Dogma Disrupted
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Political Rights, Activism & the LGBTQ Issue | Episode 6
Should we ally with the Left or the Right? On one hand, the Liberal party has appealed to Muslim rights as a minority group, while the Conservative party aligns with our moral values. Muslim political involvement is a fairly recent trend, and our alliances speak to more than just our personal preferences.
How can we secure our rights in a secular democracy while also pushing back against policies that go against our beliefs, such as the open promotion of LGBTQ ideas in our schools?
Imam Tom Facchine invites Dr. Mobeen Vaid to recount the history of Muslim political involvement and activism, as well as to discuss ways to maneuver the political landscape while staying true to our faith.
Want to listen on the go? Check out Dogma Disrupted on your favorite podcast platform.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. When I saw Muslims suddenly embedding themselves within this political program and tethering themselves to a puritanical political project as something that was wholly definitional to who they were, I said that this is going to be a death knell for many people's Islam. Only now their own theological religious commitments are being subordinate to them. Salaamualaikum, welcome back to Dogma Disrupted and we have a very, very important episode today on the LGBTQ movement, political rights and political alliances and where does the Muslim community stand, where has it stood, and where should it stand. And joining us today we have a very, very special and important guest, Mubeen Vaid, who is in the trenches regularly on these issues and called to stand in and educate, I think, in a variety of formats and forums. You've been talking about these issues for a long time before sort of, I think, a lot of people started joining in. So you've got a really unique, I think, perspective as to these sorts of things and we can, I think, have a conversation reflecting on where has the Muslim community sort of, how have we entered into this moment, where have we sort of been, where are we at right now, and maybe look and explore what are the sort of possibilities going forward. So I'd like you to maybe give some historical or start out by giving some historical reflections on Muslim political involvement. Last episode we had Dr. Sharifah Dobly talk more about the theoretical, the historical, the sexual revolution, these sorts of things. But obviously the rubber meets the road when it comes to political
alliances and things like that. So that's more of what we want to focus on today. What are the things that, if we're to chapter out like a YouTube video of the Muslim, the Muslim political sort of experience within the last 30 or 40 years, what are the chapters, where have we been, what have we done, do we have some lessons that we can learn from that? Sure. Bismillah, alhamdulillah, wa salat wa salam wa rasool Allah. Firstly, jazakallah khair for having me today. I ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to put some benefit in our discussion here today. So in terms of your first question, I think it's a long history, right? There are a number of different variables. In some ways, it probably is in need of a more careful analysis, historically and otherwise. And so what you're going to hear from me is a bit of historical narrative, as well as something that may be a little bit more impressionistic, simply because not all of this is grounded in a careful study of the social sciences and, you know, the historical developments at various points in time. But I'll start with things that I can reflect on more directly in my own life. I'll say that I think for many Muslims, especially around my age and older, their life in America, in the 90s, for instance, was mostly uneventful as a Muslim. We were a poorly understood and generally obscure religious minority. Now, that isn't to say that life was easy as a Muslim at all. In fact, in some ways, it may have been even more difficult. I will say that when I look back, our communities were extremely immature.
We didn't have many of them at all. I remember just the paucity of halal meat markets or restaurants and how difficult it was to find halal meat. Actually, I remember in Northern Virginia, one of the first, I think it was the first halal restaurant that I can recall, it was called Food Factory. And it was in this alleyway and you'd go downstairs and they did kebab and rice and bread, now sort of a common thing that they sell everywhere. But so many Muslims used to go to Food Factory, they would just have a line of people there every night and families waiting to get in. And there was nothing to write home about, decor, aesthetic, just, you know, a ton of Muslims, because this is the one restaurant that serves halal meat. And some of the brothers who actually helped establish the early institutions, at least in the D.C. metro area, became known for their own piety and religiosity. And some of them left behind really, to me, very powerful and profound legacies. I think of the brother Abdul Mateen, who established Halalco, which is a very, very well-known halal meat provider in the area. Growing up, people used to know that place as Mateen's Ops, because it was his store and it was one of the early providers of halal meat. But then in addition to that, as part of his store, he had a side of it where he sold Islamic books. And so all of the Sunday schools and weekend Islamic schools got their books from his store. He also sold things like Ihrams, if people were going for Hajar Umrah, as well as prayer rugs, things that were not easy to find back then. And you really couldn't find it anywhere else unless you traveled overseas. And so he established himself as a really important resource for Muslims in general.
And that was kind of our reality, right? It wasn't easy to find other Muslims. Most Muslim communities, if you went for Salah, right? I remember we had Salah near our home. It wasn't uncommon to go for a prayer and for the Musallah space, which was usually just a reserved space in a building, for it to be locked. Stone is there, or the person who had the key didn't show up, and it would just be three of you praying outside. These types of things were really common. And even your Friday prayers, they weren't readily available. Usually, you know, a handful or some gathering of eclectic sort of immigrant Muslims that came together and heard about it through word of mouth. And that's how those things began to form. I remember when we started the youth group in our masjid, every single youth that would join, every family that would have their kids join the youth group, we would take their name, their address, and their phone number. And whenever we had a youth group program, I would go through the list, and we had, you know, over 100 names. And I would call each person one by one to let them know, hey, this weekend, we're going to be doing a barbecue, here's where it is, this and that, you know, inshallah, please come. We'd call house to house. Every single person to show up, just to make sure that people are coming out, were informed about different things that are going on in the masjid. So it wasn't easy at all to actually put together programs. And it's not, you know, there were some active activities, but nothing like the scene as we know it today, which is very vibrant in different ways. And so 9-11 comes in, sort of the early 2000s. Before 9-11, real quick, do you have any impressions or anecdotes about the political aspect? Were politics, were Muslims just not really caring to get involved? Were they involved, but not sort of, you couldn't pin them down to a party? Or what did that look like at that time?
I think political attitudes were variegated. My impression and what I remember is that the intensity of political interest was subdued. Most people should not follow or care as much about the day to day political activities in this country, especially. When political items came up, either, you know, you're at people's home, or a potluck, or a masjid gathering, or perhaps even in a khutbah, it was typically things that were transpiring in a Muslim country. Right, right. Right. So something happened in Palestine, or in Egypt, or in Pakistan. You might hear about it, and people felt very passionately about those topics. But, you know, the elections that were taking place, you know, Bush versus Bush one, versus Clinton, and these types of elections just didn't inspire the same level of interest among the day to day Muslims. Now, obviously, there was probably a bit of a difference between your average immigrant Muslim versus, you know, the indigenous community, especially African American community that had a deeper history here, and perhaps cared a little bit more about some of those issues. But I think normatively, even as a society, you know, the topics that were being deliberated and debated, weren't similar at all qualitatively, especially when you compare them to sort of the culture war items today, and the constant political catastrophizing of every single point of difference that ends up manifesting itself. I mean, you know, what, you know, one of the biggest items of difference, for instance, with Bush one, and Clinton, is taxation. Right? And even Bush, when he radically, you know, no new taxes, right? That was like a really, really big deal.
That was really a prominent part of his campaign, the first time, right? So, you know, when you think about that, now, it all seems very quaint, in the sense that, like, very few people get impassioned about taxes the same way. Most people get impassioned about the outcome of taxes, or specific policies, and whether this country is, quote unquote, evolving into socialism, or this and that, like those, those suddenly become very high stakes debates. Right? Back then, it was, okay, how much of my paycheck am I going to be able to keep? Right? Like, those are, those are much more sort of ordinary, conventional political disagreements. Now, this, the world has changed a lot since then, sir. So, would you say that in your own experience, like the lack of political engagement, and I'm assuming that it's the same at the local level, say, like school boards and stuff like that, you know, because there's various sorts of motivations, or potential motivations for that lack of involvement. Could we say, do you, was it your impression that it was because there were religious reasons, and they were particularly abstaining? Or was it more about apathy, and just not really a priority? Well, I think, I think there are a couple of things. I think for a lot of people, it was apathy. I mean, for many people today, it still is apathy. Not everyone cares politically that much about what's going on. I mean, it's really interesting to me how closely some people follow politics, and look strangely upon people who don't. I mean, even me, I don't really care that much, you know? I mean, I read stories about, oh, Dianne Feinstein, and she's old, and like, okay, you know, I, I sort of understand why it's politically significant, but it doesn't, it's not something that I think about. Even me knowing about it probably puts me in, like, in a tier of people that follow politics a lot more intently than most people who just don't practice stuff on a day-to-day basis. It's kind of like sports, right? It's like following a sports team, and there's some people that are completely just off the radar, no idea, is it basketball season, or hockey season, or what? And then other people that are following every single game, what's the injury list, what's, you know?
And I understand that people who follow politics closely get very upset at times at this type of attitude, because they'll say, oh, you have, that reflects a particular type of privilege, not to be politically interested, but I think even that attitude sort of mistakes or misunderstands political apathy, but that's, that's sort of a side topic. I do think that a lot of Muslims really struggled with the question of, what are we doing here? And I think they struggled with that question for a few reasons. I think one is that many Muslims who came to this country felt guilty about leaving their families. And I don't blame them at all. I think many of them lived with sort of an abiding guilt about having left a land where their parents were living, where their siblings were, where their friends were. And they came to a place where they had tried to, or perhaps successfully did, establish a life. But they're now establishing a life in a social and cultural setting that is alienating to who they are. And it's not, it's not natural to them. And so they tried to compensate for that, just tension that they felt by sending money back home, trying to repeatedly go back, even here, establishing social spaces that reinforced what was their comfort zone. And so if you were Pakistani, for instance, or Indian or some brand of Desi, you would have these Desi gatherings, that you would go to all the time.
And everything culturally, socially, top to bottom, would be a reminder of something that looked much closer to what might occur back home in terms of like a social event and gather, from the way people dress, to the food, to just everything end to end, right? Like that, that was all something that they were clearly very interested in maintaining. And they cared a lot about their children, having those same values and growing up with them. And some of those values were motivated by religion, some of them motivated by culture. And just, you know, society and social expectations that they came here with. So I think a lot of people struggled with that. They struggled with the idea that maybe I made the wrong decision for my kids. And maybe I, I need to do more to somehow make amends for the decisions I've made in the past. And some of that may entail actually going back or going somewhere else. So I think many people were unsettled with their position in the West and certainly weren't committed to America as a long term product at the time. I think others were just psychologically uncommitted to America as just a general practice, because they viewed their place here as something that was much more instrumental. Right. And here, I'm going to earn some money, and then I'm out, right? I'm sort of using America. But I'm not really American in any meaningful sense of the term. Others had theological reasons. And that's why it was not uncommon in Islamic conferences and programs to hear very active discourse on the question of whether it's permissible for Muslims to live in non-Muslim lands.
