The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Muslim Reformers vs. Fundamentalists: Winner Contributes to Diversity Multicultural Enrichment by Eric Brazau

Episode Date: July 15, 2023

Muslim Reformers vs. Fundamentalists: Winner Contributes to Diversity Multicultural Enrichment by Eric Brazau https://amzn.to/44rcCVR The greatest debate in the Muslim world… …is between Reformers and Fundamentalists. Which side will win? Eric Brazau has studied the debate for ten years. As the founder of a popular blog that focuses on the cultural & political enrichment that the Muslim community contributes to Western civilization, he’s perfectly positioned to view both sides of the contentious discussion. Is True Islam a religion of love and compassion? Or does the Original Islam mandate executing homosexuals and blasphemers? Which side is right or wrong? With this book, you’ll be able to dig deeply into the belief systems to gain insights into the point-of-view of both Reformers and Fundamentalists. Written in a way that makes it easy to distinguish fact from fiction and fantasy from reality. Knowledge is power. Are you ready to broaden your mind? You’ll find this book fascinating because the even-handed approach by Brazau lets one understand the minds of both camps. Get it now.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you coming by the show. Thanks for being here.

And as always, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Tell all of them about us and what we're doing over here at the show. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Foss, goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss, linkedin.com, Fortress Chris Foss, and all the other places that we are on the internet. Today, we have an amazing gentleman and author, always the brilliantest minds on the show, and we're going to be talking to him about his latest book that came out February 21st, 2023. It's called Muslim Reformers vs. Fundamentalists.

Winner contributes to diversity, multicultural enrichment. Eric Rizzo is on the show with us today. We'll be talking about his latest book and everything else that goes into it. In the meantime, let's get to know him a little bit better. He is a Canadian writer who specializes in the topic of Islam and anti-Islamophobia. He is the author of the newest book, and his journey to becoming an author began in 2012. From 2012 to 2017, he was in and out of jail for a total of three years. The most significant conviction during his time took place in 2014.

He was sentenced to nine months in jail for willful promotion of hate. In 2016, he was charged with incitement to commit genocide and incarcerated for 10 months this charge was dropped to cause disturbance to to a cause disturbance uh uh charge uh during his years in prison he chose to fight the inevitable boredom by reading and copying verses from the quran he did this for eight to 10 hours a day. During his time, his opinions on Islam began to acquire context. The transformation of his thoughts was completed, and was thrown into a fountain at the behest of a mob at the 2018 Danforth Shooting Memorial.

He describes his experience as an epiphany and a baptism that changed the course of his life. Since his semi-religious experience in 2018, he sought to make amends by sharing what he learned with others, and he shares his thoughts on his website and blog, and of course his latest book. Welcome to the show, Eric. How are you? I'm doing very well, Chris. Thanks. Good to be here. Good, good. It's an honor to have you as well. And give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to look you up on the interwebs and get to know you better? I'm not as connected as I probably should be, but simply ericbrazile.com is my blog.

And you can go to my website, which is learningislam.ca. There you go. And of course, Facebook, you can find me there eric brazil so let's dig a little bit into this bio that i just read it sounds like maybe you went from somebody who is on one side of uh islam uh issues and now you you're you're on the other side. Help us flesh that out a little bit better. Sure. Well, I'm not exactly on a side. What I've done is I've just reoriented myself, realizing that perhaps I was previously biased.

And what happened at the water fountain, et cetera, something happened and that forced me to reevaluate my own thought process. Like I like to think I'm a reasonable person. Sure. Many of us want to believe that all of our opinions are based on sound foundational elements. And I questioned that. Okay. So I had to go back to the drawing board. And so now I make a point of learning about the true that. Okay. So I had to go back to the drawing board,

and so now I make a point of learning about the true Islam. Okay. So what was the other, in your book you talk about which side will win, reformers and fundamentalists, so that's why I'm using the word side. Were you, now you're a reformer. You're correct, there is two sides. is two sides however i myself no longer align myself with any side okay that there is yes okay okay i see whereas in the past i was on the side which was the the islamophobe side okay so you were islamophobic and you were against uh islam

in in a in a big way. I was going down to the corner of Yonge and Dundas and doing protestations. And basically, I wasn't burning the Quran, but I could have been. Oh, wow. Okay. I was at that level. So, Eric, what's your origin? Were you born or raised in Islam or around Islam?

