Dogma Disrupted
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Sexuality, Love, & Morality | Episode 5
Islam follows an objective morality defined by God that we must follow and protect no matter how the societies around us change. One of the most difficult topics to discuss that directly challenges this is the fairly new paradigm of sexuality and sexual identity. Why does Allah care about what we do in the bedroom? What’s wrong with people choosing who to love?
Imam Tom Facchine and Dr. Sharif El-Tobgui discuss the history of sexuality and the sexual revolution, the Islamic view of sexuality and love, and common objections to Islamic sexuality discourse.
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Love whoever you want. We're talking about who you have sex with, right? Those are two separate things. Honestly, and we need to re-ignite our discourse on love. Because we have a lot to say about love. You let your sexuality get out of control, and it will control you. It's too powerful of a force not to be properly disciplined. And people are realizing that now to their, you know, to their dismay. Salamualaikum and welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today we have a very, very important episode on sexuality. Judah is right around the corner and most people know that in North America that's Pride Month. However, when it comes to sexuality in Islam, we have to take very, very seriously what Islam says about our sexuality. How are we supposed to relate to it? Are we supposed to be led by our desires? Or are we supposed to follow Allah subhana wa ta'ala? Even in that, an issue and an area that is so close to how we think about ourselves and how we relate to the world around us. So today joining us, we have Dr. Sharif At-Tughbi. He is a professor at Brandeis University, a person of many hats, and mashallah, I have to say, translator of an extremely important work to have in the English language by Sheikh Lasallem Taymiyyah. I think the translation is The Refutation and Contradiction Between Reason and Revelation, which is an amazing book. And I just, a lot of people don't know that you are behind that and I want to just draw attention to it because it's a monumental work. Is it published now? Is it available? So it's actually not a translation because the Tahrir al-Haram is 10 volumes long. So it's a study of it. It's based on a full reading of the entire 10 volumes, but it's not a translation.
So that actually came out in 2020 in English and it's just been translated into Arabic and the Arabic translation should be coming out by the end of the year inshallah. Well, an extremely important contribution to the English language and something that I've benefited from tremendously. But today we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about sexuality. What is sexuality? How have beliefs about sexuality changed over time? So that's a very good question. And, you know, it sort of takes us right into the heart of the topic because the word sexuality itself is a fairly new word. In Europe, I think this goes back maybe to the late 18th century, if I remember my Foucault correctly, but you would probably know better, Imam Tom on that front. If you go to Arabic, there actually isn't a word for sexuality per se. There's this idea that there's a kind of a sphere of life that has everything to do with kind of one's erotic desires or sexual behavior and it's called sexuality per se. In contemporary Arabic, some of the people on the cutting edge, you know, of these things who are trying to keep up with Western discourses, I think have translated as like jinsania or something like that. But this is clearly a neologism. Even the word jins for sex is rather new. It's a stretch too because classically has to do with type and category. Exactly. So to stretch it, I mean, it's almost like it comes from how we maybe originally think of sex as XY chromosome, but now it's kind of been imposed in a modern sense to have to do with our sex lives. It's interesting how that conflation in English language has carried over through translation into the Arabic language. Exactly. And I think what's important here is that we have to always be cognizant of the fact that language is never innocent. Terms are very important. Language is very, very important because the words that we use, they codify the concepts through which we view the world.
And although as Muslims, of course, we're not postmodernists, we're not relativists, we believe there is an objective truth and we believe that Allah has revealed a great deal of that truth to us in the Quran and the Sunnah, at least what is relevant for us in our lives and our understanding of the universe. But one can use language that misrepresents reality to one, right? So if you just take a simple word that's connected to the issue that we're talking about, they used to say fornication, right? Fornication, and now it's turned into premarital sex. Those are not the same thing. You could say in a very flat sense, they both refer technically to sexual relationships outside of marriage, but fornication carries a moral valence and a condemnation. I mean, fornication is a bad thing, right? That's not a good word. And it carries that moral charge with it, whereas premarital sex completely strips it of any moral valuation and just treats it as a purely descriptive term. So one might say, well, okay, that's more neutral, right? But the question is when you're dealing with such central aspects of life, there is no moral neutrality, right? If you were to talk about, I don't know, some issue like racism, right? And you were to tell people, oh, get rid of that moral appropriate. Just be objective and just talk about it in objective terms. People will say, no, this is wrong. We should speak out in terms of that. We would bristle at a claim like all lives matter for exactly that reason because even if it seems neutral, it actually is taking a moral stance. There is no ground in which you can take no moral stance. Exactly right. I mean, when issues are inherently moral, which we would affirm along with the rest of humanity, that sexuality is something that is deeply at the center of the moral life. And in fact, anthropologically speaking, no society, no civilization, no ethical system has ever been able to afford to treat sexuality just casually. It's like no big deal, kind of just do what you want. This is very modern, very contemporary, very experimental.
But because of the power of sexuality, because of the nature of it, because of the consequences of the sex act, which is fundamentally a reproductive act, it's where human life is created. It's where new lives come into being. It's a big deal. And especially, and we'll probably get into this later on, but before the rise of the birth control pill where you have a fairly foolproof method of birth control, prior to that, I mean, a man and a woman engage in intercourse and there's always the chance or the danger or the possibility of pregnancy. And for that reason alone, the act is a very substantial, very significant act. And so that's why you find in any moral system, sexuality is always at the center of it. No matter what the specific rulings are or the specific principles governing it, there's no society, I would say, or even individual human being who is nonchalant or casual about it. Even in our modern culture where people feign this sort of relativism, do whatever you want, nevertheless, there are still certain boundaries, there are still certain conceptions that relate to sexuality and sexual behavior, including LGBT. People are very committed to that paradigm. And if you disagree with the paradigm, people feel very strongly. They're not like, oh, well, okay, we'll just agree to disagree. People get really viscerally angry. You reject this, it's a big deal. Why? Because sex is a big deal. It just is. And there's no getting out of that. It's like all these other life issues like abortion and euthanasia and all these kinds of issues, these are issues that are central to human life per se. Again, how life starts, how it ends, in what context human lives come about, there's hardly anything more central to our personal and collective moral lives than these kinds of issues. And that's really, really significant because what you're saying is that rather than framing it as why are you Muslims trying
to regulate sex, our point is that everybody regulates sex. Absolutely. It's not an issue of to regulate or not to regulate because especially in the United States we have that kind of rebellious bone where don't tell me what to do. I don't want to be regulated. Leave me alone to do my own thing. But it's kind of a false characterization of the issue because, in fact, everybody regulates sex in some way. Very, very significant. So as you were saying, it's not a question of yes or no to regulate or not to regulate. It's a question of what are the principles that are organizing that regulation, right? What criteria are we going to say that this is right and this is wrong? And that's an extremely important intervention because now you actually get to talk about principles and you'll find that Islamic principles, and we'll get into this in a second I think, that the Islamic principles of regulating sex and sexuality and sexual behavior is very coherent, is very grounded, and also very pragmatic and realistic. Whereas if you really push the other side, if you push the LGBTQ lobby or whatever is sort of coming down the pipeline next. It's just modern post-sexual revolution because the LGTB also exists within a larger context, right? It would be unthinkable without the sexual revolution itself. Yes, definitely. In just a second. But the principles that underline that are much more fluid and much more slippery and much less coherent and consistent, right? So maybe take us down this journey. What's the significance, and it's really, really I think important that you pointed out that Islam, we're continuing to give recognition to the fact that sex is about reproduction, okay? So that kind of is maybe where, like a starting point.
How do we get from where we were, Islamic sexual ethics? And maybe we can talk a little about Islamic sexual ethics, and then even other types of pre-modern sexual ethics. How did we get from where we were to where we are now? Okay, yes. So that's a very good question, very important one as well. It's always important to take a step back and kind of look at the larger picture to see where we are. Because if you just jump straight into the current discourse, it's very difficult to get your bearings, right? Because first of all, it's very emotionally charged. Second of all, the language and the concepts are already ready made for you. And you need to be able to critique those before you can engage in it constructively. And one of the challenges that we face as Muslims is that the underlying assumptions have shifted so radically over the last, I'll say 50 years since the sexual revolution, 55 years now since the sexual revolution. Let's put it around 1967, you know, 60s, but late 60s is really when it starts ramping up. The underlying assumptions have shifted so radically that positions that were just totally intuitive and natural to the vast majority of people just one generation ago, right, are now incomprehensible to the younger generation because they've been, you know, raised on a completely different paradigm and notion of what, like, sex and sexuality even are. So let's just go. So I think a watershed moment in this whole thing as I've intimated is the sexual revolution, right, of the 1960s. Before this time, now the birth control pill comes out, I believe, in 1959. And this is very much a catalyst for changing attitudes towards sexuality as well as, like, second wave feminism starts at that time. And you have other movements going on in the 1960s. And so there's a sort of this effervescence within Western culture. And when it comes to sexuality in particular, so you have changing gender roles and kind of challenging of traditional gender roles and stereotypes. At the same time, there was kind of a rejection of Christian sexual morality, which up until that time was basically normative in Western society. It doesn't mean it was always perfectly adhered to,
but the official kind of view of society was sex outside of marriage is wrong. No one would ever tell you anything other than in school or in a church, obviously. Girls who got pregnant outside of marriage in the 1950s and before was a huge stigma. They would go off like, oh, she's visiting grandma for seven months or whatever, you know, off at some home probably till she gives birth to the baby, puts it up for adoption and then comes back. Everyone kind of knows where, you know, why she went to grandma for so long. But it was like, hush, hush, right? These were very kind of, you know, in the 1960s, as I pointed out in another podcast, even on daytime public television like the soap operas, they couldn't even say the word pregnant. It was, you know, she is expecting or with baby or, you know, with child or whatever euphemisms. There's nothing wrong with saying pregnant from an Islamic perspective. I'm just saying even that was considered like too forward. Like, no, these are very kind of personal issues. And, you know, one should have to quorum about them in the public sphere. So there's a revolt against, you know, this for many reasons. I think once the birth control pill comes around, all of a sudden for the first time in human history, it is conceptually possible now to separate the sex act from its natural consequence, which is reproduction. As we said before, you know, if you don't have the pill, they had condoms and they had other kinds of birth control, but none of them were very effective. I mean, condoms today are much better, but back then they were not really that effective. So you were always running a risk. And so because that fear was always there, it was always a risk, right? And for women especially, you know, they're the ones who bear the burden. You know, the guy, it's over quickly. The girl, she's the one who gets pregnant. She's the one who has to carry the baby. She's the one if the guy runs off who's stuck with her for the rest of her life, she and her family. So the price was very high for women particularly. And so it makes perfect sense why girls were expected to be very prim and proper and kind of keep their legs closed, so to speak, because the consequences were just huge, right? Not that men, I mean, who's getting the girls pregnant? Men too, right? So men also have to be properly behaved and properly trained. But in the end of the day,