I mean, that question would come up, I remember, at times during fundraisers. Like you would have a fundraiser for like Islamic school or something. And during the fundraiser, like that question would suddenly arise out of nowhere. And the person giving the fundraiser would talk about it. And it was always interesting to me because there wasn't, there wasn't this dialogue around it that treated it like it was a ridiculous question. Right. But nevertheless, like that was part of it. So I think you have a number of different reasons for which Muslims weren't really invested in the political sphere, certainly not to the same degree that they are now. And then, as you were about to say, I don't know what happened. Yeah. And so I have my own, you know, personal sort of history with that. I was, you know, fairly young. I was in eighth grade when that happened. And so that was kind of my first exposure to Muslims. And that set off a chain reaction. And Allah's will is, you know, always prevails. And it led me eventually to Islam. But what was going on in the Muslim communities that you were a part of? How did that change all those dynamics that we were just discussing? Yeah, well, it was scary. It was scary for a lot of Muslims. I remember I was in high school when 9-11 happened. I remember we saw it live on TV. And I still remember my calculus teacher pulling me out of class. And she told me, she said, Mubeen, you're really going to need to be careful the next couple of days. Wow.
And so I remember, again, like that was a remarkable event because it was like local television all day the whole day, at least on that Tuesday. I believe it was a Tuesday when it happened, maybe even the next day, Wednesday. And our social studies teacher asked us right then and there, OK, raise your hand if you think that we should bomb Afghanistan. Wow. That was on the day of. Every single hand went up. Every single hand in the classroom went up. And I was like, that was like, I was so up until that point, like, that was really my politicization. Right. Because up until that point, like, you know, I did good, you know, well enough at school to get by. And then, you know, video games and sports and stuff like that. I didn't really care about anything. But it was at that moment when I kind of looked around and was like, oh, my God, it's like this stuff has like really major stakes and pressure and expectations and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, it always, you know, I'm always interested to hear people's sort of stories and their experiences as to how it's playing out in school. We'll get around to it. You look at the pressure that Muslim students are facing now in schools, especially with the sort of complete rollout of the LGBTQ agenda and pressures like that. Similar dynamics, but in a completely different context. But you see how teachers have a lot of power. And I guess I want the I want viewers to really understand this, because, you know, I've seen a couple sort of like, well, what's the big deal? You can just sign your kid out or something like this.
A lot of people and parents do not register the amount of power that teachers have and how petty some teachers are to even sort of inflict or assert their will. I had a homeroom teacher, OK? I was like a big rebel in high school. Like I didn't stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance and stuff like that. The Marines used to come into to run like gym classes once a quarter or whatever. I would never participate like like, you know, getting sort of these sparring matches with with the gym teachers. And we had a teacher in homeroom every single day. He would the entire Pledge of Allegiance would have his fist up in the air. And then he'd say at the end, love it or leave it, love it or leave it. And that was like his his thing. So anyway, like that's that's a whole other thing. But I really want parents to understand. And this is why maybe I connect with youth more than than most people in the Muslim community do, because I really feel like I get those little moments and and the pressures that they feel and how many different subtle avenues of exerting pressure and trying to get people to conform that there are in a in a typical school day. So that was my experience. So so your teacher was looking out for your well-being, which is awesome. What else was going on? Yeah, I mean, I can look back. It's interesting. I still remember the week that 9-11 happened. That week I'd submitted an essay that now is for English class. And I say, for me, it was like a fate of writing essay. And I had written mine as a critique of secularism. Yeah, I was actually quite concerned now about, like, how am I going to be viewed as a teacher? Is it going to, is it going to become something that really results in me holding a bit of a reputation throughout school and all of that? So, you know, there were a lot of fears that hung with Muslims for a long time.
And in the aftermath of 9-11, I was living in Northern Virginia, which is the epicenter of a lot of Muslim activity, Muslim institutions, Muslim organizations, almost all of them were headquartered here. You had a ton of Shia and scholars that had come to the U.S. from different countries around the world. Especially Saudi Arabia. Especially Saudi Arabia. And almost all of them over the next couple of months ended up leaving the country. Some left the country very soon. So you have to realize you're sort of the young person going to the masjid, and now a lot of your imams and teachers are no longer there. Right? The ones who are remaining are extremely cautious and concerned about what's transpiring. They're worried about what activities they're allowed to keep up doing and how they can talk about them. So there's an atmosphere that just feels very stultifying to you as an individual, where you can't really have what seems like an honest dialogue about your faith, or to talk about things that are troubling you without putting yourself out there in potentially uncomfortable ways. In addition to that, you have a lot of parents that are now concerned about their children and their children's religiosity. And they don't want their kids to be religious because suddenly now that religiosity could be a liability for them. So a number of kids who used to come to the masjid are now no longer part of the masjid. Right? So all of these things are happening virtually overnight. And one of the things that I think happened at the American Muslim leadership level, especially with our largest institutions, was sort of collective concern about how can we move forward, given what just happened. And my understanding, based on what I observed, and what ensued afterwards, was that there was a recognition that before 9-11, too many Muslims
had prioritized their psychological allegiance to what was happening around the world, and their ethnic solidarity with their families, their relatives, everything else. Right? And had not sufficiently invested in the American project, that they themselves could even view themselves as American, let alone contribute to something that can help them in moments where they are now suddenly under intense public scrutiny. And so the motif for a lot of organizations at that time suddenly became the establishment of a very strong American Muslim identity. And part of that entailed becoming much more politically active, because suddenly now we saw laws being passed that were disproportionately, if not exclusively, being applied to Muslims. But it also entailed placing a very high place of emphasis on sort of nationalism, patriotism. Many of our conferences started rolling out with the American flags. It became responding in ways that I think were well-intentioned, but sort of communicated a really desperate attempt to acquire the status of model minority. And many young people grew up in that era, exposed to all of that, and lived under that. And I think many of them, they grew up in the shadow of that, and then they reacted to that with a very strong rejection, right? In the years that followed sort of the 2000s. That's my thought. So this is kind of the birth of, quote unquote,
American Islam, right? What the folks sort of criticize in this idea of ... It's always fascinating to me, and you and I both are fans of history, how things can swing from one extreme to the other, right? Almost to make up for a deficit. And again, we're talking probably exclusively about the immigrant Muslim community as opposed to the indigenous one. But there's also something to be said for, I wonder, why was there an asymmetry of major Muslim institutions that were headed maybe by immigrant Muslims as opposed to indigenous Muslims? Is that a factor? Maybe what have the reaction been different had there been more parity or more collaboration? That's an interesting thing to explore. I want to hear what you have to say about that. But just noting how swinging from one extreme to the other, if before the concern was, quote unquote, back home, right? We're always thinking about back home, either financially you're assisting back home or politically you're invested back home. And America is just like this thing, and this is well known within the Muslim community, or at least again, the immigrant Muslim community about people building up castles, right? And getting ready to kind of move back, and the move back never kind of happens once you have kids and they're Americanized and all that sort of stuff. This is kind of the opposite extreme. Now you have people trying to fit in, trying to assimilate, trying to go under the radar, trying to find out of all of the Americana things, what can we possibly adopt either with a view towards that doesn't contradict our faith explicitly, or even potentially compromising normative elements of the dean for the sake of fitting in? Yeah. So I think that project was sort of a social project where there was an active attempt to rearticulate how we sort of spoke about ourselves as a community. I think there were cultural elements as well, right? It was how we began to dress, how we began to think and interact and programs and everything else that we were doing. But I think there was
also a very important theological element of it, which is that we actually need to go back, reevaluate our faith under the lights of contemporary Western context and reexamine what in fact is appropriate for this moment and what is it. And so suddenly it began to snowball into something that was much more thorough going than its original intent, which presented challenges and opportunities. I think in terms of the immigrant indigenous divide, this is something that Dr. Sherman Jackson has written a fair deal about. I think for a lot of young sort of suburban Muslims, my own impression of it is that there is a, for lack of a better term, almost a romanticizing of the black American Muslim community, as if to say that all of our problems would have been avoided if we just handed over the keys to them. None of these issues would have actually presented themselves. And I think that's not the case at all. I think certainly, I think one of the major areas where people look at this, they said, well, Muslims voted for George Bush, Dick Cheney, instead of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. And that the black American Muslim community was more liberal, the American Muslim community, the immigrant community was more conservative. And so the immigrant community drove the political sort of discourse for a lot of Muslims in a very contested and tight election and may have swung the boat towards a conservative. And we suffered in the aftermath of that. And I think that there's a lot of revisionist history going on there. One, because there are plenty of, to me, eminently rational reasons to have opposed Joseph Lieberman and to be concerned about him above and beyond him being Jewish. I think there was a sort of superficial sense that, oh, they just, you know, these unsophisticated immigrant Muslims saw a
Jewish man and they said they didn't want to be in power. Instead of recognizing that, no, his political platform was itself quite caustic. And in fact, in the aftermath of 9-11, he became one of the worst sort of hawks and a complete neocon, right? And so I don't think he was a reliable ally. It also, I think that discourse presupposes that the Democratic Party and what it became after 9-11 would have become the exact same thing had it been in a position of power. Right. Instead of having became what it became as a result of responding to power. Yeah, that's a good point. And that dynamic, I think, is one that is taken for granted too often because for whatever reason they believe that it's sort of an essential part of the liberal political ethos to have taken those specific positions. Instead of looking at them saying, no, what they're doing is creating counter-political activities to contest their partisan antagonists in really contingent moments, as opposed to something that's like essential to Democrats. Like Democrats have and can easily become militaristic and they can dismiss civil liberties. I mean, we're seeing it. I mean, they were and they are, right? I mean, there was no meaningful opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan. There was a tiny bit of a blip of opposition to invading Iraq and so on and so forth. If you're actually going to go back over the last several decades and look for a truly bipartisan moment, I mean, the bipartisan moment par excellence is probably the response to 9-11, which is, yeah, again, there was no winner, I guess, or there was no sort of easily fixable, oh, if only we had done that. I mean, even Obama, he's the first presidential candidate from the Democratic Party that was able to run
without having the blemish of Iraq's color. Well, candidacy post-Iraq war, but that's also because he was such a junior member, right? You can imagine that if he had more years under his belt by that point, probably would have voted the same way. It's not as if he was this radical contrarian within the party. And so, I just think a lot of times people advance notions that I think can be a bit simplistic about what inspired. Definitely. So, do you have any other further comments about sort of, okay, there's the Bush era, okay, there's like the eight years, and then we have sort of the, what are the moves that the Muslim community are kind of making, the alliances they're kind of making, and then setting that up for the Obama era? Obviously, a big sort of discursive shift, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of reality, huge disappointment, not as much of a shift as people had thought. Well, I think one of the important shifts that we saw under Bush was the establishment of a very vibrant liberal cultural project, like politically liberal cultural project. And I think it's really symbolized and embodied by The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, which became immensely influential. And I think for many people, it was almost cathartic to watch The Daily Show nightly, and to listen and watch Jon Stewart, interesting interviews for him to speak critically about the political establishment without constantly having his patriotism called into question. To see someone who was willing to be politically disagreeable on just the secret artifacts of Western patriotic nationalistic society in a way that felt that it wasn't acceptable, that many people felt had been