As a child, I never knew Islam existed. I was born as a Catholic. You know, did my first communion, church, Easter, Lent, Good Friday. We went to all the high holidays and several in between, but nothing, not every Sunday, not even close to that. And as a child, I knew nothing about Islam until much later into my 20s, early 30s. There you go, and so going up going through your journey of Islam and in dealing with it and and some of your Things that you were going on with the end up it with the convictions jail

Where are you at now? I mean you've gone through this whole journey. What's your overall perspective and feeling on Islam? Well, my journey right now is I run an organization called fightislamophobia.ca. It's a not-for-profit. Okay. And the idea is to reach out to people who are in a potentiality of becoming, putting their lives in danger, doing silly things, doing things that are possibly criminal. To reaching out to them to show them that there is a better way to understand the religion of Islam and to help others understand what is the true Islam.

And so that was my journey, was just how can I reevaluate what it is that I'm trying to portray and what message am I trying to give to the people? There you go. Simple as that. Okay. So talk to us about your book, Muslim Reformers vs. Fundamentalists. Why did you write this book?

I mean, it seems obvious, but we like to hear from the author, of course, himself. Why did you write this book? What motivated you? And give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside of it. Well, good question. And often myself, I was critical of those who wrote books on Islam. Here in Canada, some woman wrote her life story, and I said, you know, very good, interesting book, but what do people need to know about Islam that they don't already know? What could she say? All she can say is Islam is

good or Islam is bad, either or. And people usually have an opinion on Islam one way or the other. It's rare that you'll hear someone say i know very little and i'm ignorant on the subject have you ever heard anyone say that not really i mean i think people have opinions whether they're well formed or well educated or not they kind of have you know everyone's kind of kind of layman sort of uh yeah uh understanding and uh yeah so i understanding. And, yeah. So, I basically thought, okay, I was reading Irshad Manji and Zuhdi Jasser. They're very well-known

reformist Muslim celebrities in these interfaith, inter-dialogue circles in America and Canada and to some extent to the world. And I was reading their books and their podcasts and literature and then I was reading also

what we would call the what we would call the problematic Islam. The Islam that resembles ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Yemen, Qatar and those who are shouting death to America, whether they live in Iran or in America or in Canada, they're shouting death to America and to the West.

Oh, wow. So those are the two Islams. And I thought, wow, here's an interesting perspective. Most people want to believe this as opposed to that, but some people want to believe this as opposed to that but some people want to believe that as opposed to this the two sides so my book focuses simply on presenting those two sides as i do now as eric brazo i'm studying i'm learning arabic i'm learning the terms, I'm learning to the nuances and what is underneath Islam as opposed to just you know the fact if you like. What is the underlying essence and ethos that's being promoted by

scholars, Islamic doctrine, you, imams, sheikhs here in North America and Europe. Maybe I'm rambling. I don't know. Am I saying anything coherent? No, you are. I'm getting it. So, this book doesn't tell you what to think, I think, is what you're saying.

You present both sides. Is that my understanding of it correctly that's exactly what i do and if what i'm most proud of um and i spent most time working on and i'll say you know editors and going back and forth was taking out any of my voice of my opinion of my because sometimes we try to be smart or sarcastic. I am the author, after all. So when I'm writing, I want to make a joke. I want to say something clever.

Most of that is gone. If not all of it. That's not to say that it's a boring book. I've tried to make it not boring either. That was very important to me. It's not a book that reads, that goes along, that moves along. And it is kind of humorous and funny it's amusing to some extent

you'll you'll chuckle sometimes okay but you won't chuckle because of my opinion I don't try to be a smart guy all right and the last chapter which is what I learned is my this is really my first book I wrote a book prior to this, but a booklet. And in a book of this nature, which is nonfiction, you have to have conclusion. This is how the book concludes. You tell the people what's the conclusion. So my last chapter is conclusion with confusion.

That's interesting. That's interesting. So at the end you're you're confused yes i the author i'm confused okay not me eric brazile is not confused oh but the author is confused all right both sides and you don't want to be biased and put your thumb on the scale? That's... I tried to do that as much as possible. Okay. That was my goal.

Hopefully I've succeeded, and I think I've succeeded to a large extent. So let's tease a little bit of this out. What is the difference between Muslim reformers and fundamentalists? So we can educate our audience a little bit. Think of an...er would be someone who would say the Constitution and democracy is compatible with LGBTQ rights. My Islam is compatible with the West.

My Islam is compatible with music, with any kind of music. And then the fundamentalists, which are not in essence fundamentalists, but we term them fundamentalists, are what we would call ISIS. Simple. So, and then of course, are you familiar with Thomas Sowell? No. Okay, you should be. But anyhow, so he has a book in which he talks about the, what do you call it, the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.

