesia and it was hard to relate to that devastation. But then Katrina hit and I remember right away just sometimes daydreaming. and thinking about what it would be like to be in Indonesian that woke up in a tsunami reality.

So may Allah bless our brothers and sisters and protect them all. And I hope to come and to meet more people there, inshallah. I'm glad you came to Dallas. Oh, it's a pleasure. Man, thank you so much. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure. Sama al-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. That was Dr. Omar Salaiman, who is the founder of Yakin Institute and Professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University. Thank you. This is an endgame.