deemed unacceptable otherwise. And so, a lot of people grew fond of both The Daily Show, the culture it established, and the larger sort of liberal political project that was part and tied to that. Now, I think one of the, there were many adverse consequences of that. One is that that project was extremely liberal socially, such that their moral framework was virtually non-existent. And they set the steps, or they sort of set the stage for what ultimately became Klobuchar and gay marriage and all of that. And so, they did a lot to advance that cause. But in addition to that, there was also an attenuating of the importance of theology and religion. And that to me was a very important negative contribution of that discourse, was that they frequently made light of the sacred and the faith. And they would parody faith as a way of trying to diffuse public attention. The idea being that we'll have less conflict when we have nothing left to fight over or fight for. And so, all of these faiths are great because they can all be made fun of, because they all have ridiculous things in it, because they're all in various ways absurd, but they're all in various ways fulfilling to individuals when practiced in the correct way. And the correct way being something that is intensely private while in public society, you're just trying to be a good person. And what a good person means is you're sort of being a citizen who subscribes to the verities of the moment. And so, I always felt that that was a huge, huge contribution of his. And then, you also had what spawned after 9-11 was the new atheist movement, which was extremely aggressive for a time, certainly presented a range of challenges
that we had never seen before in terms of the rise in atheism. And it's often surreal to me how quickly it ascended and then how quickly it fell. Just to point out a contrast for the listener, you're contrasting these developments in liberal social force compared to, say, the Clinton years of the 90s, right? It's like third-way Democrats were like nothing really special on the social sort of front, very, very overlapping with Republicans. A couple issues like abortion and things like that. But for the most part, nothing really to write home about. But the particular nature of the liberals sort of this generating wave, which we'll talk about Obama in a second, sort of ushering in this new ... Not just ushering in an adversarial politician, but really an entire cultural movement and one that sweeps up Muslim youth in the tide, so to speak. Sure. Yeah. Well, I think by that point, many Muslims had become infatuated with liberal politics. They felt at home with liberals. They felt like liberal pundits spoke to them. They felt like liberal politics was really the only place that they could find anyone that would even tolerate them and accept them. And so we saw this with the John Kerry vote, which was the first one where overwhelmingly Muslims supported him. And then all the subsequent elections where disproportionately Muslims were supporting the Democratic candidate, almost exclusively. I mean, the numbers were very, very high as a voting bloc. And that maintained under Obama. And now only recently has it been dented and does it seem to be distributing a little bit more over the last few years. So how do we understand Obama in the Obama years? Because Obama was much more,
if you compare Obama to Kerry, right, for example, I mean, Obama was a larger than life figure. He represented something much, much more than just another sort of old stuffy politician who's going to maybe different a few things like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, I think Kerry was sort of this old stuffy, uneventful politician. He really didn't motivate people a lot, which is partly why he lost. And it's difficult to take out an incumbent, right? Incumbents always have a leg up. So that's always a tough task. Nevertheless, you know, Obama ran on a transcendental platform. And it drew on a lot of very strong themes, including moral themes, right? To vote for Obama wasn't simply to cast a ballot for the better of, you know, the better alternative out of two political candidates, but it was almost to register your voice in the annals of American history. And it was to contribute, you were contributing to the civilizational progress of the West in untold ways by voting for Obama. I remember the night Obama got elected, I was in DC and people were out in the streets yelling, cars honking. It was, I had never seen that before in an election. And there was, there was just such, the mood was so uplifting. In fact, I remember, I think even Muslim Matters and others, they publish articles and popular Muslim outlets that were publishing articles about, you know, Obama winning the election, right? And how it should be a cause of hope, but also, you know, maybe a cause of some caution, like cautiously optimistic should be the stance that we take. And so many, many Muslims were very optimistic about the promise of a Barack Obama presidency. And so then we know the reality was somewhat different from that. So maybe we can talk about the expectations that maybe the Muslim community
had going into the Obama years and how they were unfulfilled and kind of where that left us, kind of culturally and intellectually. Yeah, well, I don't think, I think some people weren't fulfilled. I think for other people, they were very fulfilled. And what Obama does is that he consolidates a lot of the Muslim support in the left. And what happens to Muslims as part of that consolidation is that some of them become solidly Democrat in a way that becomes far more ideological. Yes. And I think Obama becomes, for reasons that don't have, that are not solely his, right? So I'm not saying it's solely his responsibility or fault, but I think when you have a political discourse that draws so heavily on the transcendental nature of a single person, single individual candidate, especially in a partisan political environment, right? Such as ours, where you don't have any thicker, unifying, normative commitments. You really pave the way or beg for what will only be a greater atmosphere of contention. And so you get this ongoing and ever increasing atmosphere of political contempt between the two political parties where everything suddenly becomes confrontational, right? And it's almost the goal of one political party against the other to obstruct and to be belligerent. And that's, it's not normal sort of political horse trading, but something that even in the public eye appears to be a lot more visceral, much, much more visceral. And so, you know, when you're dealing with politics in a moment of political purity in that manner, suddenly your own commitment gets colored by all of that. And that's where my own concerns really started stemming from,
is when I saw Muslims suddenly embedding themselves within this political program and tethering themselves to a puritanical political project as something that was wholly definitional to who they were. I said that this is going to be a death knell for many people's Islam, right? Suddenly now their own theological religious commitments are being subordinate to the politics of the moment. And so the first article I wrote on this was in 2014. And that, by that point, I thought it was very late. And it was a tentative article. It came out in 2008. That's into a second term. Absolutely. And it was a tentative article and it wasn't very aggressive. And it was, I think it was entitled something like, should Muslims reconsider the liberal alliance? Should American Muslims reconsider the liberal alliance? And the whole thought process behind the article is, hey, a lot of American Muslims allied themselves with liberal politics, had problems with liberal politics. And I tried to make very clear that I'm not calling for right-wing coalitions or right-wing politics. I am calling for Muslims to take a bit of a step back and look in the mirror. There were some positive responses to that. There were many negative responses, frankly. Plenty of Muslims said, oh, this is politically naive. This is uninformed. You're not going to have any political voice. And by that point, many people were just psychologically connected to the Democratic Party in ways that were just so unhealthy that anything that called that into question was going to be rejected and viewed as inappropriate and stuff like that. And so responses were varied. But following that, I started authoring just more and more articles kind of focused around that general notion. And so I wrote an article from Muslim Matters on the idea of being prophetic. What does it mean to be prophetic? And it was just an article about the prophesied Sunnah and Sunnah. And the reason behind that is because I was looking at how often
the term prophetic was being employed as part of liberal justice and social activism projects. Cornel West made promiscuous use, liberal use of the term prophetic and prophetic actors. And I was very concerned that his prophetology was one that had no relationship to our own. What it would do is diminish the notion of prophethood to something that is like someone being courageous in a very partisan political vein or capacity as opposed to prophethood being defined against sort of revelation and the significance of what that entails. But that's immensely consequential for Muslims. And so I started writing articles with hope that it would provide people greater discernment, particularly around the discourses that were emerging and gaining greater and greater fashion within the American Muslim community in hopes that they would sort of try to rein things in and peel things back a little bit. But from that point, it was just one article after another. Yeah. So I mean, that's really significant. And we've had conversations and we're part of conversations that highlights the importance of intervening on the level of language because language is really where a lot of these battles are fought. So exactly, just to tease out the consequences of what you're saying or that first article or first couple of articles that you wrote, if prophetology is simply somebody, an underdog figure, somebody going against the grain of society, then what's to stop somebody from saying that
this queer person or this trans person is acting prophetically because they're trying to upend society or standards that society is holding? You leave yourself on extremely weak ground to tie, and this is really the difference between sort of the gravity, right, or the anchor that Islam and revelation provides to people who are practicing versus the sort of unmoored and untethered morality of those even who understand themselves as Muslims but are modernist in their sort of orientation where they're, you know, looking to update these sorts of things. And, you know, you and I have both dealt with people, you know, in these times trying to use these terms such as justice, such as mercy, such as compassion, and really empty them of all traditional meaning as defined by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and the Prophet ﷺ and stuff them full of contemporary meanings that are actually completely opposed to our deen. So that's extremely significant and subtle, and most people wouldn't have the subtlety to intervene at that level. Could you give us a sense of what were the other sorts of buttons that you tried to push or the avenues that you tried to push back against? And I also want people to keep in mind that this isn't just about language games, you know, it's also about, you know, Obama was responsible for CVE, right, drone strikes, right? So, you know, you're writing in 2014, 2015, a lot of this stuff is already well underway. And what we're getting is we're getting the psychological wages, right, of being the, you know, pat on the head, decent minority. But in a very real sense, we are being undermined and targeted and surveilled and sort of spied against. I would like to pick your brain, whenever you see it fit to talk about what were the moves that the government was making at the time to try to control and steer the Muslim community?
Yeah, no, that's, those are all really good questions. Before I get there, you know, there's a wonderful passage in, I think it's Alice in the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's work, where Alice runs into Humpty Dumpty, you know, and he's this egg. And I look it up, but, you know, Humpty Dumpty gets into this exchange with Alice, where he says, when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. And then Alice says, in response, the question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things. And then Humpty Dumpty responds saying the question is, which is to be master, that's all, right. And it's a really wonderful, very simple exchange. But to me, it captures so much of just the stakes of language in the way that, that, you know, language can be manipulated, weaponized, and then deployed against different actors. In fact, Allah tells us about this in the Quran, about how there are people who wish ill. And when they're told, لا تفسدوا في الأرض, don't spread corruption on the earth. How do they respond? They say, إنما نحن مصطحون. No, we're just trying to rectify society. We're working for the betterment of our people. And so they're in fact, playing games with language. And they're misconstruing what they're doing. And they're manipulating public thought in this way. Yeah, absolutely. And so there's that. And then I think your other question was about what sort of the additional items that I wrote about, right? Yeah. What are the other sort of buttons that you're pushing to kind of try to bring this in and maybe sort of ring the alarm bells for the Muslim community?
Aside from on the ground activism, I mean, for me, I tried to focus a lot on just producing articles and writing, and it was selective intervening, depending on different situations and circumstances, and trying to make sure that we could bring those circumstances into dialogue with our tradition in a way that reminded people what was important. So, for instance, there was the very tragic event of the young boy, Eliad Hamouhou, who was in Syria, and his body had, I think, had shown up on the shore. And that picture really made rounds and is very heart-wrenching. And I remember much of the dialogue following that was this overwhelming sense of despair, overwhelming sense of despair. And so I wrote an article for Muslim Matters at the time on, you know, what do we know in our tradition about the death of children, right? Because the idea is that these are the moments that we need to remind ourselves that, you know, even though this is a tragic situation in this world, we shouldn't have our entire worldview be colored by this notion of despair, especially given how much we know about the death of children. Right. And that is actually the greatest triumph that one could possibly have managed to obtain.
