How Yaqeen Works to Educate the Public - Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown | Making Principled Progress

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Series Family & Community Education

Lecture

How Yaqeen Works to Educate the Public - Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown | Making Principled Progress

Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown describes how Yaqeen Institute’s publications reach far beyond the scope of academia and help people access more reliable, relevant information about Islam. This talk was held at Yaqeen Institute’s Second Annual Banquet “Making Principled Progress” on November 10th, 2018.

Watch on YouTube

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.

When I first started studying in my graduate school, my PhD, I really actually came to that study as a very skeptical Muslim, a very modernist Muslim.

It wasn't until I started to go to Egypt and study with shuyukh in the Azhar Mosque and other places that I realized that a lot of my arrogance and presuppositions about how Muslims weren't critical thinkers,

and they just memorized things and they hadn't answered the great questions of the modern world, these were just completely mistaken.

It was only through studying with these shuyukh that over years and months and years of just being repeatedly, in effect, humiliated.

I would have some super snarky answer to some question and they would just demonstrate immediately that it wasn't the Islamic tradition that needed to be corrected, it was my own arrogance.

I really learned a lesson and as I went back to graduate school in 10 of my classes, what I started to realize was that what I was learning from traditional Muslim scholars was actually making me a much better scholar of Islamic history from a Western perspective.

I had spent all these years being a Muslim in college and in graduate school and wondering, people are not going to respect me because I'm Muslim, am I not going to get a job because I'm Muslim?

I began to realize that being Muslim was actually a huge asset and that learning from the Islamic tradition wasn't going back into the past of scholarship, it was actually pushing me into the future.

I had a tremendous respect for the Islamic tradition. One of the things I've tried to do as a professor and as an author is to try and make this tradition available to people in the West.

A couple of years ago when Sheikh Omar came and talked to me in my house, first of all I was impressed by how tall he was and the second thing, he said, look, Professor Brown, you write really good stuff, but you're an academic and no one reads what you write.

I was like, okay, true, it's a bitter truth.

He said, well, why don't you come and work with Yaqeen because we have all these super competent tech wizards and people who do search engine optimization and we can actually figure out how to get this material out to the broader public.

I said, this is a terrific idea.

This has really been the first thing that we wanted to do at Yaqeen is to educate the public, educate the public about issues of controversy, issues of ignorance around Islam and Muslims, for both the Muslim and non-Muslim public.

We started by writing things on the kind of topics you can imagine are the first things people ask you about, Hadud, apostasy, honor killings, everything like that, we started to write this material.

I couldn't believe how quickly this material, if you Googled Hadud or honor killings in Islam on your computer, Yaqeen would be like number one, two, or three on the Google results.

I couldn't believe it. I knew it wasn't the quality of my writing.

I had people behind this figuring out how do you actually maximize this, how do you go and compete with all these Islamophobes who have all these thousands of people clicking away and doing whatever to get their articles to the top.

Immediately I saw the results. We're not just interested in educating people, apologetics, oh you think Islam is bad, no Islam is good. We actually want to reclaim the narrative.

We want to change the discussion. Whenever I hear that phrase reclaim the narrative I think about some politician who's just gotten busted for embezzling campaign funds and he's like you've got to reclaim the narrative. That's not what I mean. I don't mean in some trite PR sense.

What I mean is to take, instead of just saying okay well you heard about stoning in Islam or honor killing, well let me explain this to you. We don't just explain this to people.

We also change the narrative into something more constructive. If we're going to talk about Hadud let's talk about criminal justice. What are Islamic theories about criminal justice? How can that help us in the United States?

If we talk about let's say blasphemy or insulting the Prophet Muhammad, let's not just say what is Islam's position on this.

Let's actually have a discussion about how you talk about free speech in a pluralistic society. If you look at our articles they don't just educate people about Islam.

They use the Islamic tradition to push the discussion forward in a larger sense. This is the third thing we try to do. You want to actually contribute to the society.

We're not just Muslims who are defending our tradition. We're trying to make people not hate Islam.

We're trying to use the Islamic tradition to show the society through our writings, through discussions we have, what Muslims and what Islam can offer other people.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the places I've seen our material appearing.

People will contact me who are writing about issues of religion and LGBT and things like that. They'll say, we read your work on this topic.

For them, Yaqeen's material is becoming part of a bigger discussion about rights in a pluralist society, religious rights, minority rights in a pluralist society.

I've been contacted by several professors from Northwestern University, Oxford University, saying, we use your material in our class.

I just got an email from another professor in the University of Edinburgh saying, I'm doing an online course, a MOOC,

a massive online course, and we're using your articles on Sharia issues and we want you to appear in these videos. This is kind of like what I never dreamed of happening is happening.

Instead of Muslims being afraid to be part of a discussion, Muslim contributions on these issues are actually being taken seriously as part of academic discussions.

The last thing I'll say, I was so happy to see this. When someone writes a book, they submit it to a publisher, then the publisher sends it out to peer reviewers,

anonymous scholars in the field who are experts who will look at it and say, should this be published or not?

I was peer reviewing this book on something to do with Sharia law, and there in the footnotes in the bibliography were two Yaqeen papers.

Two Yaqeen papers being cited in an academic book on Sharia issues. This made me so proud and happy, even maybe happier than the Google search results.

I'll just close by saying that Tasneem read my bio. That was my bio for my website, minus the corny jokes part.

But the last thing my bio she didn't read is that I'm a director of research at Yaqeen.

That's the thing that I'm most proud of.

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