the consequences fall more heavily on the woman. Anyway, once you, you know, but for both, you know, there's always a risk involved. But once you're able to separate the act from its natural consequence, people all of a sudden say, oh, we can actually engage in the act now without having to worry about consequences. And because probably, you know, people might've intuited that the moral restrictions on sexuality were related to its grave consequences. So the idea is if we've minimized or eliminated the consequences, why should those moral, you know, rules apply anymore? And I think that in the West, this happened because over the course of the modern period from the enlightenment on, there had been a gradual secularization of the worldview, a gradual secularization, secularization of morality. Religion until very recently was still seen by many people in the West, particularly in the United States as being that, which gives us our moral direction. Even Galileo way back when, you know, 17th century said, the Bible is not about, is about how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, right? So leave, you know, the cosmology to us scientists, but revelation, religion, that's about how, you know, about morals and ethics and how to get to heaven, basically. I think what happens is that is so much undermined already in Western society by the mid 20th century, that the sexual morality that existed was very much a vestigial by that time. It was like a remnant of past eras. It was kind of a holdover from earlier times. And all it took, I think people are just holding on because of the fear of the consequences and pregnancy and all of that. But once that was gone, boom, you know, all hell breaks loose, basically. Whereas in other parts of the world, you know, the birth control pill becomes available, you know, technologies become available everywhere. You don't see a sexual revolution in the Muslim world. You don't see a sexual revolution in China. You don't see a sexual revolution in other parts of the world outside of the kind of the Western, you know, Samuel Huntington, the eight spheres, you have the kind of Western cultural sphere, right? And so I think part of it really is because, you know,
look in the Muslim world, fine, we have birth control pills, but that doesn't automatically, you know, that people's commitment to Islam and the fact that ethics and sexual ethics and stuff are still very deeply informed by religious norms that go way beyond just the practicalities of, oh, we want to avoid, you know, illegitimate pregnancies. People are, you know, by and large still, like they have that kind of, you know, they've internalized, right? They've internalized that ethic that, okay, fine. I have a birth control pill. It doesn't make zina halal, right? That's still like a huge sin to fornicate. Amazing point. And if I could just sit there for one second, because, you know, we are still dealing with this phenomenon today when it comes to justifying Islamic norms, right? You're basically saying if we're going to properly learn from American history, then we should be very, very cautious when we are justifying Islamic norms in secular terms, right? It might have a role or an instrumental role to play in dawah. You want to explain to somebody why, you know, fasting is good for your health or why the hijab, you know, nobody forced you to wear it, for example. However, if we're merely going to use, if we start to internalize those secular sort of reasons for what we're doing and taking it away from our primary sort of orientation, no pun intended, in life is obedience, right? Is otherworldly oriented, is focused on the relationship with the creator and pleasing the creator and submitting to Islam, then we might also find ourselves in a similar position decades later where the only thing that's left is the sort of secular justifications and it actually leaves us very, very vulnerable to just being completely washed away by some sort of either technology or something like that. And I think it's very critical for Muslims to understand first and foremost because we ourselves are affected, obviously, by these larger cultural paradigms, right, and the dominant discourse, especially our youth,
and also for us to make others understand that it's precisely what you said. I mean, in the end of the day, our marching order, we hear and we obey, that's what Islam means, submission. It's not called Mohammedanism like they used to say in the 19th century, right? Other religions, Christianity from Christ, Confucianism from Confucius, you know, Buddhism, whatever, but Islam, it's not the name of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, it's the name, it means submission, like the very essence of the religion is to submit and there's the beautiful verse in the Quran, وَمَا كَانَ لِمُؤْمِنٍ وَلَا مُؤْمِنَةٍ إِذَا قَضَى اللَّهُ وَرَسُولُهُ أَمْرًا أَنْ يَكُونَ لَهُمَا الْخِيَرَةُ مِنْ أَمْرِهِمْ Right? It is not for believing man or woman if when Allah and his messenger have decreed an affair to have any choice in their matter. And we live in an age which fetishizes choice, right? And the word used, ثِيَرَةٌ مِنْ خِيَارٍ You know, اختيار. It literally says, no, it's not your choice when Allah and his messenger have decreed. And so, it's important for us to understand, you know, when people say, for example, why as Muslims do you not drink? Right? Many people in the modern world think that if you just say, oh, because God said so, that's a cop-out. That's not a cop-out. Like, that's the best reason you could give. Right? That's the best, most solid, most objective, and most indefeasible reason you could give. And that is our reason. Why do you not drink? Because Allah has forbidden it, period. Now, why has Allah forbidden it? Is it just a random taboo? Is it just to test us? You know, which it could be. Like, that's Allah's right. You know, jump. We jump. Sit. We sit. Four rak'ahs, two rak'ahs, three rak'ahs for the different prayers. You know, that's what's come to us. That's what we do. But it just so happens that Allah is Hakim. He's wise. He has hikm. And we can, you know, we can discern many of these wisdoms. So, once we understand that we don't drink primarily because Allah has forbidden us from drinking, now we can start saying, well, why might Allah have forbidden alcohol? And I can give you a whole list of reasons. It's very clear. One, two, three, four, five. And it becomes clear that, okay, of course, this is, this is what wisdom requires. Right? This is what wisdom requires
because humans are not wise enough on their own and our passions get in the way, our culture, our different proclivities get in the way. Allah in his mercy says, don't drink. Okay. Now, when we think about it, we say, alhamdulillah, that we understand the wisdom behind that. If we don't understand the wisdom behind it, does it mean that the prohibition drops? Of course not. It's very clear. Even if we cannot discern any wisdom behind it whatsoever, the idea is, if we have clear evidence that Allah has declared it, either forbidden something or proscribed or prescribed, forbidden it or commanded it, then, you know, that is what determines what we, you know, our moral framework. Right? And I think that when it comes to sexuality and many other issues, again, it's not a black box. Like we can look and we can see many, many reasons and wisdom behind why Allah has commanded certain things and prohibited other things. And maybe some aspects of what we don't totally get, maybe some aspects of what we can't really discern the wisdom, but because we know that it's the source that it's coming from, which is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, right, we have that trust and we have that iman and we have that faith that Allah knows and you don't know. And so we have tawakkul ala Allah. We put our trust in Allah and our faith in Allah for those aspects that we, you know, don't necessarily, cannot necessarily discern the wisdom of with our minds, right, and pray for guidance and pray for enlightenment on those aspects. Or, and or, I mean, primarily peace in our hearts in a spirit of taslim and submission. Yeah, it has to be axiomatic for every Muslim to believe that Allah knows what's in our best interest. Right. And we can't confuse the fact that the sharia is based off of human interest. We can't confuse that with the proposition that therefore we can somehow insert ourselves and better determine what is in our interest and therefore update or revise or sort of modernize
in order to adhere to what's really at the at the end of the day, just modern liberal values. Exactly. Because also what is in our interest, you know, it really can be very subjective and it depends on our understanding of what our interests are, which goes back to a question of who we are as human beings, where we're coming from, where we're going, what we're here for. And so if you take this notion of harm, which is a very common, you know, sort of the moral coinage of the day is all about, OK, preventing harm. That sounds nice. And we have that principle in Islam. There's no harm or reciprocating of harm. Right. But what is harm? Is harm just physical harm? You know, when I was growing up in the 80s, not too long ago, people smoked everywhere, you know, airplanes, restaurants like there was smoke everywhere, buses. OK. And I remember as young, there was like a non-smoking section in the back of the restaurant by the bathroom. And then a couple of years later, it was switched. And that was the smoking section. And the rest was like non-smoking. And then after that, the smoking section was completely pushed outside. You had to go outside to smoke. And then it's like 30 feet away from the door and all of that. Right. So, so people, you know, they had to do this gradually because a lot more people smoke back then than they do now. I mean, just anecdotally speaking, I don't have the statistics. And they knew that they couldn't just push it overnight like they had tried to do with prohibition in the 1920s. So they kind of gradually, you know, pushed smoking out, stigmatized it, marginalized it while educating people as to the harms of it. Right. So that's actually a good campaign of here's something harmful. We didn't know about it before. We didn't realize we've come to, you know, understand the harms involved. And let's have a kind of calculated program over a number of decades to sort of, you know, change people's attitudes and behaviors towards this thing. That's all very good. What kind of harms are present here, though? Right. These are harms that are physical harms. Those are important in Islam. You know, we have to protect our bodies. We have to protect. And the modern world is a materialistic world. And so we can understand
and register physical harm. OK, but are those the only harms that exist? I mean, for a lot of modern people, yes. You know, show me the stats. Show me the science. Show me, like, you know, the actual physical harm. And I'll agree that maybe we should regulate something by legislation. But if you say, wait a minute, what about what about, you know, spiritual harm? Oh, my gosh. No, like that's completely off, you know, outside of consideration because there is no, you know, that's denied essentially or it's considered something totally subjective. What about even like emotional, psychological harm? These are kind of taken, I mean, into consideration more, but then it becomes much, much more subjective, I think, as to what constitutes emotional and psychological harm and what doesn't. So when we talk about harm as Muslims, we have to realize that we have a much more nuanced and a much more comprehensive view of harm that's based on a on a full and realistic appreciation of what the human being actually is. We are bodies, we are minds, we are hearts, we are souls. We exist in this world and we will exist in an eternal afterlife. And so our right, our interest, our what is good for us is that which brings about our felicity and our health and all of those on all of those domains and all of those levels, physical, mental, spiritual, and in both worlds, this world and the next world. Like that's what is in our best interest. And there are things that we might not discern the harm in because the harms are immaterial. The harms are spiritual. The harms are ultimately, you know, leading to destruction in the afterlife, which is the worst kind of harm imaginable. It's much worse than getting lung cancer, being thrown into the hellfire, you know, for eternity or even for any amount of time. Right. That's much worse than getting lung cancer and dying of it. You have to die somehow anyway. Right. Not saying we should make light of it, but, you know, compare those two and there's no comparison. So, of course, modern secular society cannot register. I mean, it has no
resources for assessing or talking about or even allowing for any consideration of, you know, spiritual harm or moral harm. But again, that is fairly new because it wasn't too long ago that things, you know, again, particularly before the sexual revolution, people don't realize it was only in 1967 that I believe it was Holland and Denmark, two of the most liberal countries and most secular countries, legalized written pornography. OK, what do I mean by I mean like salacious novels. OK, imagine a world in which in European countries, as secular as they are, it was, you know, salacious novels were actually prohibited. They could not be sold. It was just indecent. It was considered an affront to public morality. And that was considered important and everyone would suffer if you allow basic moral norms to just be undermined. And then so 1967, those two countries allow written pornographic materials. And then in 1969, again, this is in the heart of the sexual revolution, in the heat of it, they allow everything else, you know, images and photography and, you know, movies. And then that becomes the norm across the Western world. But before that, no, like it was this was actually considered illegal because this was considered an affront to, I guess they called it like public morality. And that was considered legally relevant in the West just literally a generation or two ago. You know, like you can't just engage in activities that are outright immoral because moral harms are real harms because the moral life is something real and objective. Now, of course, that's completely been scuttled, especially in the last 50 years as we've moved from the modern period into the postmodern period. That's part of a much larger social trend, a trend towards subjectivism, a trend towards relativism, a trend towards non-realism in all realms, including and especially the moral realm.