But it was to remind Muslims that, like, we're just not sort of base materialists. Like, that's not our view of the world. And we shouldn't allow ourselves to succumb to that type of attitude simply because the public narrative is one that's anchored in the sort of secular materialism, right? Like, that becomes a problem for us, right? So I started authoring articles like that. It was sort of situationally specific. I tried to provide specific, you know, commentary on specific things. And then over time, it got a bit more academically focused. And so the first one that I wrote there was about the study of Qur'an, where I did a review of the study of Qur'an. And there were a couple of items which I thought were really important for Muslims to understand, especially some of the problems in the work tied to the way it framed the question of salvation, which obviously was the most significant, but also some other issues that it had. And then after that came the Scott Kugel article, which I think was back in 2016. And since then, it's been a steady stream of articles tied to LGBT in various angles. I never saw that coming. I didn't know that this would sort of become my issue. It just ended up sort of falling out that way. Before we get, because the Scott Kugel article is going to be really instrumental, I think, to carrying this conversation forth to where we're eventually going with it. But can you give some voice for a second to what were the moves that the government was making when it comes to steering the Muslim community?
We've already talked about sort of the ways in which maybe some sectors of the Muslim community was falling prey to a certain optics and certain sort of, you know, the cultural liberalism that was taking place and being pushed. And, you know, what are the various sort of psychological reasons why that might have been happening? But also, there was a very deliberate attempt to be steering us and to be sort of inculcating certain dispositions and views and beliefs. So, you know, I know you know quite a lot about that. Yeah. No, actually, there are a number of good works that have been written on this. Andrew Shryock has Islamophobia, Islamophilia, where he's written a lot about sort of different attitudes, both politically and otherwise towards Muslims and the political natures of them. I think it's interesting because, you know, in the Bush administration, you had an attempt to not explicitly demonize Islam. But because of the political moment and just everything else surrounding his administration, including the sort of underlying evangelical commitments, as well as the very open hostility that came out of the warmongering of the neocons and the elevation of them into various positions of political authority, the relationship with Muslims was one that was always a bit tentative and tenuous. Right. And so you'd have different things where Bush would maybe come to, you know, some sort of program with Muslims or do an iftar or something like that. But those weren't things that were necessarily looked at as major celebrations between the Muslim community and the government. Under the Obama administration, the relationship changed considerably, partly because his administration was much more adept when it came to their understanding of Islam, but also because they were actually leveraging that understanding.
To try to make active inroads into the Muslim community and shape and form, you know, American Muslim activity in various ways. And so we do get the emergence of countering violent extremism in the CBE program, which I wrote about and others wrote about. Actually, Ahmad Sheikh did a lot of really important articles on countering violent extremism and CBE programming for Muslim others, actually, as well as other places. But he was a really important voice to draw attention to that. But it's also international efforts, whether it's through NGOs, the way in which cultural products suddenly started representing a very particular image of what a good Muslim was like. It was the celebration of a specific subset of Muslim voices. So someone like Reza Aslan becomes a really authoritative Muslim scholar, quote unquote, talking about what it means to be Muslim and responding to really difficult Muslim issues. And now you have a different type of challenge, because you're not just dealing with hard power, you're dealing with a fair amount of soft power. And you're dealing with Muslims who've been convinced about the truth value of what these various things are asserting or conveying explicitly or implicitly. And those people need to now be engaged with at a level that we perhaps weren't accustomed to up till then, because, you know, it's the old adage of hearts and minds, right? Like now, now you're trying to recapture something because what those people did was provide a story, provide a narrative, provide a way of living for Muslims that reduced a lot of the prior tension Muslims had. And it's difficult. I mean, how long can you live? How long can you subsist under the weight of feeling like you're just always this sort of fifth column or something, that you're always different, that you're always an outsider to public society?
What they did was they provided a bridge. They provided a bridge. And for a lot of Muslims, that bridge was extremely attractive, because, frankly, for a lot of people in my generation now who got older, and even people younger than me now, they grew up and they didn't have any of the psychological allegiances that their parents have to overseas. They don't feel foreign to the society at all. Their religious commitment is in many ways, variously speaking, negotiable. Many of them raised their own children not to stand out, right? They, in fact, looked back at their childhood and the things that their parents did. And they look back at that with a fair level of disappointment or regret that I had a strange sounding name or that my parents took me to all these immigrant activities or whatever, right? Like that they didn't allow me to just be another person in school. So many, many Muslim parents now are giving their children names that are sort of passable. They don't stand out as Muslim. There's this whole effort underway. And suddenly now you have a lot of Muslims that are extremely assimilated into public society. Their best friends are not Muslim. They hang out with non-Muslims. The Muslims that resonate with them are these public actors. And then you have a political project that's underway to really formalize that as a proper instantiation of Islam that perhaps has the greatest authority in the public eye and the greatest visibility in the public eye. And that suddenly became a really acute threat to all of us. That's a very, very scary thing. One thing that I think we've come, again, I don't want to delay getting into the Scott Kugel article too long, but how do you reckon with where we've come now and the tendency to, I want to say it's undermined a lot of authority, right?
And so there's almost like a nagging fear that lots of Muslims that are conscientious and practicing and proud Muslims might have that particular leaders or particular speakers or institutions or whatnot might be in the pocket of the government or might be sort of mimicking or parroting these sorts of things or might have strings attached and this sort of thing. How do we stay balanced between sort of being awake and being observant and not letting ourselves sort of succumb to those forces and changing Islam and changing us from the inside, but also not giving way to maybe paranoia that now everybody's kind of tainted. We can't trust any sort of big organization or we're sort of always fearful. You have any thoughts about that? Yeah. So a couple of years ago, I wrote an article for my blog. It was called A Crisis of Trust. And I just reviewed statistics, frankly, on different aspects of modern life in America and how much trust has been lost. Whether it's the media, politicians, medical professionals, teachers, universities, you go down the line. Corporations. Right. There are so many institutions that have lost their credibility and religion is not immune from that. Most people do not look at religious institutions as presumptively credible institutions. And so when you live in a climate where people are so distrustful of institutions and institutional authority, you have to adjust and reckon with the fact that you can't rely on an appeal to authority that may be much easier in a different social or cultural setting.
And I think sometimes Muslim scholars and du'at and others struggle with that. Because in other contexts, all you have to do is assert your own authority. You talk about your own knowledge. And you'll see these frustrations play out on social media sometimes. Say, oh, these people don't even know Arabic and they don't know this. But a lot of times it's missing the point. These people aren't suggesting that they're scholars themselves. What they're doing is they're questioning, they don't trust your credibility. And they don't trust your credibility, not because they think you don't know Arabic, because they think you haven't studied. But for various other reasons, they don't trust the credibility of these individuals. And now sometimes that lack of trust is rooted in a poor hermeneutic. You have hermeneutics of suspicion, which can make it extremely difficult to build anything approaching a useful relationship with people. In fact, the Prophet, peace be upon him, he talked about what happens when the amanah is lost. As being from the signs of the end of time, when trust has been lost in society. Like being able to have some meaningful, notionable notion of trust among human beings is one of the most important things that we have. In fact, Allah speaks about this religion as an amanah. In this verse in Surah Al-Ahzab, Allah says that He presented the amanah, this trust, to the heavens and the earth and the mountains. And they refused to bear the burden of it, but mankind took it. A lot of the mufassireen, the exegetes of the Quran, they said that amanah is the religion and everything that it entails.
And so the notion of trust is really essential and fundamental to our faith. And when you unravel that trust, either deliberately or effectively, you create a climate in which people cannot really adhere to faith, seriously. So I think we have to be sensitive to the fact that I think people have good reason to distrust a lot of institutions. I myself distrust most of those same institutions that I've listed. I don't walk in there sort of naively believing every last person who asserts anything. In fact, all these institutions give us ample reason to distrust them. I think what helps us as Muslims, or what can help us, if we're simply willing to be honest and credible with our community, which means that we are able to demonstrate our ability to rise above the fray. And that means absorbing and taking hits on occasion. That's going to happen. But at some point, you just have to stop caring. You just have to stop caring. Not everybody is going to love you. That's going to happen. The Prophet ﷺ, not everybody loved him. Not everybody loved him, not everybody accepted the message of him. That's the case for every single prophet that ever came. I don't think you should expect that you're going to have universal acceptance. I think that's a tall order for anybody. I think people who want sort of like as broad acceptance as they can, I think the easiest way to do that is probably just to kind of stay local and do activities with a smaller group of people. But if you want to try to appeal to a larger constituent set, you're going to rape or rub people the wrong way on occasion. I'm sure I have. I mean, I don't discount that at all. And I don't know that I even do it especially well. I've given talks where at the end of the talks, people just yell at me. That happened multiple times recently.