Now, everyone is a little bit of both, somewhere at 90%, somewhere on either side. Very few people are 100% on both sides of that equation. So if we want to talk about fundamentalists, for what we would call isis obviously not every muslim who's a fundamentalist is an isis sympathizer is that you follow me but everyone's on the scale of islam so the reformer who says i my islam is lgbtq friendly and i'm married to a man because there are Muslims who are say they're Muslim and they're married to a man or a woman a woman married to a woman you could say that that person is wholeheartedly embraced Western

civilization or Western values Isis or an Isis, would be considered 10, because we would, from our perspective, call him a terrorist. Now, so if someone is a 7 or a 6 and says, well, sometimes it's okay to kill people for insulting the Prophet Muhammad, but not always,

well, he would be, he could be considered a six or a five because he's somewhat Islamic, Islamist extremist, but not wholeheartedly. Where some fundamentalists would say, if you don't grow your beard long enough as a Muslim,

we kill you. Jesus. Because the Prophet Muhammad said, grow your beard. Therefore, you must grow your beard no exception no there's no ifs ands or buts about it throw your beard come to the mosque and pray if you don't come to pray we kill you or you shall die wow so that would be the fundamentalist so So in between there, you have people who, you know, either he's a zero, a three, a five, a seven, or an eight. So that's the difference between what we would call fundamentalists and reformers.

Okay. So, but coming back to it, so then I present to the reader the voices of those two extremes so the reader can decide between the two and figure out what they want or what's good you know it's interesting to me i think people you know are always trying to understand the difference between you know isis islam uh a lot of people don't understand the difference between, you know, ISIS, Islam. A lot of people don't understand the difference between Muslim and Islam. And they just don't get the whole picture. So it's good that they have some education so they can figure this out in setting the debate. Some of the different things that you talk about is how we assemble and defeat irrational fear.

Tell us a little bit about that. Well, Islamophobia is, by its very nature, irrational. So, funny enough, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a psychologist, actually a psychiatrist, and I asked him if there's a clinical definition, if it's in some book, they can assess you as being an Islamophobe. And he said, no, there is no clinical condition called islamophobia however it's taken for granted that a islam an islamophobia is an irrational fear so the idea for my book and what i'm trying to do with people who are labeled as such as islamophobes is to help them to

understand and deal with what people perceive to be the irrational. And everything, again, is on a scale. So I'm not afraid of spiders. I should say I'm not afraid of spiders at all. But if I saw something that looked like a tarantula, I might start to get very nervous. Yeah, definitely. When I was a kid we used to catch grass snakes and feed frogs to them put them in a box you might have done that wow but if

i saw something that looked like a rattlesnake or a cobra i might get again scared yeah so when is it rational to be scared when is it irrational to be scared? There you go. And that's what I deal with. Or I try to deal with that and help people. All right. Come to terms. There you go.

And if I may say one thing, it's not only the person who has to come to terms with that, it's those who are labeling them or labeling people need to come to terms with what is a phobia and what is not a phobia. Yeah. I mean, a phobia is something where we don't fully understand it, right? We need to not be afraid of something we have a full understanding. I mean, rattlesnakes are bad. Cobras are bad.

But they actually serve a good place in our ecosystem. You know, they kill certain rodents and different things like that. They have a service to the whole environment of an ecosystem. And, you know, they're part of a world that we have to all share and get along in, I guess. Is that a good analogy? Not really. Kind of, but not really.

Because cobras and rattlesnakes are a reality of life. That's true. That is a fact. So you touched on that. That's a reality of life. But then do we want cobras and rattlesnakes in our backyard? No. The grasshoppers?

No. But if I saw gardens, what are they called, those green garden snakes, that would not scare me. Those would eat the grasshoppers and maybe the mosquitoes. So on that balance, which snakes do we want in our backyard and which snakes is it rational or logical to be fearful of okay okay um and then uh and so you you talk about tolerating Tolerating and finish by embracing. Tell us about that. Well, as a society, we are told, and it's become a truism, that we are to tolerate. I mean, that toleration in itself has become a virtue.