It's still very new and we need to realize that. Yes. There also seems to be something of a progressivist attitude that I think that we need to address because there's a sense and the other sort of question that I wanted you to address as was coming up. We're talking about birth control and talking about how the, let's say that the risks of fornication are asymmetrically born by women. They fall more to women than they do to men, at least in the dunya. And so the feminist narrative to respond to that, and we will have a separate episode on feminism. I don't want to get too much into it here, but there's the celebratory sort of triumphalist narrative that, well, yes, now that was not fair. It was not just that women had this undue burden attached to them and the stigma that was attached to them, and it wasn't attached to the men. And so we freed women from that asymmetry and from that sort of injustice by giving them the same sort of sexual freedom that if it wasn't sort of accepted yet on a social level, let's just say that men were allowed to get away with it. So the kind of idea that morality is progressing, at least in some sort of way, that, well, we don't have those attitudes, those restrictive attitudes back then. How do we respond to somebody who accounts for it or who experiences it that way? So I think a couple of things. I mean, one, there is some point to that, right? Like, okay, well, women bore all of this burden, in secular terms, like nature put this burden on women, and now we can relieve them of that because we have the technology to do so, right? And we're all relieved of all sorts of burdens by technology. We have our dishwashers and our washing machines and our cars. I'm not ready to give up any of those, although maybe we should, right? Because I'm not sure the planet can really support that, right? Especially the automobile. So there is something to be said for that. But at the same time, I think there are a couple of things, right? First of all, we're not
just machines. We're not just reducible. And when it comes to, again, sex and sexuality and reproduction, it's not just a physical process. There are emotional, there are psychological aspects to this as well. And I read a book recently that just came out, I believe, last year called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. I don't know if you've read this. She's a British. So she actually, and she's not Muslim, obviously. I don't think she's Christian either. I mean, she seems just to be secular. All of her arguments are purely secular. And she speaks in terms of evolution and so on and so forth, just as a kind of earthly phenomena without bringing in sort of divine anything into it. But she says, look, even if you take sort of this purely evolutionary kind of view of it, right? We are the way we are, either because God created us in a particular way or evolution created us the way or God through evolution, however you want to view it, right? But we have come to be the way we are according to that paradigm over however many hundreds of thousands of years, right? And our reproductive capacities, they exist within a larger environment, in a larger ecosystem, maybe if I could say, right? So it's not just that women had the physical burden of pregnancy, but she points out that because the investment of women is so much greater in the process than it is for men, this has, again, she would say evolution has therefore produced a very different set of psychological and emotional dispositions in women that go along with that. So because a woman gets pregnant, carries a baby for nine months, and then is with the baby for however long after, I mean, the whole life, but the baby's very dependent on her, women therefore become very selective in their mate selection, right? And so the type of promiscuity that is very common of males the world over, okay? Although again,
this is how I'm like, we're not excusing it, but I'm just saying as a sociological phenomenon, it's true. I mean, first of all, male sex drive and female sex drive are not at all the same, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively. Again, we're talking averages. You can, I said, ironically, you can read about the experiences of people who attempt to transition to see exactly that play out. Women who take testosterone, they say, oh my god, you know, like I can't believe this is what guys go through every day. Like it just hit them. They said, you know, of course we had a sex drive before, but this is just insane. Once they started taking testosterone, they couldn't believe the changes, right? So anyway, and she points out on there's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up and to deny this is just pure ideology. This is pure ideology, right? Oh, this is all just socially constructed. And, you know, this is just a patriarchal myth. That's nonsense, right? So again, kind of the strength of the male sex drive and also the nature of it, right, is very different from the female drive. And so what Louise Perry, one of the things she argues in the book is that the sexual revolution has actually lied to women by telling them that you will be happy if you become like a man. And if you're treated like a man, but she says women are not like men. We say, yes, they said that. So we agree. The male is not like the female. Right. So if you just tell women, OK, now you don't have to worry about reproduction anymore. Go out and have sex like a man, basically. You know, again, I'm speaking just in cultural terms, not like in Islam. Let me see. It's OK for men to go out, but go out and just kind of, you know, like men, so your wild oats or whatever women are not, you know, maybe some women like to do that. But in general, women are not designed to to to do that. And they are left feeling very empty and very unsatisfied after these one night stands, which can also have bad effects on men. But in general, it's much easier for men to kind of separate the sexual act from emotions and commitment and all of that. For women,
it's much harder to do that. Right. It's a it's a very invasive thing. You're taking someone into your body. Right. And it's just a much more emotionally involved thing for a woman. And they end up feeling very hurt and lonely and used and abused when a guy just trots off. And it's like, you know, see you later. Thanks for the good time. And I'm gone. And so she points out that women have been told for 50 years now. Right. You will be happy if you become like a man. And what kind of feminism is like, you know, in the end of the day, the male principle wins because we if we have to make women into men, no one said the men. No one said the men need to like we need to control the men. This is what what's Mary Mary Wollstonecraft, you know, the 18th century. She actually called for that. You know, she's like these early proto feminist voice. She actually said men need to be taught virtue. Men need to control their sex. So she didn't say the women need to go out and become like loose. She said men need to become controlled. And the 60s didn't do that. They didn't say we want to make men more like women in this way. They say we want to make women like men who benefited from that. What were the what were the cultural sort of sectors that benefited from telling women that lie? I mean, Louise Perry will say men because or at least, you know, on a first order, men seem to have because it's like now you have all these women available because before, you know, women like there was no free lunch, basically. If you wanted access to a woman, you know, you had to you had to be able to. Yeah. I mean, to commit. Right. Ring on the finger. No ring. You know, put a ring on it. Right. That's right. Put a ring on it. Cost money. You're taking responsibility because you get involved in that act. She ends up pregnant. You need to be responsible for that. Right. Like you can't just have that baby. The baby has a
right also to be born in a legitimate setting with parents who are responsible, ready to receive it. And not just some woman abandoned on her own with this child, barely able to take care of it. That's a that's a violation of the child. Right. So, again, this whole notion that it's just my body and I can just do what I want with my sexuality. This is complete nonsense. Like this is very, very individualistic. It only centers, you know, me, myself and I, which is, again, the modern paradigm is a very much it's like a nest based self actualization paradigm. And it doesn't look at societal, you know, consequences of things. And it also doesn't look at, you know, the rights of the child that you are risking bringing into the world in circumstances that are not appropriate for its reception. You are doing vulnerable against that child before it's even born. Right. Like the child has the right to be born legitimately. And Islam is very, very keen on that. And the Sharia takes great, great, goes to great lengths to ensure that children are born in legitimate circumstances because it is their right. Do you see? And we don't think of that as a society. I remember when these technologies came out in the early 80s, like IVF, you know, in vitro fertilization. I was young at the time, but I don't remember any major kind of debates, even among religious folks like Christian, you know, priests or whatever about is this even ethical to produce children in this artificial way where you're taking sperm and egg from like donors and all of that? Is it even ethical to do this and to like mix lineage and obfuscate parent parentage? You know, and in Islam is very, very clear, like, you know, our anima have derived from the Sharia. All of these procedures are haram unless you are taking the egg from the wife, the sperm from the husband. Yes. Maybe she can't like, you know, her fallopian tubes are
blocked so they can't conceive the natural way. It's her egg. She carries the baby. That's it. So you're preserving the natural God given and God designed, you know, framework of reproduction. And that child is born legitimately of a married mother and father to those people within that home, so to speak. Right. If you take a sperm donor, egg donor or surrogate mother, that's all completely haram. And they say it's like be method to Zina. It's like Zina. And for most Western people, what do you mean? It's like Zina, like fornication, like no one had sex with anyone. Like, why is that? You know, no one outside of that couple. They were not unfaithful. You say, yeah, but it reproduces the consequences of Zina. It's as if the woman went out and had sex with the sperm donor. It shows how holistic the Sharia is and how holistic Islam is, because as you were saying, sort of to paraphrase, you know, Islam and of course, Allah has the longest view in the room. Right. So we're looking at sexual ethics. We're looking at everything. We're looking at the whole lead up, the whole subject formation, the whole, yes, the act of sex itself, and then all the consequences and fallout that's going to happen later. Whereas like the modern society in the modern world is only focused on one very, very minute aspect, just the actual act of intercourse is their consent is their harm and completely neglecting everything that has to lead up to that moment, completely neglecting everything that's going to be downstream of that moment. So it's a very sort of limited and myopic sort of way to look at things. It's very artificial too, right? Because it doesn't take into account, you know, the actual consequences of the act. And it focuses again, just on individualistic desires. And then it turns those into the center of personhood, right? Which is, again, that this has sort of been long in the making in the modern period, the kind of centralization of desire of inner feelings as who we fundamentally are at our core. And then the sexualization of
that, particularly through Sigmund Freud, right? Sex becomes absolutely central to our core identities, human beings. And this is very, very new. I mean, in the past, sex was an act that you did, even same sex behavior and desires have existed. We know that for sure. They existed in Muslim cultures. We have this in the literature. This is not a secret. I mean, maybe people are not widely aware of it, but like, but it never was anybody's identity, right? And even today in the Muslim world and in many more traditional societies, you still have, you know, these kinds of actions going, you know, going on, particularly between men, perhaps also between women. And people don't actually view themselves as being like gay or being some different kind of class of human beings because they may either on occasion or regularly engage in sexual behavior with members of their own sex. Now that's haram. Like, we're not saying it's halal to do that, but like, zina is haram and people commit zina, you know, other things are haram, people do that. So that goes on. But the point is, it's not an identity marker for people, neither the desires nor even acting on the desire. It's becoming more so because the Western paradigm continues to be exported and, you know, universalized and it becomes the one norm that everyone is expected to follow, right? So Muslim societies themselves are taking on, you know, I was told actually, when I was in Egypt in the mid nineties, studying Arabic, it was still very, very common in the streets of Cairo, in all districts and all social classes to find men walking around holding hands and hooking arms and even fingers interlaced. It's very, very normal. I'm told today in Cairo, that's not done anymore, except in the poorest, at least, you know, like modernized classes. Everyone else they'll say, oh, it's gay. Where did they get that from? No one conceived that as being gay 25 years ago. And now, men in Cairo or whatever, they won't hold hands because they have a Western conception of what
that means. Some of the, I'll never forget my landlord in Saudi Arabia, you know, they have some of the tribes, they grab you, each one grabs the beard of the other and then they kiss your nose. Okay. That's something that's completely normal. Not in Rochester, huh? We'd be, you know, definitely labeled. But that's a really important point. And I especially appreciate that you mentioned that this is something that even the advocates of it recognize, Freud, you know, and Foucault even recognized that conflating or let's say generating an identity based off of your desire in general, or your sexual desire specifically is something completely new, completely unprecedented, honestly, in history. And so for people who are trying to make an argument by saying that's like, well, this is just who they are. Well, then we have the right to ask, what if you did this with every desire? And what if you did this with every proclivity? Who wants to steal or somebody who wants to even just cheat on their spouses, like in general, forgive them, you know, like same sex or opposite sex? Do we now construct an identity around that and defend it? The person is just a cheater, or a swinger, or a larceny, or this, and then, you know, roll out a file. I mean, obviously, this comes up a lot to a whole platform to now kind of try to convince people that, you know, not only, you know, not only recognition, but celebrate, but celebrate this as some sort of new, you know, progress of morality and sort of human values and, and enlightenment and cosmopolitanism and acceptance and tolerance and these sorts of things. If you were to apply the logic evenly across the board, it would be absolute madness. And yet, somehow, somehow, and perhaps, you know, you can speak to this, when it comes to sexuality, it's something that we have kind of fallen for hook, line, and sinker,
where we are, and most people are, whether it's on the same sex side, or the opposite sex side, whether you're saying homosexual desire, or heterosexual desire, to even identify, to play the game, to identify in that matrix, is listening to the idea that my identity is constructed around my sexual desire. Exactly. And people should really get beyond that. I mean, look, in Western society, even just about 100 years ago, if you ask the average man or woman on the street of New York, or whatever, are you straight, they wouldn't, they wouldn't know what you're talking about. Like, people didn't identify, even as being straight, forget about like being gay, or whatever, people didn't identify as a sexuality. Right now, maybe say, okay, well, they were straight by default, or whatever. But yeah, most people were. But the point is, even people, you know, this, the idea that I, that, like, a fundamental category of my identity, is, like, my gayness, or straightness, or something like that. And this sort of like, these are fundamental categories, in terms of which I see myself, that this is, this is very, very specific to, you know, this current moment in Western culture, right. And we need to see the, I think, the historically contingent nature of it. Now, it's hard sometimes to think yourself outside of the paradigm, which, which, in which you exist, when, especially when it's so dominant. But I think, you know, as Muslims, we have a transcendental standard. And, and so we have a perspective, we have means to, to have a perspective on issues, which can actually transcend culture and transcend time and place. Right? Because we know that, you know, just, right, if you're going to take sexuality as your core identity, and, and affirming your identity means affirming your sexual behavior, right? But the Sharia categorically forbids certain acts, right? All right, there's a, there's a head-on collision right there. So what are we going to do as Muslims, like, this forces us to think, well, wait a minute, like, how are we going to resolve this conflict? Okay, the Quran is what it is,
it's not changing, right? And so, so the other side we need to, we need to really examine, right? Is it really true that, that one's sexual drives, right, are who a person fundamentally is, or that if you're, are not accorded the opportunity, or the, you know, given the legitimacy to, to act out on those desires, that all of a sudden you as an entire person are, are being undermined, right? And, and for many people, that's just sort of reflexively the case, but if that's true, that makes mincemeat of the Sharia, right? And if we're going to stick to Islam, then we're going to have to question either one or the other, right? You have to choose your God, essentially, right? You have to choose either, either your, and, and the literal definition of what are you worshiping, what are you serving, right? Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la said that he has not created in the chests of people two hearts, right? You can't follow two regimes, right? So you have to either choose, are you going to obey Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and his guidance, or are you going to obey your desires? And we know what Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la said about the person who takes their own desires as their God. And it's so interesting to me, that I add to the Qur'an there, that, you know, they continue to have more and more valence, right? And more and more application as time continues to unfold, you know, maybe when that ayah was reflected upon a thousand years ago, you know, there were various ways in which its interpreters and its ponderers could understand it. But I feel like as we continue to live, even more ways in which, in which this ayah applies. Then of course, you know, we can't, I don't think, even though this, strictly speaking, this episode is not about gender, but we can't let escape the fact that the same exact thing is now happening with gender, right? Like to, to, to, you know, I, I very much push back against the idea of even having to give my pronouns in the first place, right? The trend on college campuses where you put in your signature
for the email, he, him, she, her, these things. And you go around the circle, even in my, in a youth organization that, that my oldest son is a part of for the first time, they did it the other day. And I was very, very alarmed, but I saw it coming. This is in a Muslim space? No, no, this is a non-Muslim space for like birdwatching and things like that. And how did he deal with it? Well, it was, it was, it was very indirect and it was very kind of sly. So I saw this happening, you know, for, you know, some time now I saw the direction that this particular organization was going and the ideas that they're trying to, according to them, be more open and inclusive and diverse. And so I noticed just a couple of little things. And I said in my head, maybe six months ago, I said, I bet there's going to come a day where they have one of these field trips and they're going to offer the possibility for the participants who are between ages 10 and 18 to, to give a pronoun. And so just the way it happened, nobody took that person up on that sort of thing. Nobody even mentioned any pronouns. And so it ended up not being a big deal, but next time they're going to enforce it. But exactly. And here's the thing too, because I really wanted to drill down on this point, because exactly, it's exactly the same thing as, well, what's the big deal if you can just identify as heterosexual, right? What's the big deal if you can just say, I'm cisgendered, right? Or, or he, him, and use your pronouns is that you're asking me to even identify myself with this thing and act as if this is, you know, some sort of fundamental part of my identity that I have to express and I get to choose for myself. You are destroying my entire worldview and you're asking to come into yours, right?