Yeah, multiple times. But I'm okay with that. I sleep fine at night. I ask myself, okay, are these people saying anything that I need to consider? Are there good points in this, even if it's being delivered poorly? Because what I try to do is evaluate the substance of what it is exactly that they're saying. And I reflect on myself because I realize I'm not perfect. Inshallah, you know, perhaps there's some benefit I can get even from a very bitter message that I might not like in the moment. So I think to your question overall, I don't think there's that sort of perfect process. But I think that, you know, if we just kind of focus on trying to do right in front of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and like demonstrating the fact that that in fact is our greatest priority, that that is our greatest concern. I think people will be more responsive to that than they would if they feel like we are trying to game them. Right? And I think people have become extremely sensitive to the idea. That they are being gamed by other people, because it's just everybody, you just look around and just feels like everybody is trying to manipulate you. Right? Right. Subhanallah. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a lot to think about. And we're probably going to circle back to talk about that again, once we go down the path of sort of talking about your article when it came to Scott Kugel and sort of how you got involved in this being one of the first responders or early responders, perhaps we can say, to the LGBTQ movement and agenda and ringing the alarm bells. And then we have to talk about who heeded those alarm bells and who didn't, you know, sort of why, what were the justifications? Were they, were they, you know, merited justifications? And then maybe perhaps eventually get back to was there a loss of trust with with some institutions in the fallout of sort of where
we've gone since then? And how can that be regained? But take us back to, okay, so you wrote this article, what is, who is Scott Kugel? What's his whole thing? And why did you feel, why did you feel required to respond? You know, I wasn't even sure that I should respond when I did. I really wasn't sure of it. When I wrote it, I really wasn't sure that it was going to be a useful contribution. Because you always have to weigh, am I drawing more attention to something than is truth? How many Muslims know Scott Kugel really is? How many people have encountered his fall, such that I need to publish a public rebuttal to some of his core arguments? And that's something that I really wasn't sure of, and I had to wrestle with for some time. But to me, my concern was, you know, a couple of things. You had Obergefell, so you have passage of gay marriage. You have more and more Muslims who, in the aftermath of that, responded to it with a tremendous amount of, I'll just say, public adulation, right? And I think there's a difference there, right? I don't think, I don't think, I think it's very tough to say, well, they're just doing this in a political capacity. If you're going to say things like, you're going to make a broader metaphysical claim about how this is such an immense sign of human progress, or social and cultural civilization, I don't think you can talk like that and still believe that there's something sort of fundamentally immoral at the heart of homosexual relationships and the behavior that attends them. I just don't think one can do that. And so that concern to me was already there. And I really felt like just trying to read the tea leaves that this problem was going to worsen. It was going to worsen because the planks that held together social morality in Western society had slowly begun to erode. And Daryl Paul writes about
this a lot, the idea that heterosexual marriage existed within a particular plausibility structure. And the plausibility structure that gave sense to heterosexual relationships, to marriage and the family, had long since ceased to be viable. They were no longer viable parts of the American cultural tapestry anymore. Because by this point, you have a weakened notion of marriage, you have easy divorce, you have so much promiscuity and nudity and everything else that has proliferated throughout your society at arguably unprecedented levels, especially with the introduction of technology and the damage that does with the internet. And so it seems like a very arbitrary line drawing activity when you say, well, you're getting married, right? And to me it was, okay, well, there's an issue here. One, because you have direct, direct contradiction between this and revelation in a way that is so unambiguous and explicit that there really is no room for negotiation. There is no space to me where a Muslim can look at an issue like this and say, well, I just think differently about it. Whereas I think on a host of other issues, Muslims can have prudential differences on what might be advisable policy. Certainly this isn't one of those issues. And then beyond that, it was the way in which this was not a limited political project. In fact, even if you look at the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, the language it used was intensely moralistic for the court. The Supreme Court opinion was so moralistic, was so transcendental. It made such grand metaphysical claims about society. And then President Obama's comments in the aftermath of that really set the stage for where
even just looking at it as an outsider, he said, it's not going to be long before any disagreement is essentially bigotry. And there was just no doubt in my mind that this was really going to grow. Now, did I see transgenderism of that becoming what it is and drag queen story hours and all that? No. But I certainly saw that this was going to ascend in the coming years. And so my goal was to really write something that I think consolidated some of the core arguments or brought together and synthesize some of the core arguments that Muslim reformists were trafficking on the issue of homosexuality and behaviors. And what I thought were the most important arguments, to me at least, were arguments of the Quran. Because I think in general, a lot of Muslims are more confused about the Sunnah. I think some of the other ancillary arguments when it comes to things like usul al-fiqh and things like that are just those specialist domains. And I think Muslims of all stripes will not debate the idea that the Quran is an authoritative text that is just an essential part of what it means to be a Muslim. So if I was simply able to convey to them that the plain unambiguous message of the Quran is so unequivocal on this issue that it provides us no room for alternative interpretation without engaging in a huge act of bad faith such that I'm going to deliberately mistranslate text, I'm going to deny any number of things, and I'm going to present a very skewed and distorted picture of what Islam has ever said or what scholars have ever said on any number of issues to try to advance this revisionism, I thought it would be important to just shed light on that. Definitely. So let's run through those arguments real quick. What were the main arguments that folks like Kugel and other reformists were making,
and how did you hit back and respond to those? So my feeling in hindsight is that they took arguments that were made against the Bible. Oh, 100%. Because I read it. Yeah. I mean, I did a lot of reading at the time. For example, I'll just jump the gun, and one of the bigger ones is that there's nothing specifically mentioning the homosexual relations part, which is true of the Bible, but patently false of the Quran, like you come to men with shahwa, you know, the literal account in the Quran at several places, right? Instead of women, right? So that's the one I'm most familiar with. Yeah, of course. No, I think the notion of coercion and rape, I think a lot of these things had been established as Christian revisionism that was being applied to Islam. And to your point, I've spoken with some, you know, Christian theologians and scholars that are very firm on this issue. And some of them at least have suggested that, yeah, there are ways to read the Bible that, you know, now they don't see those as legitimate ways to see the Bible. But they nevertheless say, hey, look, some of this reinterpretation takes advantage of certain, let's just say vacuums or absences in the biblical text, because it's made itself available in certain ways, especially for people that may have bad intentions. And that's very different from the Quran where that room simply isn't there, right? Like that space has never been provided. And so it was really examining those specific things. And there was a story that specifically Scott Kugel did, which is the Quran itself never did this. But then there's this sort of inappropriate interpolation that exegetes perform against the Quran, where suddenly they ossify a very particular understanding based on their own heteronormativity. No, that's the modern of homophobia.
Internalized cultural homophobia, such that that becomes the meaning of those verses, the meaning of that story, whereas it never was to sort of the early community. And people need to understand that that is the modernist playbook when it comes to anything, when it comes to feminist interpretations of the Quran. Recently, I was scouring the works of Amina Wadood and others like her. It's literally the same move time and time again, over and over and over, is that their interpretation is historically determined, yet my interpretation is not historically determined. The things that the Quran really stands for are progressive values such as justice, compassion, mercy, et cetera. And we're going to pay no attention to the substance of how Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala defines those things in the Quran or how the Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam, defined those things in the Sunnah. But rather, we're going to gut those values of any anchor in the revelation and fill them with contemporary, modern, liberal values of what they mean today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, now, I think one of the interesting things that's happened is that in some ways, the Scott Kugel Project is a bit, it's almost, I don't want to say an anachronism, but maybe atavistic in this day and age, because you needed theological revisionism when scripture still held a great deal of authority. Sure. Sure, sure, sure. The terrain has moved since then, you're saying, such that people would not even, unfortunately, they would not even think to have to tie their argument to a theological anchor such as the Quran. So his entire positioning is presupposing a level of religiosity that no longer perhaps exists. Certainly in Christianity, certainly in Christianity, right? Like there isn't that, so just assumed authority that the average Christian gives to the Bible. In fact,
I mean, I've met and I've been privy to Christians who are priests of various denominations that will openly speak in ways that strike me as rather disparaging about the Bible, right? Oh, we all know the Old Testament has a bunch of crazy stuff in it. Things that I just say, wow, these people will talk about scripture, scripture this way. Like it's astonishing and stunning for me to hear them speak about their own holy texts in ways that seem almost dismissive, right? And so, you know, for them, now the terrain has transitioned into something that's much more social and culturally focused, which is now arguments that are rooted in justice or equality, where the notion of being a good human being, like they don't really need that. In fact, I still remember during the last presidential campaign, during the nomination process, the Democratic nomination process, there was an LGBT town hall that was held and Elizabeth Warren was asked a question about whether she has ever struggled to reconcile the Bible and her Christianity with her support of the LGBT community. And she responded to that as if, almost incredulously, as if the question itself was almost absurd. And she said, why would I have trouble reconciling my beliefs as a Christian with the demand or duty to be a good person and caring for all human beings? And it was quite clear that to her, this entire project is one of simply being good to other people. That's all she's interested in, is just being a good person. And that, to her, is the spirit of Christianity. It's the spirit of Jesus. It's the spirit of the Bible, which is far more important than the parochial,
you know, the parochial terms in a particular gospel that was written, you know, by who knows who hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years ago. That is almost irrelevant when you're taking into account this broader question of human equality, human dignity. And she actually used the word dignity. She actually used the word dignity, as I recall. She said, giving every single human being his or her dignity is not negotiable, not something that I've ever seen as a problem for my own faith and beliefs. So was there anything in the Kugel piece that was outside of just a sloppy, copy-paste job from Christian critiques and Christian revisionism and this other sort of modernist playbook of just, you know, oh, these are all just, you know, cishet interpretations of the Koran, and now we have a progressively sort of better morality and we can see more. Is there anything outside? Yeah, well, I think there are certainly, well, a lot of things in the article itself. It's lengthy. So I even talk about sort of what is our sexual schema as Muslims, not just vis-a-vis what's licit and illicit, but how we look at this notion of identities, which I think you went through with Dr. Shetty, right? I'm sure you guys discussed all of that. So I explored a lot of that and engaged in a lot of that topic in the article because a lot of Scott Kugel's discourse presupposes the identity framework, which for us is a problem. Beyond that, I also engaged with the history of scholars and what they said. And I tried to engage with that topic honestly, right? Let's sit there for a second because people still don't recognize the danger of the identity framework. Can you please speak, because I try to tell anybody who will listen, what's your take on that? What is the identity framework and why is it so limiting and actually undermining of our sort of theological positions in total?
Yeah, I think sometimes the identity framework takes time for people to really apprehend fully because you have to create this distinction between a feature perhaps that you possess or a characteristic you possess, and then an identity that you form around it, such that you become defined by it in certain ways. And so I'll talk to people about the impulse or the thought of feeling sexually attracted to other people, right? As a sort of corollary to homosexual attractions, even heterosexual attractions. If you feel those attractions and if you carried them out, they would in fact be Zinab, which is a major sin in Islam. The fact that you feel those attractions, is that something that you need to define yourself by? Would you refer to yourself as a Zani? Right. Because you feel these attractions, right? Like I'm a fornicator, that's who I am. And you, well, you'd say no, fornication is a particular act. The fact that you feel inclined on occasion, like that thought crosses your mind, is probably something that happens to plenty of people every single day of their lives, or certainly plenty of people all over the world. The fact that you don't act on those passing thoughts is a cause of reward. And if you sort of settle on those thoughts and marinate in them, then that becomes a problem because now you're acting with your heart as well. And a person should excise those thoughts and repent to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, right? Because the more a person meditates on those thoughts, the more likely they are to act on them. And so, all of those things are important to just deconstructing and unpackaging the notion that that identity is something that's acceptable. And most problematically is that that identity
relates to an act that is a major transgression against Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, to which he is condemned in the harshest of terms. And so, why would a person want that to be his identity, right? That would be a really inappropriate way to identify by. Likewise, with queer homosexual identity is that it conflates all of these things into a singular package, which makes it almost impossible for us to deconstruct and unpackage all of the things that are going on at once without a person feeling like we are calling his very existence into question. Now, I'm not simply talking about, you know, I'm not talking about particular actions that this person might take. I'm talking about who that person is. And that's why one of the common refrains of people who have adopted the identity discourse is that we exist, right? Like people exist. They'll say things like that, very demonstratively even. And I think that's indicative of just how deeply entrenched the identity discourse is with them. No, that's a great point. And we're sort of saying it's like, no, they don't. In the sense that, you know, a gay person, right? I remember, I think it was, it might have been Ahmadinejad or something like that back when in Iran, and he was asked about homosexuals in Iran. And I think his response was, we don't have any, they don't exist. And that is something that completely doesn't compute, you know, at first, because what we're really trying to critique is that you are identifying yourself with these desires, which is something that's very, very new and very, very problematic. And in fact, if you were to take that logic to its final conclusion, then you would have to identify with all sorts of horrible things because human beings are urged on internally to do all sorts of horrible things. And yet we don't sort of build identities or political sort of platforms
around them. And that was one of the sort of sillier sort of critiques that came out about the Navigating Differences document. You know, why are you talking about this particular sin versus others? Well, that's precisely the point is that there's so much energy in society and in the culture right now trying to rally around this one sin as an identity, asking for recognition, and not just recognition, but affirmation and celebration that this is an inseparable part of who these people are. And we're actually trying to say, oh, it's quite separable. Actually, it is extremely separable. And actually, that there is a moral duty to separate. Whether you take that up or not is another matter entirely. Very well said. I'll add to that that one of the questions I'll ask people is that when you meet somebody, what is it that you want that person to know about you when you meet them? If you just met someone and that person asked me, tell me about the most important parts of who you are. I might talk to them. Certainly for me, I've grounded my faith and my belief in this Muslim status, our fundamental identity, right? That there's nothing, it's a blessing, right? It's God who named you Muslim, right? Like that's such an honorific that it sort of looms over everything else and everything else that we do is conditioned by that, our relationship with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, with God. But I might tell them about other things about me. I might tell them about my job or my career. I might tell them about hobbies or interests. I might tell them about my family, my children, my parents, you know, different things that I consider to be important parts of my life. What wouldn't come to mind would be who I'm sexually attracted to, right? Like that would not come to mind as a normal form of
conversation such that I would look at that and foreground that as a really important part of who I am. Now some people may hear that and they'd say, well, that's easy for you to say because that's not stigmatized for you, right? I'd say, no, no. Well, obviously that's like, that's just like recapitulating the identity discourse, right? The whole point is that like if a person feels sexual attraction, like that's like for us, that's not presumptively stigmatized at all, just the feeling. It's not like we're not stigmatizing the feeling, but we're stigmatizing our particular set of actions, in which case we've flattened the playing field quite a bit. And nevertheless, we'd say, look, if someone came to the community, Muslim community, and they had homosexual attractions, it's not like we'd know, right? That's not a question I ask people in the masjid. I don't meet a brother and say, hey, were you like second, like, but that's absurd. It's like, you know, like that's a ridiculous thing to think that somehow that's going to be a question that we would ask anyone. No, we just, you know, this person comes, they're part of the community, they can worship with us and be part of the community fully, a full member of the community. And there's so much richness that I think is still available to such people in their lives that the fixation on this has a particular aspect of what they experience, such that it becomes like, to your point, like inseparable to who they are and inescapable as a psychological condition, such that it's always there. It's just lingering constantly. It's in fact profoundly counterproductive and unhealthy, I think, for many such people. And that's why I look at contesting the identity discourse is so important, because it can be emancipating to individuals to recognize that, look, sure, I experience or I feel these feelings, but I feel a lot of feeling.