Would you agree? Yeah. become a virtue would you agree yeah but no one's quite explained how toleration is in itself a virtue so should we tolerate injustice maybe not we're not okay so in the past as a civilization we understood without understanding that some things we should tolerate so if you dressed a little bit funny or had a speech impediment people understood it's not nice to make fun of that and we should tolerate you

and even if you were eccentric you know we could tolerate that and that was something that we shouldn't tolerate And even if you were eccentric, you know, we could tolerate that. And that was something that we shouldn't tolerate and even embrace you. However, now, just to make the example, not that I'm saying that this is how it should be, but the example would be 50 years ago, it wasn't seen as preferential to tolerate men who dress as women. So today we've learned that we are supposed to tolerate that and we've embraced that. So then the question becomes, is there anything that we should not tolerate and not embrace? By virtue, we seem to be saying that everything we should tolerate and we should embrace okay we should tolerate it just because it's diversity and embrace it

there you go again that's what my book explores that in a very succinct simple way to understand now you're mentioning they're mentioning something about your voice being removed in the in the editing of the book. Did you find a way to get that resolved? Because the voice has got to come through the other side. I'm not sure I understand the question. Earlier, you mentioned something about your voice when you're writing the book and editing. Yes, correct.

And you had said that the editing had been removed no in the editing process I made a point of removing my personal bias oh you removed your personal bias okay yes so that I'm presented as opposed to saying ha ha ha because that ha ha ha this is funny I I didn't, I just gave you, I tried to not play with the mind of the reader and to convince him to kind of slowly believe something. I just presented it as much as I could as possible to be neutral and say, this is the information. Now you, because I'm confused, I'm certain they're going to be confused so in the sense my book is not so i mean i i would love it if they if they did but those who are hardcore are not going to like my book if they're on either side of the equation they will not like my book okay because it definitely challenges them and what i've learned is for the most part people who are hardcore committed to their point of view don't necessarily want to be challenged.

Oh, yeah. Or they don't want to possibly be moved by something other because they're committed to their ideology. So, for example, you take a professor who's been writing books on multiculturalism for the last 25 years. He's a professor of multiculturalism and such. And he's written books about why multiculturalism is good. He's been on panels

for the government. Is it possible for him to admit that maybe multiculturalism is not good? It's not because he's very committed to that. He's invested. Now, not to say that multiculturalism is not good, but it could either be...

So someone who's written books about the evils of Islam and is committed to that, if he were faced with anything other than that information, that could make him uncomfortable because he's vested in that idea. So the person who is in the middle, who's not committed to one side or the other will most benefit from my book. There you go. There you go. Well, it sounds really interesting, and hopefully it can help open the minds. What do you hope this book achieves with people? What do you hope they come away with in the end?

That a Muslim is not Islam, and I prefer to use the word Buddhist, we'll talk about Buddhists. If you met an angry sad frustrated Buddhist because there's many reasons a person could be sad and frustrated when you meet him in the elevator would that therefore mean that Buddhism itself is not a good religion

or a good philosophy no I could be a good person philosophy? No. Okay. I could be a good person and I'm a Christian or I could be a bad person and be a Christian. I could be a friendly person and a Christian and a not friendly person and a Christian. Maybe my dog just died.

Maybe I just found out I went bankrupt and I'm a Christian. I'm really angry. I'm not smiling. I mean, a lot of people from all walks of life, and it doesn't mean that you're good, bad, or ugly. I mean, it usually comes down to the person you are in and of itself, right? Correct.

And so that's perfectly well said. So the idea is to separate the people from the ideology. There you go. Separate the people from the ideology. I like that. That's more of what we need to take and do. So this has been really insightful. Anything more you want to share with us before we go?

Well, not the whole, again, I'd like to leave it on separate the people from the ideology, be they good people that you like or bad. For example, let's use Donald Trump. You might not like Donald Trump, but if he says it's raining it could be that it really is raining outside we should not doubt somebody just because we don't like them yeah exactly so it comes back to when we come when we want to learn about islam we should not take anything for granted just because we would prefer to believe one side as opposed to the other or we are ourselves invested on one side of the equation

or the other. There you go. There you go. Well, this has been really insightful, Eric, to have you on the show and share this data with us. Tell us where people can find you on the interwebs. ericbrezot.com and

Twitter, ericbrezot on Twitter, ericbrezot, and you can go to my website, learningislam.ca. And, of course, the book can be found at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and everywhere else that fine books are sold. There you go. There you go. Wherever fine books are sold, as we always say on the show. Order it up, folks, wherever fine books are sold.

Muslim Reformers vs. Fundamentalists. Winner. Contributes to diversity, multicultural enrichment. Came out February 21st, 2023. What if you, the reader, when they walk away from reading this book,

it will not just, it will allow them to have a conversation at any dinner party, any debate, and be able to contribute absolutely on this subject. There you go.

It's good to know and understand what's going on in our world, the people in our world, and knowing, you know, leads to better understanding, and hopefully we all get along. So there you go. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, youtube.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas,

and all those other places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. Alright, Eric.