And you're assuming that, that it's, it's up for grabs and you're assuming that someone who sees you and looks at your physical form and hears your voice or the same with me, and that they should just legitimately suspend judgment as to whether we are he's or she's like, that's absurd. I mean, we would say that's just, no, right? And, and, and by, by going along with it, you're, you're precisely kind of playing into that, that yes, I need to say, right. You know, like, like, it's like, no one has a right to call me he until I've given them the permission to do that. No, you have to call me he, right? Like you, you should do that, right? There's, there's no reason why you shouldn't do that. And I understand you say, okay, well, what about people who don't identify as one gender or another? It's a whole separate topic, right? And I think you're going to have another conversation about this, right? So these are our issues. And I think, you know, the transgender aspect of it, we won't go into it too much of it here. I think that this may be kind of a tipping point in the movement, because I think it's so radical that even many people who identify as lesbian or gay are really uncomfortable with a lot of things that are being pushed by specifically the transgender movement. And there's a group in the UK, it's called the, I think, LGB something. And they specifically said, we're excluding the T, like, we have nothing to do with that phenomenon. We're a totally separate thing. I mean, part of the reason is because homosexuality depends on a gender binary, right? To be homosexual means there are two sexes, and I'm attracted to my same sex. Like, it depends on that. And you might have heard, like, there's this whole phenomenon now of lesbians, women who identify as lesbian, being castigated by trans activists, because they refuse to date or, like, go to bed with, quote unquote, trans women who are biological males. And these women say, look, the whole meaning of being a lesbian, right, is that I don't want to be with a biological
male. Like, that's what it means for that I'm a lesbian, right? Like, I want to be. And now they're being told, well, you're a bigoted, you know, you're being a prejudiced bigot, because trans women really are women. And if you're a lesbian, you're supposed to be open to all women. And now you're discriminating against women with certain genitalia, you have a genital preference. I was just going to say, like, the I mean, the absurdity of it, like when you say you're a bigoted lesbian, because you won't go to bed with this trans woman who has male genitalia, because you're prejudiced against women with male genitalia, it's like, and you have a genital preference, and you're using that to exclude, like, you know, other people. You just look at it, and you're like, this is completely insane. Yes. I find telling the missionary aspect of it. And honestly, even from the first, you know, I remember when I was an undergrad, and I was not a Muslim yet, you know, going to whatever college parties and stuff like that, I'll never forget that there was somebody, I guess, who seemed to be a homosexual, and grabbed my hand, without, you know, any sort of permission on my part, and then proceeded to accuse me of why am I being uncomfortable that I'm holding your hand as a man? Right. And I never forgot, I never forgot that, because, you know, discursively, right, at the level of rhetoric, it's all just about inclusion, tolerance, and things like that. On the ground facts on the ground is that, you know, this is something that's extremely evangelical, and it's extremely missionary. And it attempts to force this sort of recognition and approval and even celebration, you know, many people have been following the sort of the flag raisings that was, you know, walked out on by many Muslim youth, Canada, and similar things that are going on in North America and all over the world.
It is a, perhaps, you know, the veiled threat, right, like the threat is there, it's just there's a smile in front of it. But the subtext is, if you don't celebrate us, right, that we are going to find a way to challenge you to that and try to push back and militate against you for basically not doing this. You know, and I, again, people are caught in the cultural moment. And I think if you just take a few steps back, it becomes so clear that why is it that, you know, what other, you often hear this argument, okay, well, everyone's a minority, like they're a minority, we're a minority, you have different kinds of minorities, all minorities, by definition, are subject to mistreatment and are vulnerable in one respect or another. So we should all, you know, we all stand together or fall together, and we should all support each other. I think there's a lot of problems with that argument. But just grant, you know, take it, just to grant it for a moment. If that's true, then why are all minorities not being treated the same? Because other minorities, no one is forcing anyone to celebrate them. Like no one's forcing them to celebrate Muslims, like actively go out and march and celebrate and kind of like, say that they identify with our actual values and beliefs. And I mean, that would be absurd. The equivalent would be maddening. It would basically be like us forcing elementary school children to color, you know, crescent moons and stars. For entire month, Muslim Awareness Month. Yeah. And learn their names in Arabic and, you know, girls to wear like hijab maybe for a couple days to show how much they really, really appreciate and, you know, Muslim views on modesty. Didn't participate that we would live, you know, label you an Islamophobe. Like, yeah, that would be the equivalent. Exactly. And I think everyone would just say,
well, that's completely absurd. And we would say that's absurd. Right. We want to make Dawah. We want people to know about Islam. But I don't think we would, anyone of us would be comfortable kind of like enforcing it on, you know, people, kids in public schools in America on the threat of, you know, we're going to call you the worst of names if you don't sort of, you know, where's the where's the crescent and the star flag flying? I don't see that. Right. Well, we're a minority, too. Right. And I pointed out before you have Black History Month, that's kind of the other, you know, minority has a whole month. No one suffered in the United States, particularly more than the African-American community. And it comes and goes. It's kind of uneventful. Some people do some things or whatever, maybe libraries, you know, have books. But you don't have every corporation in the world rolling out all of its products like in kind of black, you know, themed colors or Africana or whatever. None of that. Right. It just kind of comes and goes. And no one else gets their month even. Where's the Muslim month? Where's the, you know, Asian month? Where's the where's the month of other, you know, Jewish month or whatever? Where are the months for every other minority? Right. And so it really there's much, much, much more going on here, I think, than just, OK, a fight for equality and a fight for recognition and affirmation. This is how it's built. This is how it's kind of marketed. But if that's true, then, you know, society is like under dereliction of duty for neglecting all of this is really what it takes. Then why are you leaving all these other minorities out in the cold? And if other minorities are sufficiently, you know, taken care of by saying, look, we we affirm your right to exist, to live the way you want and so on and not be molested on the streets and not be attacked and not be, you know, whatever. And that's sufficient. We don't all have to sign up to your entire world view and value system and practices and behaviors and lifestyle in order to grant you, you know,
kind of a space in society. Yes. Why is that not sufficient here? Why is it not sufficient for me to say I have gay neighbors and co-workers and so on and so forth and I get along with people well, just like I would with people or atheists or polytheists or any other belief system that I don't, you know, agree with or approve of or think is correct. And I'm not automatically considered to be some hateful bigot who's going to go out and attack that person or undermine their their safety. I can get where some of this might be coming from. Right. And I don't want to just ignore, you know, I was just reading yesterday and maybe we sometimes forget the other side of this. So just to be fair, right, because there's always a grain of truth, you know, in everything like that people say usually, even if it's sometimes taken in a direction that that is out of proportion. I was reading yesterday on Quora, one of these forums, you know, some, you know, now a man was saying when he was young, I guess he was effeminate as a kid. And he's like, my dad hated me, like despised me because he saw this like gay kid in him, although he never said, you know, openly. And he said, I was left as a 10 year old all alone in the middle of a big city because I refused to speak to my dad about having sex with girls at 10 years old. It's not a conversation that a 10 year old should have anyway. He said, I broke my wrist at one point, you know, doing something, and my father wouldn't take me to the hospital. And to this day, I can't write properly because my wrist never properly healed. Right. And then he said at one point when I was, I don't know, a teenager, this is a bit vulgar. He said I had some growth on a testicle or something. And I asked my dad to look at it. And he said, oh, you're trying to get me to, you know, perform a certain act on you. You just and you're like, oh, my gosh, you know, like, what did that kid do? Even if he's effeminate, even if it's like from an Islamic perspective, right? This is completely out of bounds. This is totally wrong. You know, we have a much more nuanced discussion on things like gender nonconformity. We have a whole category in the Sharia of the Muhannad who's
basically an effeminate male. Like that's a category within our legal and ethical tradition and the rules that apply to that. And one of the principles is that, you know, our scholars recognize that some people are naturally gender nonconforming in their mannerisms, in their voice or whatever. It's, I think, more common and more obvious, socially speaking, in males who are effeminate than kind of females who are more masculine. But both exist. And we have terms for both in our categories. You have the Muhannad male and the Murad Jalaf female. Right. And the scholars were very clear that, you know, there are two kind of varieties. One is Imam al-Nawawi says it can be khilqi, which means basically inborn or something that's just part of one's constitution, or it can be affected, right? Like taken on, you know, purposefully. And he said, as for those for whom it is khilqi, right, inborn, there is no blame on them whatsoever, because they didn't choose that. In Islam, you're only responsible for what you choose to do. If you're a male who just happens to have a higher voice and a more feminine gait or whatever, and you know, the idea is then scholars differed. Should such a person, is such a person required to try to recondition themselves so that their mannerisms are more in conformity with the norm of their sex? Some scholars said, yes, the person is required to try. And if they don't try, then they're sinful for not trying. But if they try reasonably and like can't manage, then there's no blame on them. Others said, no, they're not even required to try in the beginning, as long as it's their natural disposition. And they didn't, they're not taking on heirs. They're not even required, although it might make their life easier to, you know, especially if they're a boy, to kind of not be so effeminate looking, because it's just, you know, probably socially speaking, it would make it more difficult for them. But some scholars said that there is no moral obligation to even try, but some said there was. So the idea is that, you know, we have this notion of people
who might be effeminate, right? Or again, women who might be more masculine. And the scholars are very clear that there is no actual blame on this. So for some 10-year-old kid or eight-year-old kid, for his father to treat him like that, right? But you know, when the kid didn't even do anything, hasn't had sex yet with anyone, has not done anything that by the Sharia would be considered wrong or sinful, this breaks their heart. Like you just read that and you're like, oh my gosh, that's terrible. And a lot of people identify as LGBT, like they have those stories or the last generation did. And that's what they'll say like, okay, you guys don't understand, right? The other side of what we've had to go through. Sometimes we're just like perceived, you know, homosexuality or something like that, right? And so we really have to be like, I think Islam properly followed and understood is very much a balanced, you know, is a balanced religion because you also cannot, the other thing too, is that if you refer to a male as a Muhannad, that's an insult. There was like, I think it was a tab, you know, who actually ordered someone to be flogged for this. You can't do that. So belittling people, making fun of people or assuming because a male is effeminate, that he is actually a practicing homosexual, who's having sex with men, which is like, you can't do that. Do you have proof that he's actually doing that? Right. And if you do, then that's a shorty thing. And that goes through the courts and that goes through whatever. It's not for you to take justice into your own hands or to bash the person or to come after them and say, I'm warning you totally off the, you know, so we're, we're totally on board when it comes to, you know, the, the aspects of the sort of the struggle of the gay rights movement, especially early on that were about these types of issues. I think we could say that, that, you know, Islam is gives dignity to everybody, right? But it also has the fullest definition of what that dignity is. And if somebody steps in,