And I'm, in fact, so much more than just this, like what this like cultural program is trying to box me into. That's not the totality of who I am. In fact, what is far more honorable and dignified and profound for me in my own life is this relationship that I'm able to build with Allah. Right, like that is really, really deep. And I think that there's tremendous beauty in that for Muslims. So, OK, so the, you know, homosexual marriage comes in around 2015. OK, Trump gets elected 2016. OK, take us through the political calculations that are kind of being made, especially in the Muslim community, where we've already mentioned how, OK, for, you know, with various liabilities, we've kind of gotten to that and taken in, you're seeing sort of these things start to accumulate and we're worried about the culture and sort of the inroads being made against the Muslim community from the liberal cultural sort of machine. And then Trump gets elected. That seems to be very profound in sort of how this whole thing unfolds. Like, what did you observe about the Trump years and, you know, eventually getting to the political alliances that were made within the Muslim community and assessing and evaluating those? Was it a good idea? What did we think we were going to get out of it? What was the reality? Yeah, well, I think, you know, during the Obama years, you had this establishment of the of the sort of larger than life political figure that gets elected on the back of public prestige, charisma, almost quasi worship around the figure and the person of the individual. Right. So that that almost becomes a political framework for running a presidential campaign.
And Trump kind of builds on that in very dysfunctional ways. Right. He takes advantage and he exploits a lot of human tendencies. He taps into a lot of domestic frustration and he successfully wins a presidential election, which surprises everybody. But he worsens this specific dynamic a lot because one of the things Trump constantly was, he almost heckled people who disagreed with him. And he was just this constant antagonist. And he relished that role. He never never shied away from from just mocking his adversaries and poking them on a daily basis. I mean, you know, people just couldn't, they couldn't take their eyes off of him. Yeah, exactly. The nicknames he would invent for people on this sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, people, people, people who hated him couldn't couldn't stop following him. Right. And so you're reminded of his presence every single day. And now what you have is a climate that becomes intensely tribalized. Extremely politically polarized, and that polarization worsens and worsens and worsens. And as a result of that, you have Muslims who had already established themselves as hard carrying liberals who now become polarized as well. In that political moment. And that that really does a lot of damage to the community, where now you have Muslims who like the almost unofficial political program for plenty of American Muslims, especially its activist sort of contingent, is really one that is espousing an uncritical far left political program, irrespective of what that program says, with no limited conditions, with no constraints. In a totally unqualified manner. And anybody who tries to step in, anybody who tries to just lower the temperature a little bit, gets accused of the most harsh things humanly possible.
And that, you know, in some ways, like we are suffering from years of that having gone unchallenged and a lot of pent up frustration from people who feel like they didn't have a voice at that time. Right. And I felt like, you know, it's sort of like what happened with the far left. Like a lot of Muslims, I think, moved into the far left, partly because of those early 2000s. I thought early 2000s was an atmosphere where they just felt so stifled that it was emancipating for them. Right. To feel like, hey, now I can be part of a political party where I can be critical of the political establishment. I can express myself there. And suddenly now you have this additional reaction where it becomes a great deal more hostile, not only to its political adversaries, but even towards other Muslims. Right. And that begins what becomes sort of this enduring, you know, social media battle between different actors on Muslim social media. So what were, OK, so there's a couple of ways we can go. I think one of the things is I want to explore, you mentioned damage and damage is something that gets brought up a lot. How can we, in as specific terms as possible, sort of assay the damage? What was the damage? And then also, what were the justifications for why this sort of political alliance or these political alliances were made? And why were those reasons not satisfactory? Yes. So I'll take the first question first. I think a lot of people are witnessing it today. I think if you look at some of the responses to the navigating, is it? Navigating. Navigating. Navigating Defense Statement. I guess you should know the name of it. We both signed it.
Yeah. So if you look at some of a lot of the responses, especially the critical ones, did come from people who were politically aligned with liberal politics. And their objections to it were deeply moralistic. Right. They were rejecting the theology of the state. So you're saying that the very fact that there is such a fuss about this statement, right, from supposedly from Muslims. Right. It indicates sort of the damage that has sort of already occurred. Yeah. I mean, many of those people had been in activist spaces for years. Right. And suddenly now they're expressing sentiments that on its face very clearly indicate a problem with the religion. Right. Like they have an issue with the religion. They have a religion. They have a problem. Right. They can they can couch it in whatever terms they want. But many responses were very explicit on that. Which I think is quite tragic. Right. And so perhaps that was less of a surprise to some of us. I think for other people, it's really eye opening to see all of that come about and to see it out there in such a brazen form. So when you talk about damage, I think that damage is done. And now we have to figure out how we can try to minister to people who are extremely skeptical about what Islam has to say on this and on a host of other issues. Right. But certainly on this issue, you know, Andrew Sullivan has a really interesting article that he wrote years ago. Andrew Sullivan, he's sort of a gay Catholic and sort of conservative, but lower case C, interesting writer. But he wrote an article for I think it was New York magazine titled America's New Religions. Which I always encourage people to read, because I think it's a very, very insightful piece. And Sullivan's argument is that liberalism does not have. It doesn't have the goods to provide for people a meaningful life.
Right. Like liberalism, the old critique is that liberalism has an empty center. Right. Right. And his point is that liberalism has been tricking his mind. And he's a liberal, hard carrying liberal, right. He believes that liberalism and by liberal, I don't mean sort of partisan liberal because he can sort of identify as conservative. Right. But in any event, he's saying that the reason liberalism has been able to succeed in a climate like America or in an environment like America is because it was able to walk a very sort of thin, tight rope. In balancing between the role of politics in the state. With the far more important and fulfilling spheres of human life and activity. Recognizing that it was never the goal, and this is the old conservative argument, never the goal of politics to become all encompassing. Sure. But rather politics was supposed to be a domain where we are simply navigating the minimum sort of set of policies and procedures needed so that we can just coexist without coming to blows. And we can just live in the same physical domain without fighting. This is his argument. Plenty of people have offered very robust critiques of liberalism. The critic of liberalism, myself, wrote a lot on it, right. McIntyre and Min Taylor and secularism and all of that. All of that. Right. But nevertheless, I'm just bringing up Andrew Sullivan's argument. And he says that what's happened with the loss of Western religion, especially Western Christianity, is that it has produced a generation of people. Of all ages who are living as addicts, digital addicts. Right. They are living in a constant state of ongoing distraction.
They are socially atomized, but they're living in apartments alone with a dog. Yet you have fewer families. You have all of this social atomization that's occurring. And you have people that have no greater faith or belief that can guide them through the difficulties of life, that can help them understand their place in the world. And what has supplanted all of that for too many people has become the domain of politics. And he talks about how political rhetoric resembles the most intense theological rhetoric in the most contentious moments historically. Like crusade level rhetoric has now become standard part and conventional part of our ongoing political discourse in America. And he says that this, in fact, is a crisis for America because politics cannot fulfill those voids. It just can't fill them. And, you know, when we talk about some of the challenges that or some of the reasons that I was deeply troubled by the uncritical alliance building, the uncritical political activity that was occurring in a very partisan way, was that it was furthering people into a very particular political program at a moment where puritanical politics had become the de facto norm. Where there was no room for thoughtful, selective engagement on situational activities. Rather, it was just consuming people from the inside out.
And what we needed to do, to me, as people concerned about religion and ministering to our community, was reduce the purport of politics in the hearts and minds of our young people and give them a way to understand their world in relation to their faith and their beliefs. Without constantly enmeshing them in the day-to-day fights of left and right. And unfortunately, we weren't very successful at doing that. So here we are, and we've got, we're picking up the pieces, okay. That, I think, will carry us, I think, towards the end of this conversation as we're approaching two hours. First thing, the first thing I want to, and this could be a much longer conversation, but, you know, the first thing is, okay, a lot of people, they're concerned about blame, right? They're concerned about sort of, you know, and we've talked about already the lack of trust. If you are a da'i or an institution or something like that, that perhaps misstepped, that perhaps didn't see all of this unfolding in this particular way and contributed to this, there's a lot of discussion about what does it look like to set things right, right? On one side, you have some people that seem to demand that you flog yourself in public, you know, and then there's other people who maybe would prefer to just silently, you know, change strategy. What does that look like? How should someone respond? I think that's a very, very interesting open-ended question to pursue. Yeah, I think it's an open-ended question. I don't know. I mean, theologically, we have guidelines for TOEFL, right? We have guidelines for TOEFL. Within sort of our digital domain, we don't have any guidelines for TOEFL.