you know, and they experienced this unjust, you know, treatment and this oppression through something that they couldn't control, that if they take the matter into their own hands, they think that they can interpret what's going to give them the most dignity. Then that's usually where they, they make a mistake, right? Because Allah promised us dignity through obedience to him and through submission to his Sharia. And what's going on here is you've got, you're swinging from one extreme to the other, or you're swinging from one oppression to another, where somebody is actually a genuine victim, right? Of an oppression. But they've taken matters into their own hands, or they've, they've interpreted it in a certain way, and they've made certain conclusions, and they end up running into a different type of oppression, oppression on themselves, of course. But it shows how important, it shows two things, actually, it shows how important that anchor of submission and obedience and having that third party outside of yourself to kind of play referee with things that are very murky, such as desire and identity and these sorts of things, how important that is. And the other thing that it makes me think of is also how, you know, almost overdetermined and narrow sort of gender and sexual expectations are within the United States, you know, and the experience of anybody who goes to public school in the United States, right? You know, as a young man, if you're not committing zina, if you're not actively committing fornication, you're made fun of as gay. And so, you know, that was always what it was growing up. And so we have this crazy, very, very narrow sort of range of what's acceptable, you know, or maybe we did, maybe that's past tense, maybe I'm showing my age here, but that at a certain point, we had a very overdetermined, extremely narrow idea of what was acceptable masculinity. Masculinity was you had to be like the Ken doll, you had to be the jock,
you had to be, you know, viral and out and sleeping around and doing these sorts of things, super macho, whatever. And if you were going to be- And also no affection or anything male whatsoever, no physical contact. I mean, you know, a handshake at the most, a slap on the back, that's it. You know, people that convert to slamming, they get freaked out when they see men are kissing and hugging and this and that, brother and like all over each other. What's going on here, you know? Right. And then if you're going to be feminine, then it has to be the pink and the all, you know, everything that that's entailed, super submissive, super girly, et cetera. And anything that steps outside of that very, very, very narrow spectrum, now you've got the full social pressure of, well, you're either gay or you're this or you're that, and you get beat up and you're going to get, you know, you're the victim of all this sort of, you know, it's overkill really. Now look at how that's produced sort of an opposite extreme, right? Now it's not just, okay, well, let's look and have a moment of reckoning at how overly narrow our gender and sexual norms were. Now we've blown the doors off and we've said, well, now you have to just accept everything and anything that somebody could possibly feel when it comes to their gender, it comes to their sexuality, you have to accept it. It's part of their sacred, you know, identity and the things that they feel. And if you don't, you're contributing to what we've come from. You're the guy who's, you know, putting some, you know, queer person in the back of your truck and beating them up and stuff like that, stuff that happens, you know, but there's a conflation between the two. And I think that's really important for us to, you know, to recognize and also to, you know, Muslims, of course, we don't give up on our moral principles. They're not alterable. They're not in our hands to begin with. But at the same time, you know, we have to also have that proper way of interacting with other people. I mean, look, because I've talked
about this issue, people have come to me and Muslims and, you know, one was a male who said, I'm kind of effeminate. And he's like, it's really hard for me to make friends with Muslims or go to the mosque because people, they just, they'll make fun of me. And he says, so it's so like, disheartening because I'm trying to like, and he's not even acting on like he's a practicing Muslim. But he's like, I go and I try to make relations, you know, like friendships with brothers at the mosque, and they'll openly like make fun of me. And like, how destroying is that for like, you're not going to go back. And the problem is a lot of people, because they go through they're very isolated, they're very emotionally vulnerable. And what they actually need is they need those relationships with males. I mean, this is going to the psychological aspects of some people, you know, again, this is a whole different discussion. But you know, some say that kind of the homosexual drive itself, you know, to some degree, maybe kind of a sexualization of a much deeper emotional need for connection with males that maybe a boy didn't get from his father or other types of, you know, or maybe never really connected with his peers when he was young, he never felt like one of the boys. And so, you know, that kind of absence of that affirmation as a man becomes sexualized when a person, you know, becomes a sexual being, right? This is a theory, like, we don't have to subscribe to it as a theological, but you know, it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, in a lot of cases, it seems like there are certain aspects of that that might be going on. And to the extent to which that may be true, and even if it's not true, you know, what a person needs, like a male who has, say, same sex feelings or desires, like it might seem counterintuitive, but he actually needs relationships with males, but halal ones, platonic ones, but deep, meaningful relationships, or he needs to feel like a man among the men, a brother among the brothers, and like he needs to be included and incorporated and so forth, and to ostracize and shun, because he might appear somewhat feminine or something like that. This is very damaging. And
then how is the person supposed to even come out of it? And then you're forcing them into the social isolation. And where are they going to go? Of course, they're going to go down the street to the rainbow. Yeah. Because, well, you know, open arms, except a lot of Muslims say, okay, in gay spaces, we're discriminated against because we're Muslim, right? Because you have that. It's not like gay men or whatever, all like, you know, necessarily like super open to every race and every religion or whatever. So sometimes they don't even find that welcoming there because either they're minoritized racially or religiously or something like that. So, you know, people will say like, no matter where we go, we don't really share. No. And especially if someone's not like pushing the lifestyle and out and saying like, I'm going to force this on the community, but they're really sincerely struggling, you know, with certain desires or proclivities or something like that. I mean, they absolutely have to be, you know, embraced and supported and helped in their lives, you know, to live meaningful lives according to the Sharia and, you know, in the deen of Allah. And I don't think that, you know, we work really quite there as a community. I think we need to have these kinds of conversations and we need to have a, I think, have the maturity to realize that this is a, this is a very deep issue for people who face it. You know, sexuality is not something you can just turn on and off like a switch and it's always there. You know, it's a very powerful drive. And for someone who discovers that their sexual drives are directed towards their same gender, I mean, imagine where that would leave you if it's something you didn't choose and can't necessarily turn off and you're part of a religious community and you believe in that religion and you know, it's not acceptable in your community. Like this puts you in a very difficult, you know, and you don't know, can I get married? You know, is this even feasible for me? I'm not going to live my life alone. Like there are a lot of issues that come up that people don't really necessarily realize because we think LGBT, okay, whatever, you're thinking about people
are actually out like doing the activity. And there's a lot of excess, certainly in the community, not every person who also has LGBT is necessarily kind of like, but especially among males, there's a very high degree of promiscuity. This is known, you know, anecdotally and statistics are there. So there's a lot of kind of excess right in there that will be admitted to by people who are in these communities and know about them. But that's one aspect of it. But there are also other aspects of it where people are struggling with desires. And again, it's often emotional, much more so than physical. And a lot of men will say like, deep down, I'm looking for an emotional connection with another man, you know, and the physical aspect is there. But many will say, like, primarily, it's an emotional connection. And when they say love is like, like, there's some truth to that. But again, for us, love, yes, you need love, but like platonic love, not sexual love. Right? We're going with, we've got a list of common objections that I'd like you to respond to. But just to kind of, I think, show a broad map of I think, where you've taken us. So we've almost got, you know, a two pronged sort of situation where we've got the discourse, we've got the ideas, the society, where it's going. And on terms of the discourse and the ideology, we've got to put our foot down. And we've got to stop this. So we've got to say that, no, we don't identify with our sexuality, our sexuality is determined and regulated by Allah subhana wa ta'ala and the sharia. And that's actually our entire thing. And we refuse to be called bigots. And we refuse to be conflated with people who are engaging in acts of violence and abashing and stuff like that, just because we're putting our foot down on this issue of morality, that is an essential part of our deed. But on the other hand, then you're portraying also the picture of all of the
individuals that that might struggle with the desire to sin, just like any of us would struggle to, you know, with any desire to any other sort of sin, with the exception, perhaps that this particular desire for this particular sin is extremely loaded. Now, and we're caught up with a lot of emotional baggage, which often goes back to very early childhood, right? The person's carrying a lot of baggage with them. It's not just that, I mean, some people might be, but for a lot of people, there's a lot more going on than just like misdirected desires. Right? Yes. And so that person, you know, that person should be treated, you know, that's sort of like an in house issue where this person needs support and understanding and, you know, the type of support that anybody would expect from another Muslim who is sincerely trying to do the right thing and trying to submit. And I think that's kind of where we draw the line. Are you trying to submit or are you not? Are you trying to change Islam and force all of us to change as well? Have us submit to you as the case may be. But if you accept, I've got a list of common objections here that I kind of, because as you said, and I love that you said, you know, in the beginning of our talk about language games, right? And the terms that we use are so loaded. In fact, they're really just slogans. Now, the ideas are tucked into the language in a very, very sneaky way to shift the conversation and to shift the ideas. So I've gathered just a couple of very, very common objections on this issue. And I'd just like to see sort of maybe a brief response to a few of them, if you would. Okay. So the first one is, why does Allah care about what people do in the bedroom? So, I mean, again, that's kind of a, you know, a polemical question, right? And it's one that is trying to say, I mean, look, I would say, why does Allah care what we do in the bathroom?
And he does. And we know this from the Seerah, where the Prophet ﷺ taught us how to clean ourselves after we use the bathroom. And the Kuffar actually made fun of the Muslims for this, as we know, right? Your Prophet even tells you, you know, how to clean yourself after you use the toilet. And they said, yes, absolutely. We own it. They owned it and they were proud of that as well. Comprehensive guidance, right? And you would be surprised that people until this day in the West, particularly, they don't have proper toilet hygiene. And it's advanced cultures. People have gone to the moon and built airplanes and all of this stuff. And I know someone who was a doctor in the Middle East and then was moving to Europe and he had other Muslim colleagues that just be prepared when you come to Europe, you know, and you're inspecting, you know, examining people, like just you're not, you're going to see like really unpleasant things, you know, because people don't have just basic toilet hygiene. They just use paper and it's not whatever. Okay. So without getting too explicit, like we need guidance even on that. And it's mind-boggling that people haven't figured out until now that don't you think it's cleaner to just use water? Like, isn't that obvious? If you're going to eat fried chicken and you just wash it, wipe your hands with like a napkin and you don't actually use water, like no one's going to consider that clean. This is obvious, but it's not obvious, right? People need guidance. And so how much more consequential is what goes on in quote unquote bedroom in terms of again, human life, human society, reproduction and so on and so forth. So I think part of the question is Allah cares because he cares about us. Okay. He gives us comprehensive guidance. We eat with our right hands. We don't eat with our left hands. You know, we do things in very specific ways. And I think as a Muslim, it's hard to make that argument because if Allah cares about these things, which may be from a Christian perspective, for example, which they don't
have a law anymore. I mean, Jews would get this, right? But from a Christian perspective, which is the dominant, you know, kind of religious paradigm that the West is coming from, why does a religion care about all these minute things? Well, if it cares about such minute things like dress and kind of, you know, mannerisms and things like that, then again, sexuality is much, much more consequential by anyone's estimation, you know, anyone's kind of, you know, yardstick than this. So that's not really a question that comes up. And I think we already answered the question towards the beginning, you know, sexuality is a big deal. Again, it's before birth control, it's where life comes from, right? This cannot be allowed to just be left to the vagaries of human desire. Not only that, we are, again, very physically and also emotionally embedded in it, right? It's a very, to even take pregnancy out of the picture, there's a lot of destruction that can come about from wanton, you know, unbridled sexuality, especially for women, but also for men. So Allah cares because, you know, we can really get burned and hurt badly, emotionally, and psychologically, and spiritually by letting our sexuality get out of control. And this is apart from the fact that, okay, because it's sinful to do so, you are risking your akhira, you are blemishing your eternal soul, right? Now you can repent and have it cleaned. But you're actually, you know, there are direct moral consequences because you are acting immorally and in disobedience to Allah, and that can possibly lead to your demise in the akhira. We know that Allah says that the paradise has been surrounded by, you know, difficult things, things that we dislike, and hellfire has been surrounded by passions, and desires, and delightful things. So, I mean, that's, I think,
again, if you go back to what we said earlier, the consequences are very real, and Allah knows best, and is also saving us from ourselves, because you let your sexuality get out of control, and it will control you. It's too powerful of a force not to be properly disciplined. And, and, you know, again, take pregnancy out of the picture. You still cannot have people running around just indulging every desire it's going to lead to their destruction, and people are realizing that now to their, you know, to their dismay with, you know, the fallout of the sexual revolution, right? It's not a good, it's not a good outcome. Excellent. Well, that responds well to the next one I had, which is what's wrong with people choosing who they love? I think that covers that well. Love whoever you want. We're talking about who you have sex with, right? Those two separate things. Yeah. You know, honestly, and we need to re, you know, we need to, I think, reignite our discourse on love, because we have a lot to say about love, right? And we have a lot to say about friendship, and about love in friendship. If you read Imam al-Ghazali in the Ikhya, he has a beautiful section on, you know, love among brothers. I mean, brothers and sisters in Islam, right? And what are the rights and duties of brothers on each other? And, you know, we, again, traditionally speaking in Arab culture, particularly other Muslim cultures as well, you have much more, I would say, like friendships. And you probably noticed this when you were in the Middle East, that friendships among people of the same gender are usually much deeper than is the case in European culture, right? So two men who are friends in the Arab world, they will have a much deeper emotional relationship, and even physical, I don't mean sexual, but like physical contact and things like this, than is even possible or imaginable in the West. Because in the West, that would just be classified, okay, this is like, this is like a
romantic, like bromance or something like this, okay? But, you know, I remember being in Egypt, and you call up someone, oh, why shouldn't you sultek? Like, even saying that, like, I miss hearing your voice. If you say that in English, it's like, what? You miss my voice? Like, dude. Yeah, there's a lot of waxing chromatic. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we want to see your face, you're beautiful. And all of this stuff, you know, and then again, like, again, physical, you know, contact. I remember I was in a mosque here in Boston a couple years ago, and I did a double take myself, because there were two, there's like in Tarawih, like, to Hajj in the last 10 days of Ramadan, and there were two brothers, and one had his head on the other one's thigh, lying down, and the other one has back against the wall. And he was like, petting his, I don't know, like, it was very intimate looking. This was like in a mosque. And I was like, Oh, my God, like, they built this in the mosque, you know, like, it's messy to all the time, right? If you see it, you know, like, and like massaging each other's legs and feet and stuff like that, like normal. But yeah, totally civilized here in the West that would never fly at all. So I mean, so just talking about, you know, love, and I would say I've seen it among, say, like males, you know, like, I think they really do, like, have this, like, love. I mean, I've been with groups of people, you know, for a day or two, and like, they leave, and they're like men, and they're like crying. Because we're so sad, we're like, like, really love these people very deeply, like, like much deeper than you would normally experience, again, in a friendship, in like a typical modern Western culture. That's love. And the Prophet, peace be upon him said, to one of his kin, do you love your brother? You know, if you do, then go tell him, go tell him that you love him. And saying that in English, again, I love you, but like, you have to qualify it, like, you know, make sure that you're like, a recognition that it had to, that it was, if you didn't qualify it, that it would be assumed to be some sort of sexual thing.
So I think that, yeah, I mean, I think that, look, I was just listening to something yesterday about why people become Muslim, you know, in the UK. And I know you did your football on this yesterday, too. I actually just listened to this as well, inshallah. And, and this brother was saying this was on Muhammad Jalal, what is it called? The Thinking Muslim podcast? Yeah, he had a brother on there, a British brother who was talking about converts. And he said, people walk by the mosque, their mosque, and they see people inside hugging and kissing each other. And like, and that draws people in because they have community and people lack community, they lack basic connection with other people. So I think we really need to kind of capitalize on this, we should not be afraid or shy. You know, and as Muslims, we take on our the cultural hue, I think we should fight against that. Because, you know, I had, my son was doing his, you know, a couple years ago, he was maybe 14, 15. And there was a kid who came from Uzbekistan. And he just fresh off the boat. And he would come and he would put his arm around the other other guys, you know, because I was normal for him coming from Uzbekistan, there was friends. And the other these are Muslim guys. Oh, that's gay. Like, what do you know? It's like, oh, dear. Right? Because I grew up in this culture, and they take on all of those assumptions. And I think that's a real problem. Because it's preventing people from having those, you know, the real and the other thing I wanted to point out, too, that things are not stable, we should be aware of that. If you go even in the West in the 19th century, you will find very similar correspondence between males, you know, females too, but we have just less of it. Very kind of like by modern standards, very kind of mushy and deep and kind of emotional, right, that professing their love for each other. You can also see pictures in Europe and America from the 19th century of men, either two men or several posing like for pictures, and they've got their arms around each other, they're sitting on each other's laps or kind of like in poses that for us today are clearly like, okay, they're a
couple, they're not a couple, trust me, like in those days, like a Victorian England, they would not be caught dead, like appearing as if they were gay, right? That was not interpreted that way. But from our cultural lens today, this looks very like like, what are they doing? They were just closet, you know, whatever. And they were flouting that, no, they were just taking pictures and not expecting at all that, you know, I mean, anyone would interpret their behavior as gay, but it looks very intimate from our current, you know. It strikes me that we're much poorer today, you know, because, you know, there's sort of, you know, within the sort of LGBTQ circles and scholarship, there's this trend to try to look back in the past and say, oh, was such and such an author really gay? Oh, was such and such a work really about homosexual desire and a lot of anachronism going on, and a lot of superimposing these modern sensibilities onto things that didn't exist in the past. And it seems like with our society that, you know, we have very much sexualized love. And I do blame, I think, music culture and entertainment culture for that. You know, you get that even the expression, making love, you know, like did a lot of, I think, ideological work to conflate the two of love and sex, and take it away from kind of a much more expansive view of what love could be. So we're almost poor, honestly, living today. Absolutely. I think we're emotionally poor for it. And, you know, it's either a relatively superficial relationship, or it's a sexual one. Yeah. And a lot of sexual relationships are very superficial, too. And a lot of people who are in these kind of whirlwind, you know, in one bed and out the next, they say, like, there's no, there's no emotional connection here at all. Right. And, and this is really what we're looking for. And we're left, whether it's in the, you know, same sex community, or like opposite sex, right?
People out going from one to the next. And after the physical thrill is over, they're left emotionally desiccated. Right. And this is a big problem in the modern world where people lack connection. And I think we need to recognize that there is real suffering going on. And again, like in the LGBT community, right, there is real suffering going on, because of, again, people's attitude, because of all the things we talked about before, but also because people are lonely, and looking for connection and looking for relation and looking for love. And it's also with people in the, you know, heterosexual straight community, to use these terms, the same, right, outside of Muslim circles, people are lost in these urban jungles, right, of profanity, and promiscuity. And, you know, and just, you know, really, like this Louise Perry, who wrote this book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, she was asked, do you think there is a counter revolution kind of brewing? And she said, you know, when I talked to my, she's maybe in her 30s, she's not, she said, when I talked to my friends, my age, girls, you know, women, she said, I actually think that there is, like there's rumblings of people are very deeply, deeply dissatisfied with the current. So I like to tell Muslims, we need to again, take a step back, have the long view, know that Allah has the longest view, as you said before, JazakAllah Khayran, and know that, you know, falsehood, Ja'al Haqqu, Zahaqal Balti, right? This is not a sustainable, this is not a sustainable situation. And Muslim, Islamic teachings on gender and sexuality are not a problem. And they're not an embarrassment. Right? They are the solution that everyone is crying out for. And they just don't know. And why is it that more women convert to Islam than men, if Islam is supposedly so restrictive and patriarchal, and so on and so forth. And they're not converting to reformed Islam, right?
They're not, quote, unquote, deformed Islam, they're converting to orthodox Islam, right? And they're wearing a hijabs, and they're happy to do so, because they now have gained dignity, through modesty, through constraint, through, you know, the place that Islam gives to the woman, and to the man in the way that it respects sexuality in the way that it regulates it. Right? So we need to take that view, we need to realize that, you know, we should be, honestly, I think, gender and sexuality, and this is, you know, what the West prides itself most on, or certain sectors of the West, because the West is not uniform. And there are people in the West who are very unhappy about what's going on Christians, and Jews and others, too. Right? So we shouldn't paint everyone with the same brush. But the kind of official sort of Western, you know, view that's presented to the outside, that they're very self congratulatory about gender and sexuality. And personally, as a Muslim, okay, I think gender and sexuality is where the West has most, obviously, and embarrassingly, gotten it wrong. Yes. And it's not difficult to see that at all. Just take a step back, the bill for the sexual revolution is piling up higher than ever, and it's rolling in. And the devastation is real. And, you know, there is no solution other than in the solution that Islam provides. Another very good book, by the way, is called Them Before Us. Have you read that by Katie Faust? No, I don't believe so. She's a Christian writer. And she writes about the them before us, right? Them before us is the children and us as the adults. Yes. And everything she says in there, almost to the T is 100% in conformity with Islamic Sharia, and she doesn't even know it. Because she says, if we put children's rights first and children's interests first, which is what we should have been doing all along, and not adult desires, okay, then we would not have
very easy no fault divorce, which became the case, you know, as of the 1970s. She also is very much against any type of in vitro or surrogate mother put mothers or in vitro fertilization that takes anything from outside the couple. And she follows cases of children who have been conceived in this way. And the effects are devastating. They grow up and they're constantly in search for who they actually are. You cannot play with human beings identity at that level. I need to know who my mother is. And my father, I need to know where my DNA comes from. And you are denying children their fundamental rights by allowing them to be concocted in laboratories by this way. This is wrong. This is unjust. This is wrong. Right. And that was a tactic that was used against African Americans when they were enslaved, right, to deprive them of their lineage and their history and to disorient them in that sort of way. It was a fundamental tactic to trying to break the spirit and break them down and do that work. And now we have people electing to do it. And the consequences haven't changed. And people are deeply disoriented, like who, you know, okay, I know this is my mother, but who's my father? Well, your father is an anonymous sperm donor. Well, thank you very much. I need to know who my father is, my actual biological father, because biology matters. It's not just like the one who raised you. Yes, that's important. But I need to know, like biology matters, right? This is a systematic denial of our age, right? Scandals for sperm donors saying, you know, saying one thing, and then it turns out they're not who they said they were, right? These are actually the matters of litigation. So there's even a recognition there that it really does matter who was the person behind the donation. And then there's no limit. So you have the sperm donor, again, sowing wild oats. And so you have maybe 50 kids who have been, you know, who are all half brothers and sisters, and they don't even know.