Right, yes. We have no guidelines for redemption for anybody. There is no playbook for people to be redeemed. I don't know of many people who have successfully been redeemed. I was trying to think of someone. I couldn't, yeah. I really can't. You know, there's a really interesting article that I think Helen Andrews wrote years ago on First Things, and it was called Shamed Storm. Oh, I read that. Yeah, I do remember that. It's a really great piece. It's phenomenal. And she talks about an incident that happened years ago. It was on C-SPAN. It was aired on C-SPAN, and it was a debate. It was like a roundtable discussion on some public policy issue. And she had just broken up unceremoniously with a guy who was also in sort of the public policy space. So they're on C-SPAN. And this ex-boyfriend that she just broke up with goes off on her in really, really vicious ways. And that video goes viral. And it follows her around in a way where she can't build new relationships, because everybody has seen the video, especially in the spaces where she is. She has struggled finding jobs. And because every time she applied, people understand her reputation. And she ended up moving to Australia and picking up the pieces. And she talks about it. And it's not a perfect article, right? Like there's certain things, quibbles I have with it. But nevertheless, just as like illustrative problem with, you know, and she talks about how and she talks about how like a lot of people enjoy just trashing people. Like there's almost like a sadistic joy. It's entertainment.
At the same time, there's a frustration that some people who need to be criticized never get it, right? Like there's this constant, like you can take a step back and say, okay, fair point. Like really fair point. Like there are people who deserve criticism at certain points, or deserve criticism. And for whatever reason, they're inoculated from it, or they're not getting criticized the way they should. And you'll see this a lot of times when people care deeply about their religion. They'll sense that, they see it, they say, we need to rectify it somehow, right? We also have some challenges vis-a-vis our theological tradition, right? And so far as the question is, how do we regard some people, right? Like if you look at some of the scholars and what they've said about Ahlul Bida'ah, some of it's like really, really strong. Some of it's really strong about sitting with the person of Bida'ah, talking with the person of Bida'ah, you know, listening to a person. I mean, it can be extremely strong, right? And this is not new. I mean, these are aqwal that really go back, right? And so if you have come to a point where you see somebody as a deviant innovator, and sort of an enemy of the Muslim, then to you, the redemption is the last thing you're thinking. Right. That person needs to almost make a full sort of like manhaj, like they need to, the repentance needs to be far more fulsome. And even then, Allah knows what acceptance would look like. But, you know, this is part of the problem is that like we're trying to apply theological norms to a discursive environment that doesn't adhere to them. Like what does redemption look like on social media? I have no clue. I don't know that it can be done successfully, especially among people who just hate you anyways.
I think at some point, you just have to stop living for people's approval. You have to be concerned about doing what's right. And I think in that vein, if you're doing what's right, and you're trying to be principled, if you're wrong, look, I remember, and I'll mention this. I remember a few years ago, I did a program at IOK in California. Right. And it was a talk I gave. It was a Friday night talk. And there was something I mentioned in it that was wrong. And I didn't know it was wrong at the time. And someone messaged me about it. Very upset. Like, just really angry with me. And I listened to it. And then I looked it up. And I thought I had researched it pretty well. And even it was like really tough to actually clarify the question, but I ended up looking it up. And I'll say I wasn't able to get full clarification that I was wrong. But there were questions raised about it. Sufficient questions to where even myself, I was unsure of it. And so I contacted Brothers at IOK. And I said, look, I would prefer it if you take the video down. And I said, if you can edit that portion up, that would be great. If you can't, it's better for it not to be there. And they edited it out. And I wrote a post. And I said, look, you know, just to level set, you know, because I had linked to it on Facebook. I said this was not, I requested it be taken. I request that video was taken out because there's something that I mentioned in it that I'm not confident in and I think might have been wrong. And I said, if you were there or you listened to it and you want clarification, message me privately and I'll tell you. And so a number of people did. And I told them, I said, look, here's what was said. And so we listened to it just now. And I, you know, I don't know that I do things perfectly. I know that I do things right. It's easier for me. I'm like a nobody. I'm not someone with like, you know, a million followers or something like that or something like that suddenly becomes like this big, like moment of embarrassment or something like whatever. I can just kind of shrug it off.
And yeah, I worry about it because I want to be right in front of Allah. Sure. Of course. Like, that's why that's why I worry. I worry about it. If I say something wrong, do something wrong. Like, it really concerns me, right? Like, those are things that like, you know, one of the things that I do all the time and it's so it's become such a habit of mine. It's difficult for me not to do it in context where I'm not where I'm not even talking about religion. Like, it'll come to my mind even. It's like work is that I'll end what I say with Allah knows best. I do that. I just do it all the time. I do it when I write every single article I've written. Allah knows best. All right. I'll just end it like that. And I do that not out of a false sense of modesty. But because I recognize how easy it is to. I recognize how. How just prone I am to mistakes. Yeah. Well, I try to reinforce that and I try to make it very clear to people. But like, look, Allah knows best. Like, I'm speaking extremely confidently, extremely strong on this issue. Right. And I'm asserting myself in a way that reflects that confidence. But keep in mind, Allah knows best. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the tricky things is that, you know, the example that you provided from your own experiences is fairly black and white. It's like a factual error. Right. Or something akin to a factual error. But once we wade into the the terrain of politics and moves like this, then there's, you know, I feel like we need there's a variety or there's different sort of a typology of errors that could be made. OK. Right. So there's like one type of error, the factual error. Easy. OK, that's that's straightforward. Another type of error that could be made is a is a political error. Right. You had you had a good intention, but you didn't foresee things turning out the way that they would,
even if others perhaps did. And so you have, you know, this sort of calculus that you use and you you you make decisions in real time without perfect information, et cetera, et cetera. And then it turns out to go horribly wrong. Right. That's a different type of mistake than just a factual error. And then beyond that, then there's there's a moral sort of shortcoming, which is like if you, you know, you had sort of a a failing, a moral failing, maybe you lacked courage in a particular sort of you knew what was right. Right. I guess that would be the distinguishing factor. You knew what was right, but you failed to act because of some sort of outside pressure or or, you know, you were afraid of something, whatever. So, I mean, I think that one thing that, you know, it's hard to come up by nuance in days like this when everything is so absolutist and black and white and polarized. But I think that people viewing and looking at other people making decisions, they need to consider these different types of mistakes that could be made and how making amends for them might be different depending on the nature of the mistake, the mistake made. And it might not even be possible to really identify, like, what is what was a political mistake and what was a moral failing. Right. I think some people, they they once the trust has been eroded to come full circle to that, they assume that everything's a moral failing. Right. They assume that you're you're in the pocket of whatever the Rand Corporation and these sorts of think tanks and whatever. And you're just everything's just, you know, just one moral failing after another. And that's a very... I remember the recent Kyrie Irving, right? Right. After he shared a video on Amazon, like some Amazon video or something. Right. Is it some movies about? I forgot it. Apparently, it had some offensive content towards Jewish people. I have no clue. Right.
But, you know, he shared this video and suddenly, you know, it was like, OK, how does he get redeemed? Yes. Right. The Brooklyn Nuts gave him a laundry list of things to do. And there was there was a sense that the reason they're giving him this laundry list is because they just want to get rid of it. Like they're actually not interested in redeeming him. Yes. They're almost more interested in humiliate. Right. Right. Right. And that was his that was his like irritation, too. Like he was, you know, reportedly really angry with the list because it wasn't that he didn't want to make amends. It was that it seemed like they were out to just embarrass. Yes. As opposed to providing him an opportunity to just make a clarification around what to him seemed like a very trivial mistake. And so I don't know. I mean, look, these are these are as I've said, I think there's there's different dimensions of this. There's one which is Islamically. And I think that's a much easier dialogue. Sure. Like shut up. Yeah, sure. Should I do when they sin? How do I how does a person return to Allah subhana wa ta'ala? What responsibilities do they have to rectify themselves when they espouse something wrong, et cetera, et cetera? But then there are other dimensions of this that I look at. And I say, yeah, I don't know. Like, I just don't know. I mean, look, there are there are people on social media who Allah knows best. I don't you know, no one knows what's in other people's hearts. But I get I get the feeling at times that they just hate everything I write. And they probably don't like they probably don't like me. I mean, honest to God, there are probably people who don't. And I'm not saying like everyone has to love me. You're not right. Like I'm sure that not I'm not everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone's my cup. But I mean, like they're probably just like me. I sense it like hate. I thought I'd say like to the point that, you know, everything I do, everything I say will somehow, you know, be misconstrued and nitpicked or whatever. And frankly, I really don't care because I don't live on social media. You know what I mean? Like it feels tedious to me even like logging in these days. I just have too much going on in my life. And I don't like it doesn't condition my life in that way,
where it's much easier for me to just log off and live and not worry about people just really, really dislike me. And I understand not everybody's like that. For some people, it's just so agonizing when they're getting criticized and they're getting attacked. And I don't know. I mean, I don't I don't have great advice for these people because I'm not like I'm not in PR or something, you know? And, you know, I mean, even Helen Andrews, that's sort of her thing. She says, like when the shame storm kicks in, there is nothing you can do. Right. Right. There is nothing. And she came back after 10, 15 years. That reputation was still there because you can still YouTube her video. Yeah, sure. The Internet never forgets. Google it. It's the first response. And she's written who knows how she feels like a PhD. She's written all these articles. But yet like that one moment still seems to be something she can't get past. Why? And I don't know. I mean, like you talk about you talk about individual redemption for past mistakes. OK, well, you know, I think I think that. You know, one of the things that, you know, a lot of people bring up is they say, OK, well, we have to have a discussion. And I think there are lessons learned. And those lessons learned should be lessons learned that we act upon in good faith going forward, whether we're forgiven or not. Right. Right. Right. We're not forgiven enough. People say, OK, this should be a reason now why going forward you second guess your political judgment. Right. Like Russell Moore writes about this with Christians on an article called Losing Our Faith, where the Christian preachers and televangelists that he grew up with during like the post Cold War era, one after the other was talking about Soviet Union as if it was the fulfillment of every end of times prophecy in the Bible. And he said none of those people revisited that.
And they they presented that not as an interpretation of the Bible, but what it said. That's what it said. And he said, and all of these people moved from one confident political assertion to the next confident political without ever revisiting. Any of their past claims, even ones that were flagrantly wrong. And if and he's saying, like, if these people can be so easily captured by their preferred politics, then that to him is a crisis. That's a crisis of faith for Christians. And I think Muslims would be well served to study the experiences of Christians and Jews in this country who have gone down these roads and asked themselves, how do we avoid these pitfalls? Because we have fallen into many of them already. To many of them. And the more we sit back and don't critically analyze what our motivations are, what our political assumptions are, how we're how we're being captured by different political moments and taken in by them, I think we're susceptible to failing again. And, you know, again, it's to me, it's just about saying, OK, well, what lessons can I take from these mistakes? How can I operate better than, you know, what what do I what responsibility do I have to other people is something that, to your point, is going to be discretionary, subjective based on isn't done in the past. And then at some point, not everybody's going to be satisfied. So you just try to move on and commit yourself to doing said in front of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and asking Allah for acceptance. Right. I think that's a fantastic segue to a final topic before we end up things up here. So I feel like and I wonder if you also feel like we're almost getting a second chance at this thing, you know, with everything that is transpiring. I mean, there's no doubt that sort of the moves that were made sort of unfolded and led us to where we are.