And they might end up marrying each other if they're all in the same community, like this is a complete disaster. And the fact that no one thought of this, you know, or no one saw any ethical kind of qualms with this just shows you how utterly, really, clueless people are without actual divine guidance. We're not smart enough to figure it out on our own. We really are not. We can, you know, Newtonian physics, Einstein, whatever, that's all fine. We might be smart in certain areas. We cannot figure out ethics alone. And the project of the Enlightenment was to put all human knowledge on the grounds of reason and empirical science, including moral knowledge. And I think everyone has realized now that this has been a complete and utter failure. And this has led to the relativism that we see today, because reason alone cannot provide us with, you know, strong, with indefeasible moral foundations, because we simply don't have the perspective to, you know. And the other thing I wanted to say earlier about this, too, and I think Muslims need to realize that the sands are always shifting very, very rapidly. And whatever people think is so obviously right and wrong today, it was completely different just five, 10 years ago, and it will be completely different five and 10 years from now. And when you're in the heat of the moment, the moment looks like it's all there is. But again, the benefit of having revelations, it gives you that objective angle to step outside. It's your yardstick you can use to measure any society, including the one you're in. And by the way, when they made in Denmark and Holland, when they made pornography legal, they made everything legal in the 1970s, including child pornography was not actually illegal. And those two countries became international hubs of child porn because it was not illegal to produce it. Okay, so what is child porn? I mean, you're raping children, essentially, on camera. It's the most sordid thing you could possibly imagine. And it's only in the late 70s, they said, you know what, maybe we should pass laws banning this.
Hello? You know, I mean, how could you have not realized that? Okay. And so they passed laws, but now you have this, you know, it's festered. And I understand that even today, a lot of stuff comes, you know, of that nature comes from those particular countries. And until the early 90s, you can find, I think, clips even on YouTube of like French, you know, like Oprah type shows, you know, where they're interviewing politicians and media personalities and actors and stuff. And some of these people, men are openly boasting about how they had, you know, sexual relations with underage children, boys, you know, like 10, 8, 10, whatever. And it was like, Oh, you know, like, it was just totally accepted. It totally accepted. Many of the big figures of the left in France were very well known for that, and actually attempted to get age restrictions removed. Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir. Foucault, one of them, Simone de Beauvoir, another one. Yes, absolutely. And these are all the icons, you know. Yeah, yeah, a lot, a lot. So that'll help us and not wipe us out. And people think, oh, it would never go to, you know, pedophilia, consenting adult is totally separate from a child. No, I mean, people, it seems obvious to you, it was not obvious to people in the West 30 years ago. No, and it's not obvious to people 20 years from now, either or less, because they're pushing, you know, they're trying to drop the consent laws, you know. I think that that people underestimate how far desire can be taken. I think that people, you know, they think that, well, if I, it's like two paradigms of desire, they think that if I have a desire, and I fulfill it, then I will be satisfied. Realize that if you have a desire, and your only response is to fill it, then the desire actually shifts, and it continues to move. And when it comes to human beings and desire, there's almost no limit.
Yeah, to what a human being can desire. And the desires will continue to move. Just as a junkie or an addict, you know, has to continue to get a stronger, you know, a stronger high in order to satisfy the sort of same thing that they were doing the sexual desire or any other desire. It's the same way. We ask a lot for protection. I have another thing, too, is that, you know, you said that desires keeps shifting. And the other thing, too, is a very easy to rationalize anything. So reason is one thing rationalization is another, it's very easy to spin rationalizations for any type of behavior. And we see it all the time. So that's another thing, too. Well, what's wrong with this and blah, blah, blah, it's give me any, you know, take anything almost, and you can, you can kind of rationalize it. Right. So we also need to be, I think, much more humble. In our, you know, modern man is very, self-satisfied, very self-inflated, self-congratulatory. We need to, to be, I just read today, Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad, one of his contentions, it said, like, tradition, tradition, we are on religion's leash. Modernity, religion is on our leash. Yeah. Right. I mean, in religion, in English, from the Latin, religioso, or whatever it means to bind or to tie, which is what apida means, it's tying you down, right? It's tying you down. And so religion is, it's, it's tying you, right? Because otherwise, you're just going to be a wild animal, like, Yeah. And we flipped it. Modernity is an inverted paradigm. It turns everything on its head. And so up is down, down is up. Metaphysics is on the bottom. You know, it's not, we're creating the image of God. God has created an image of us. That's like fishta or whatever, you know, because God is just a projection of the human mind. No, akhi, you are wrong. Right? Allah's attributes are first. Anything that we have is derived from those, not the other way. We're not projecting God. He projected us.
Not projected, created us, right? We're derivative of. Yeah. So anyway, We live in very scary times. I've got one last sort of objection that I'd like to respond to. We'll try to find a way where we can end on a constructive note, inshallah. Inshallah. So what if someone says, okay, if you don't affirm people's lifestyles and their sexual choices, then they are more likely to commit suicide. Again, I think we've partly touched on this before. We talked about, you know, how do we treat other people? And does disapproving of certain behavior or lifestyle mean that we're actually endorsing, for example, you know, bashing and violence and sort of unjust treatment and so forth? So part of it is that the other part of it is that there is increased, you know, risk of suicidality among people who identify as LGBT, right? Whether this is due to other people not approving of their lifestyle is, you know, is not clear. Because the reason is that even in countries that are very sort of officially and practically also pro LGBT, very liberal like Sweden and places like this, they've done studies and they find that mental health outcomes of LGBT communities there are not substantially better than they are in places like the United States, where, you know, you have more like conservative people and it's less of a, it's not just like totally, I mean, it is in a lot of places, right? But we're not Sweden. The US is not Sweden, right? In some ways, that's good. Some ways, that's not so good. You know, I mean, Sweden has every place has good and bad in it. But there are there are reports. I mean, there are studies that have been done on this. Of course, if you are part of the kind of LGBT movement, this won't make much sense because everything has to be blamed on kind of social pressure and other people.
If you take the view that that homosexuality itself may be a manifestation of kind of like deeper issues going on, then it makes more sense because there's a lot more going on in people's lives that we've said before. And some of it might be caused from like what they call environmental stress, a non accepting environment. But I think the degree to which that is true is easy to to overstate that. And because studies show that even in very kind of open societies, you still have substantial. And, you know, I think it's even clearer when you come to transgenderism. Because when it comes to transgenderism, the statistics are clear that suicide, the rate of suicidality does not go down at all as a statistical norm after gender transition procedures, be they chemical, surgical or otherwise. Right now, maybe certain individuals will say this saves my life and I'm only not suicidal anymore because I transitioned. Right. But statistically speaking across the board. Right. You know, if it's true for some individuals, it's it's not true for many others. And some people, it gets worse. Yeah. Right. So I think that that that is a used as a tactic, especially in the transgender, like, would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter, you know, like a boy who says, I want to transition and the parents are concerned, don't want it to happen. That is a very, I think, dishonest tactic, especially when it comes to like the transgender issue. Suicidality and other mental health outcomes, you know, less than optimal mental health outcomes are real things in among LGBT populations. But again, I think that we have to have a more comprehensive view of, you know, what are the factors that are causing that, how much of it is external, how much of it is internal. Right. And and to the degree to which some of that is caused by unjust factors, what we would that we would identify as unjust, like you're ostracizing a person. You're turning your brother away at the mosque because he's kind of effeminate.
You have no, you know, he's not pushing anything. You have no like even proof that he's sort of involved in some type of hard on relationship. You're just kind of making assumptions and you're leading to that person's isolation and all of that. Those are things that, yes, we have to address. But does it mean that you have to go all the way to the extent of saying, well, we approve of behaviors which Allah has forbidden? Again, that's not an option because we don't write morality. We're not the authors of it. Modern people don't understand that because they don't they don't sort of accept the notion of an objective morality. Certainly don't accept the notion by and large of a divinely authored morality. Right. Or say morality is underwritten by divine command. But this is not it's not for us to decide what is right. Why don't we know that Allah and his wisdom does not forbid something to people where the forbidding of it in and of itself is leading to suicide? That that's not, you know, that that's that's not what is what what it's about. Right. So I don't know if that really does that. Basically, in a lot, too. Right. Like you're leading to people's suicide by not being completely LGBT affirming. That's not a fair charge. No. Yeah. So so, you know, in a nutshell, we're saying that affirming your choice, whether it's your gender transition or your gender identity or your sexuality, it might not do anything for your mental health outcomes. And it might not have any effect whatsoever on your suicidality. And in fact, like, you know, those sorts of things, actually, it might be a chicken and the egg sort of situation where it might be the just a symptom of what you're going through in and of itself. Right. Like this, this sort of thing that that that you're struggling with, though, that is complex. Right. And I think we should be aware, at least some members of the community, to be aware of all of these different theories and and studies and so forth.
I think theologically speaking, we don't need to take a hard stance on the actual etiology or origins of same sex desires and so forth. I don't think it's very clear to anybody, despite what people all we know is that there is no gay gene. Like, that's very clear that that's been substantiated. But and even, you know, the latest studies, I think this came out in 2018 or 17, where they looked at several hundred peer reviewed studies altogether. And the conclusion was that possibly there's an eight to twenty five percent contribution of genetic factors to a predisposition to. So if you just got a predisposition, doesn't just mean like encoded for OK, but a predisposition to, you know, possibly having a same sex desire that there may be eight to twenty five percent of a genetic contribution to that. That's very low because you're saying eight percent, even twenty five percent. Even if you say there's a twenty five percent genetic contribution, it's a contribution to a predisposition, not to the orientation itself. And that's the highest end of the genetic contribution is twenty five percent. And then where is the other seventy five percent? Yeah. So it's clearly it's coming from environmental factors of some kind. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the person can control those, because a lot of those, you know, according to the most plausible theories, at least that we have today. And of course, science is always changing, which is another reason why we don't bank our theology on it to begin with in this realm or in any other. A lot of those factors seem to be very, very early childhood factors. Right. Which a person is not even aware of their existence yet. By the time a lot of these kind of trends might be set in place in terms of identifying with their gender and so forth. Right. But all I'm saying is that it's a it's a it's a very complicated it's a very complicated if we're talking about the sort of deep set homosexual tendencies or desires or gender dysphoria as opposed to just kind of excessive desire of like of an adult who kind of just went beyond bounds and wants to try something new or something like that.
But we're talking about these kind of hard cases. Right. No matter how disapproving the society is or whatever, even in the Muslim world, you're going to have people who come and they just discover these desires within themselves. It's it's we don't have a very good no one has a very good understanding of exactly kind of what this is a result of. And so we just, I think, need to be open to different views on it and different kind of models and try to keep an open mind and sort of look and see what makes most sense. Of course, we bring our theology to the table. No matter what the answer is, I don't want to say it's completely irrelevant, but it doesn't erase the moral choice. I think that's the thing to be clear about with others is that regardless of whether, yeah, we shouldn't necessarily put all of our eggs in one basket when science is always shifting. But the entire reason that I think, you know, the LGBTQ lobby had gone down that that vector of argumentation in the first place is to excuse a moral choice is to basically erase the moral moment and say, well, this is something that's natural. That is the way I was created, the way I was made, and I can't do anything about it. I think as Muslims that we need to be insistent and very clear and very simple on the fact that, no, there's no getting out of the moral choice, that even if there is some sort of degree to which that this is worse for you than other people, there's some science behind it, there's some genetics behind it. Everybody has, you know, that exists with drug addiction, that exists with alcoholism, that exists with other sins as well, and it doesn't excuse anybody from the moral decision to try to submit. What is the nature of the struggle that Allah gave you and your outcomes in the afterlife are going to be dependent upon? What did you do to struggle against those things and how was your moral fight against the things that you naturally struggle with? I mean, you could even look at like heterosexual. I mean, people have different sex drives.
Some people have very, very strong sex drives. Men, some women also, you know, and some have much weaker ones. Right. But the same rules apply to everybody. So if you're a male with an extremely high sex drive, you still have to be married to have sex. And if you don't, then you're just constantly committing Zina because you just have such a strong sex drive. Well, I understand that that rule might be harder for you to follow them for someone with a more manageable sex drive, but they have it harder than you do somewhere. You know, like I don't know, like everyone has their challenges. Everyone has their their their tests. Right. So the idea is maybe you've been challenged in your sex drive, even heterosexual sex drive. And it might be really I mean, a lot of men have a great deal of trouble, you know, across societies and cultures managing their sex drive. It's difficult. It's very difficult. And that's why Islam is also so clear and practical on the guidance that it provides in this realm. It's not just don't commit Zina, don't even get close to it because you get close to it and it's very easy to fall into it. So that's why we have no khalwa, no touching, modest dress, all of these guardrails to make it, you know, practical for the average everyday person. You know, like decent moral fiber, but not like a moral superhero to actually not fall into Zina, which is our norm as Muslims. Right. If you're not married, the assumption is if you're practicing Muslim that you've not had sex before. And that's, you know, I think would surprise many people in contemporary society. But that's actually true. I mean, I've had many friends who got married in their 30s, late 30s. They all had to have the talk given to them before because they've never been with a woman before. They don't, you know, they need to be told like certain things, you know, that that's just taken for granted. Right. It's very important, but it's a struggle.
Excellent. So let's let's wrap this up on on this sort of going back to, you know, in the beginning, we were talking about sort of how society, modern society kind of devolved in this way that it abandoned morality. Moving forward, kind of forward, how do we recover morality in general or sexual morality? What are our opportunities? What can we do? So I think there's an inward facing and an outward facing. I think we need to make sure our house is in order. I think one of the challenges is that as our youth in the next generation grow up in this culture, this this current paradigm is so strong currently and the discourse is so powerful that many Muslim youth are just they're internalizing this. Like their their fundamental paradigm is sexuality is about choice and about dignity, about affirmation and all of this stuff. And the idea that no sexuality is a, you know, is a central moral domain that is of central concern to the religion. Right. That has rules that govern it, that are absolutely central and non-negotiable and are part and parcel of being a Muslim or not illuminating the door and so forth. Like they're losing that perspective because it's not supported in the culture in which they're growing up. So we need to be very forthright, I think, about speaking much more openly about this, about also not just saying, OK, this is halal and this is haram, because that doesn't work. If the entire paradigm in which it would make sense to people why it's haram is completely desiccated or changed. So I think we need to do two things. One is what you said earlier is the larger picture of Allah and his reality and his legislation and so on and so forth. And Allah knows what's best for us and legislates for our benefit in general and show people how that's true in all of these other domains that they can easily appreciate before you get to the kind of thorny questions of gender and sexuality.
You show them about alcohol, you show them about riba, you show them about whatever. And OK, yes, yes, yes, they concede to all of that. Say, OK, well, in this domain, why would it be any different? OK, and then you start. And then what do you do within that? I think we need to reestablish our sexual paradigm as Muslims. How do we view sexuality? What is it? What is its nature? From the big picture angle, not just individual desire, but family, society, so on and so forth. This world, the next emotional, spiritual, psychological aspects of it, everything that we put together. I think we need to strengthen this by showing people it's easy to do. That these are not OK, if that doesn't convince you yet or if you still need more to kind of help settle this in your mind. Well, let's look at what happens when people leave this divine paradigm. Let's look at some of these studies that are being produced now where people are taking stock of the sexual revolution and it's absolutely devastating. You can't look at the Qur'an anymore and the Sharia and look at all of these statistics and have any doubt anymore as to the wisdom and justice and correctness of Allah's moral paradigm. If that doesn't convince you, then I don't know what will. It's very obvious when you look at it. So we need to, I think, equip our communities with this type of knowledge. I think they often say, you know, the best defense is an offense. We cannot be apologetic. Oh, no, we're not really patriarchal. We're not this. We're not that. And then you try to sort of like eke out a space for Islam within this discourse. No, we reject the sexual revolution by and large. I mean, maybe some aspects of it, we would agree that, yes, this was an excess or whatever. But by and large, we have no truck whatsoever with the basic premises of it. OK, you know, we maintain very strongly our our notion of propriety and decorum and sexual morality. We should be confident in that.
And again, something that we we teach our youth, this is not something that we need to be embarrassed or apologetic about. To the contrary, this is our strongest selling point, so to speak. I mean, I don't like to use that language, but people are devastated and confused. And people are coming to Islam because it provides them clarity and guidance on these issues as well as others. Right. And so we lift our heads high and we're not arrogant, but we call people to the truth and we show it to them. You know, We should never forget this verse, call to the way of your Lord with hikmah, with wisdom and beautiful admonition. And, you know, argue with them, with that which is best. And that means look at this, look at that stats or whatever. So that's within our communities. I think if you show confidence and strength, you will inspire that in youth. If you look like you're beleaguered and hunkering down and, you know, we're a minority in this and that and playing the victim card, which I think is just psychologically a very bad place to be. Right. That's never a winning strategy. It's not a winning strategy. So we need to be, you know, bold. We need to be on our feet. We need to kind of be forthright. We need to be also pushing back against the excesses of this movement, especially when they're trying to just force it on everybody. Right. Our public schools are not places for sexual indoctrination. Go back to the three R's. Right. Reading, writing and arithmetic. OK. I always say, look, the reason why they don't talk about religion in schools and secular, it's not because there's something specific about religion per se. It's because it's so contentious and people have such different opinions on it. OK. And that changes over time, too, because in the 1960s, no one thought that it was a violation of secularism in America to have principals and public schools leading Christian prayers and reading from the Bible. Every morning, no one thought that that, you know, OK, they're not saying you have to be Presbyterian to be the president or whatever.
Right. But a general Christian morality and even Christian prayers and Bible readings in schools totally fine under like secular America. So what counts as you know, but the point is like this hyper sensitivity to, oh, we can't even mention the word God in the classroom. It's because it has become contentious. OK, well, sexuality is also very contentious. Right. And people have deep disagreements on it, sincerely held and with decent reasons. You can't just chalk it all up to bigotry and all of that. OK. And because of that, then also our public schools should be neutral. We're all paying into the system. And just like you wouldn't want the teachers constantly going on about Jesus or about monotheism or atheism or anything, you say religion to the parents in the home. Leave sexuality. I'm not sending my kid to school to be taught about sexuality. Right. It doesn't need to be done there. And I understand because it's become a question of identity, it makes it much more complicated. But we need to, I think, be having these kinds of conversations. And when it comes to the outside, again, our message, I always say this to people. Islam is not our religion. It's the religion of Allah. Muslims are simply those who whom Allah is blessed to recognize that and to adhere to it or try to adhere to it. Other than that, this is a call that is the birthright of every single human being. This is Allah's religion. And, you know, the Qur'an is the banquet. Everybody's invited. All of humanity. OK. Every race, every culture, every creed, everybody's invited. Right. And so we have to have that attitude that this is not a private thing. Right. It is about calling to what is right. Calling to Sabiha Rabbika. Right. And again, taking, I think, the longer view and the more noble view and the principled view, which is people need what we have to offer. Oh, yeah. People need it. You know that, Tom.
I know that I wasn't raised Muslim either. People don't know that because I have a half Arab background. My father is nominal in Islam, but I was not raised Muslim. So I came to Islam also when I was 19, probably around the same time you did. Right. And so we know, right, the difference. And we need to re-cover that, because when I was in Georgetown in the 90s, we had Islam Awareness Week every year. It was always a Dawah table. You were always passing out Dawah pamphlets. We were very forthright about here's Islam and, you know, not that many people converted, but that was our mindset. Now it's become like not Islam Awareness. It's like Muslim Appreciation Week. Yeah. Totally secularized. Big difference. Yeah. We're not celebrating ourselves as a community. That's not what it's about. This is about La ilaha illallah Muhammadun Rasulullah. When you turn it into, OK, we're celebrating Muslim achievements. No, we're not celebrating Muslim achievements. Right. This sister did this and this brother has like as a CEO of whatever. What is this? It's not Islam. It's not Islam. So radical secularization, like we need to regain that spirit. Islam is not a race. Islam is not a and we're not a minority community. I reject this framing altogether. I know we're statistically a minority. So what? That could change anytime. That's not the point. Right. The point is that it's about what we actually believe. It's about a substantive call to truth. It's about a substantive call to a particular moral paradigm. Right. And when we're talking about our rights in American society, too, I think we should be, you know, again, reject the sort of minority identity card. I think it's it's it's a losing paradigm. And particularly in the United States, I'm not a political. I mean, you're a political scientist. So you can tell me if I'm just totally naive here.
I see it is when I am fighting for a right to build a mosque or to wear a hijab or to take the day off for a need or whatever it is. I'm not fighting as a quote unquote minority such that, OK, if you want your rights as a minority, every other minority has that whatever rights they claim. I'm not fighting as a minority. As an American citizen, I've had the right to practice my faith from the very beginning of this country. Even when there are very few Muslims here. Well, there are a lot of slaves. But they said even back then, the Christian, the Jew and the Mohammedan, they said that. OK, so that's, you know, the fact that my faith is minor, like my demographic minority is totally irrelevant. That's irrelevant to the fact that I have a constitutional right to practice my religion. It's in Christians have the right to and they're the majority. It doesn't doesn't matter. Right. Like the Christian baker and all that kid. No, you have the right to operationalize your moral paradigm. I don't care if you're a minority, Muslim or Jew or you're a majority Christian. That's it's not a minority majority issue. This is a right to practice our religion in this country. The ground is fought on principles and not on faith and not on pity. I think that the minoritarian argument is one that relies on the pity of some sort of imagined minority, excuse me, relies on the pity of an imagined majority. And it's just not dignified, first of all. And second of all, yeah, I agree. I don't think it works. I think that you have to argue on the principle of the thing you take. You know, there's some sort of hermeneutics that go on. You have to look at the principles that the society subscribes to and that the majority subscribes to. And you need to appeal to those principles and show them how those principles, when applied to a certain situation, entail certain consequences. And I completely agree. I think that's a wonderful place, actually, to end our discussion that Islam is about Bilal and Tabligh.
It's about trying to to to spread it and reach people. And I definitely I definitely agree that I think that you said it so well, that Islam is the solution and that the further and further we we we go in 2023 and 24 and 25, as the maladies keep adding up and the sicknesses of spirit and mind and body keep adding up, it just becomes more and more clear that Islam is the solution to these these diseases that people face. And we don't profit anything from trying to change Islam to match the sick society that we find ourselves in. Rather, we should keep our status as being the ones who have the position to redeem, the position to contribute and educate and benefit. I think that's a very, very powerful point to end on. And I think the majority of our efforts should be going into doing that, too, and not just, again, trying to sort of constitute ourselves as a beleaguered minority. Right. We need to get back into the business of Dawah, of helping people, of bringing, you know, healing and Shifa to our societies. And when people see that, they say, well, what is it that's motivating you? Again, just people hugging in a mosque is draws people and they become Muslim. I was like, who would have thought? So, well, I hope I get to see you in a mosque someday soon, so I'll get to hug you. Inshallah. Faithful hug until then. And Dr. Sheikh, it's always a pleasure to speak and a wonderful benefit to everybody to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and enlightening us. And I'm sure we'll probably have you back on Sunday before too long. Inshallah. Thank you.
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