But we see that for a lot of people in America, the trans issue is one bridge too far. And we're seeing a lot of people start to push back. We're seeing the, you know, the stuff that's been going on close to your home, you know, or close to, you know, with the school boards and then other things in school boards across the country. Curriculum, libraries, drag store, you know, story hour, all these sorts of things. Maybe we have a second chance. And so I guess the question is, OK, here we are as Muslims. Now we're in 2023 and things have progressed to this point. Where do we go from here? Where how do we build power? How do we engage politically? Is it maybe you can address? Is it something as simple as allying with the left or allying with the right? Or is it something much more nuanced than that? What should be the lessons that we've learned that are guiding our political engagement going forward? Sure. I mean, look, I think I think that on this issue right now, we are at a very pivotal point, and I don't mean to sort of catastrophize. I just think that a lot of Muslims in America and many people in America are overconfident in the status quo and the legal settlement that secularism has promised people vis-a-vis their own faith. And for years, Muslims and others have spoken about America as a secular settlement that respected religion to a much greater degree than what we've seen out of Europe, especially Western Europe. Western European countries have not had the same relationship to religion. And so when we saw the proliferation of secularization in European countries and we compared it to America, where faith was still holding on and was much more steady, there was a sense that this difference reflected a political arrangement
that provided for greater religious participation in public life, as opposed to Western Europe, which organized society in a way that where secularism took on a much stronger and muscular anti-religious definition. That seemed to be the story. Now, that's changed a lot in recent years. One, because America has secularized dramatically in recent years with the loss of Christian faith and the rise of the unaffiliated. So the rise of the nones, as they call them every year, is growing. It's the fastest growing religion in America. And what you have is a diluting of traditional denominations where your only remaining denominations, especially in Christian faith, Jewish faith, are highly reformed based denominations, denominations that have, you know, who knows what relationship they actually have to scripture anymore. And so the Orthodox or conservative groups are becoming increasingly marginalized over the years. And that puts us in a very difficult position because we don't have good religious analogs that we can actually point to or look at and say, well, those people have commitments that resemble our own and they're actually accepted in modern society. Now, that's that's becoming less and less the case. So with that said, you know, what what confidence can we have that the political settlement right now is going to stay static? Right. In fact, we shouldn't have any confidence in that we should actually recognize that there are many active attempts to undo that political settlement. And there are many campaigns and legislative efforts that have been advanced to explicitly reduce the place of religion in American society. And that is a really, really troubling, troubling development for Muslims in America, really troubling. And I think for people of all, can you give a special can you give a couple examples?
Sure. I think I think probably one of the most explicit examples is the Equality Act. Yes. And the Equality Act, I think, simplistically takes LGBT. And defines it as an equality issue on par with race. Yes. So when it comes to law, policy and everything else, our tolerance for disagreement becomes equivalent to our tolerance for racism. Like how should how should the courts view racism? I should like how LGBT becomes the same thing. Opposition to or disagreement with LGBT becomes the exact same thing. What's critical about the Equality Act is that it explicitly calls out religious freedom as something that is inadequate. We're providing exemptions to said equality. Yes. So now it becomes one of the most critical measures that actually weakens the place of religious freedom in American society. Now, what's important about the Equality Act is that it has gone through the House of Representatives twice and passed both times. And both times with Republican support, not large Republican support, but some Republicans on both occasions. Now, it hasn't hit the Senate floor. They've sort of held off on taking it there. But the very fact that a piece of legislation like that has gone through the House vote, gotten the votes that it has, given its stipulations, should be very, very concerning to everybody involved. We've had presidential candidates like Beto O'Rourke, who explicitly said as part of his campaign that he would be in favor of stripping the 501C3 designations for religious communities that do not adhere to those equality measures for LGBT persons. Now, if you think about that for Muslims,
that would obviously, obviously devastate our communities. And I think the large suburban multimillion dollar masjids would probably get along just fine because you have so many people behind them. But when you think about the madrasa system in this country and the number of madadas we have that are very low income and don't, you know, don't have high paying salaries for their Hibs teachers and everyone else. You think about the small Islamic schools, you talk about the small inner city masjids, all of those places depend in large measure on tax exempt status, on their tax exempt status to survive, to subsist. You get rid of that, you get rid of the clerical designation for taxation, you get rid of all those things. And suddenly now it becomes financially precarious. And you cannot, you're like, you're like a business that's making no money. It does not have enough revenue coming in. And so overnight, suddenly dozens and dozens of institutions, potentially hundreds, are at risk of collapsing. Right. And so these are the types of measures that we're talking about here. And when we talk about what's happening at the school board level, I also think a lot of Muslims are very naive because they look at this as something that's future facing. Right. And it's because I think many religious Muslims even are not plugged into what's happening in their own locale. Right. I mean, I'm living in Maryland, right? But forget Maryland and what's been happening in Maryland. You have I'll talk to Muslims who treat Maryland like, wow, like what's happening right now is really crazy. But those people sometimes live in states. Yes. That have passed the same measures at the state level. Yeah. Yeah. You see, New Jersey, California, Illinois. Right. Like you're in Chicago, you're in the Chicago area. This stuff is already passed. Right. I mean, you're you're talking to me because of county trying to do some of these things. And your entire state has been taken in by this
and has advanced it in very strong ways. And the problem behind it is that now you have curriculum overhauls that are being done that begin at the pre-kindergarten level. And these curriculum changes induce gender and sexual confusion in young children. Because they're impressionable, because they're young, because it's a dialogue and an idea that they don't understand and that their minds aren't ready yet to absorb. And they're getting that now, starting at the youngest of ages, and they're not getting it on a single day. They're not getting it as part of a carved out class, but they're getting it as part of an ongoing module. Where they're learning about its history, where they're reading its books together, where they are getting the science, everything. And now it is sort of spreading itself into all of these different disciplines and subjects. And it's going on for so long such that the escapability of it becomes next to nothing. And what's happened now in Maryland is that they're saying, not only are we going to do all of these things, we're not even giving you the opportunity to opt out. We're not giving you the opportunity to opt out. And we're seeing in other school districts, in other counties, things like the month of June being celebrated by having every single day be a day where there's an LGBT reading in school. Every single day until like the school year ends for the entire month of June, you're going to have LGBT readings that those kids are subject to. At some point as a Muslim, you have no choice but to try to resist these things because the consequences are so heavy and because your own children are going to be subject to all of these teachings and this aggressive program of indoctrination. Yeah, I mean, it's completely, completely a scary time.
So again, so let's let's try to end on a on a takeaway for where people can can go. Here's where we are. And we're sounding the alarm bells and we're saying that this is an existential crisis, right? This is an existential issue for us. Um, what do we do? How do we approach this thing? Is it is it going to be solved within the framework of the two party system? Is it going to be solved in a different way than that? How does one go about fixing this thing? Yeah, and this is where the question is, well, there are certain things that Muslims just have to do. I think at the most basic level, Muslims have to get out and they have to show up to school board meetings where the school boards that have to show up city councils at the state level. And they have to let their voices be heard. They have to let their voices be heard. I think situationally, that's useful. And I think that's important. I think that we should be honest about the limitations of that approach and what can be accomplished when you take that on. Right. I think Muslims have to become a lot more involved in some of the legal deliberations that are taking place on these issues. If you look at the recent Supreme Court cases revolving around this issue, almost all of them have been taken up by Christian organizations. Right. And very few Muslim organizations, most of them not, have actually contributed to these to these debates in a way that would side with religious freedom in a strong way. And so we need Muslim voices that are actually participating in these things in a way that shows that we care about religious freedom. And we want to take, frankly, a maximalist approach to it in a. Society like ours, in a society like ours, that's what we want to do. And we want to preserve that for the stability and sustainability of our faith. I think in addition to that, we want to try our best to develop institutions that are committed to issues like this because it takes time.
It takes resources. It takes expertise. There's one organization that has sprouted up relatively recently in my own area called Coalition Virtue, Coalition of Virtue. So the name is inspired by Hedlund Fuldog, you know, in shot by each other. There's there's a lot of work that's been going on there. Let me get easy for them. I'm not saying that what they do will be perfect, but we have to try and we have to have multiple efforts. We have to have multiple groups. And if people want to get in contact with them, they should. But I think that we need more people that are inspired to take up these cases. I think we need them to be well funded. And we have a number of different angles that we have to target this from. And then I think arguably the most important element for us, at least in the New York time, in addition to all of these things, I think legally is critical. I've described all the reasons why, but I also think that our alternative institutions have to get more robust. And so when you talk about Islamic schooling, right, I mean, at some point you look at the attitudes of these administrators, of the superintendents, of the people on city council and school boards, and you ask yourself, how can I send my kids to these people five days a week for 10 months? Like, how can I do it in good faith, understanding how much these people like just have no respect for me or my religion? Like, how can I keep doing that? And so when you talk about Islamic schooling, about homeschooling and exploring opportunities of homeschooling, I think all of these things are available. And I think one of the things that should be encouraging to Muslims is the fact that more and more Muslims are starting to stand up. We saw the response in, I think it was Western Ontario, that university, maybe it was Western University, that was the name of it, that had that advertisement that depicted like a sort of drawing of two Hitabi women kissing or something like that. And the way Muslims reacted to that. We've seen sort of even Muslim students, surprisingly young children, right, even in Maryland.
We've had, mashallah, like young children with amazing courage show up to these school board meetings and speak out in defense of their faith, in defense of their religion. Right. We're seeing more and more of that. And we saw in Dearborn what happened, Muslims there. I think these are all positive examples. Not know what, again, nobody's going to be perfect. But what happens is we set in motion the idea that, you know what, as Muslims, it's OK for us to actually defend our faith. And actually, we need to do it. We need to do it. And I think we need to do it alongside a more rigorous sort of framework that is educationally connected to this, that doesn't constantly carve this out for special attention, but situates this in our larger socio-familial ethics so that people can make sense of it all. And I think that that is, to me, a very powerful message. So I think I think all of these things are interconnected in various ways. But I think that there there's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of work that is being done. I mean, a lot more work being done now than what was, I mean, five years ago, there was nothing, literally nothing. Right. Five years ago. And now, inshallah, there's there's a lot of momentum. There's a lot of energy. There's a lot of concern. And inshallah, we're able to capitalize on that and hopefully benefit our society as well. Inshallah, may Allah make us successful. And hopefully it's not too late. And it's a tremendous opportunity. And we hope that everybody's able to do what they can to jump in and try to turn this thing around. And and yeah, may Allah grant us success. I mean, it was fantastic having this conversation. It feels like just any other normal conversation that we would have in your living room or mine. So inshallah, hope to talk again soon here and outside of this platform. And may Allah continue to guide your work and to continue to guide your words to be a beneficial sort of contributor when it comes to all of these things that we talked about.
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