Dogma Disrupted
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Tawheed as a Worldview | Episode 4
Why were we created and where are we going? Any level of pondering over our existence ultimately leads to the question of believing in a higher power. In Islam, tawheed, believing in the oneness of God, can not only inform our moral actions, but is an entire worldview that shapes every facet of our lives.
Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy joins Imam Tom Facchine to unpack the arguments for the existence of God, from believing in a higher power versus nothing, to the existence of one God versus multiple, and finally, the existence of Allah versus a deistic god.
Chapters
0:00 - Introduction
3:05 - Not possible to do enough good without religion
8:21 - What is the cost of not believing that God exists?
9:52 - The very few real atheists and hard materialists
12:25 - The miracle of childbirth
15:59 - Can God be proven?
22:45 - Stories of finding Allah and purpose in life
29:34 - Identifying God in da‘wah scenarios
34:31 - There can’t be multiple gods
41:36 - An imperfect being can’t be God
47:21 - The Qur’an stresses the uniqueness of God
55:56 - Incarnation: Can God take the form of creation?
1:04:32 - Things that are unbefitting of God
1:09:19 - Debating the truth in university
1:12:35 - What kind of God do Muslims believe in?
1:20:40 - Allah’s love
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Or the famous, can God create a circle with four corners? Right, or a rock so heavy he can't lift it. Yeah, those are contrary not just to the definition of God, but the definition of circle and rock. Rock is a finite object. Yeah, it's important to the youth to demonstrate how these are really just language games being played. And that they don't, they rely upon fudging the definitions of what these concepts are in order to sort of, you know, posture like they stand some sort of threat to divinity. Salamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh, welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today we have a very, very special guest, Sheikh Mohammed Eshanawi, who is the Religious Director of the Islamic Education Center of PA in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And also the Associate Director of Systematic Theology here at Yaqeen Institute. Welcome. Assalamu'alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh, great to see you big guy. Wa'alaikumussalam. Today we have a really interesting episode. The general concept is talking about tawheed as a worldview. And why this is significant. Because we've reached a time in which a lot of people think of religion as something that is excessive or something that is just merely optional. That it doesn't have any sort of main bearing on your capacity to be a moral person, right? How often do we hear, oh, I don't have to be religious to be a good person. I can be a good person no matter what I believe. And obviously Islam teaches something very, very diametrically opposed to that. So we're going to go through a little bit of how your beliefs actually shape not just your capacity for moral action, but it shapes everything, right? And tawheed as a worldview is something very, very specific that leads to the best outcomes when it comes to across the board, right?
When it comes to moral capacity or capacity for moral action, justice, holistic well-being, and things of that nature. So maybe an interesting or a useful place to start would be if somebody, like we imagine, like the tabula rasa, right? Like the blank slate. Okay, you've got a person who they come into the world. Maybe their parents were completely not religious at all. Maybe they have absolutely zero understanding of any religion or whether there's a God or not a God. How do they decide that that first decision that faces them is sort of like, does something that is divine exist or not? And what are sort of the ramifications? What are sort of the consequences of that decision depending on what they conclude? Okay, bismillah. So first of all, can I disagree with you? Follow, yeah. This is early, I know, early in the day and early in the conversation. No, no, not disagree with you. I actually wanted to sort of buttress or preface with what I felt like was the best opener to these conversations with a world that is increasingly seeing religion and religious grounding as irrelevant, especially in terms of morality. I try to meet people halfway or however far I can meet them, try to be agreeable in the sense that I can concur Islamically that some good can be discerned and can even be pursued without religion. And there's sort of two major benefits I get out of framing the discussion this way. The first of them is that I separate Islam from the pack and that Islam does not recognize the human being as inherently evil or born into sin, right, or born tainted per se. We believe in the fitrah.
The fitrah is, you know, that original state of purity, right? And so it is not complete purity, right? It is not incorruptible. That's a different issue. But at least we're going to say we believe that humans are inherently good, not inherently evil. By virtue of their fitrah, they have a partial discernment mechanism, right? And it needs to get now perfected. And that's why the Prophet ﷺ said, I came to perfect good character and morality. That's why the Qur'an says, وَتَمَّتْ كَلِيمَةُ رَبِّكَ صُلْقًا وَعَدْلًا The word of your Lord has been perfected, completed, perfected in perfect truth and perfect justice. So everything Islam says is true. Everything Islam ordains is just. So it is the completion. It's the natural progression. And that's actually the second benefit. The first benefit is to say, by the way, we don't see human beings as inherently evil. And that's why it's not a riddle for us how someone can be non-religious because that's sort of the deadlock in the conversation. Conversation can get started with people. I see people who are, quote unquote, decent human beings, right? And they're not religious per se. They have no religious subscription or affiliation. So the first thing is you separate that. Yeah, Islam has an explanation for that. But now to your point of the ramifications, it cannot come full circle without there being a God. Because that's what's going to get people to begin with and say, okay, but I'm not sure if there is a God. Right. If there is a God, I won't even explore it. Yeah. Would it be fair to say, so maybe we could say that and the devil is always in the details, right? It's like if somebody says, okay, can there be good without religious guidance or without religion? And then maybe the better question would be, well, what type of good are you talking about, right? Because the pushback or the potential answer to that could be like, well, all those good things that people do, we could say like they have benefit in the dunya, right? And we can recognize them as good. But on the day of judgment, they might be completely rejected and they might have no weight, right? Or they might be like the miraj, right?
Or they might be, you know, there's various examples Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala gives in the Quran. So it's almost like, would you agree with that? Is it more like a dunya versus afterlife? And obviously Allah is Ghafoor Raheem and He knows you. I mean, yes, so many things. I mean, even in this world, I would even go one step further in agreement because I started being disagreeable. Even in this world, how do you come across? So when we say human beings are inherently evil, but we're still, Astaghfirullah, inherently good. And then you still say, but we need God. We need scriptural morality. Someone's going to be like, but why? Hold on. Yeah, sure. Everyone can say, don't kill, don't steal. I don't need religion. No, but is abortion killing or not, right? Is alcohol related to domestic violence or not? You know, the detailed framework, moral philosophers, the most top-notch thinkers who spent the most time with the best IQs on this subject without Allah's guidance haven't been able to agree. The moral debates rage on for thousands of years. And even if we were to agree per se, then where do you even get the incentive? Why should I not be looking out for number one? Myself or my immediate family when things hit the fan and everyone else can just go to hell. That's something that I come back to time and time again is that sometimes we ask these questions from the first world, quote unquote, or we ask them when the bellies are full and the electricity is running and the fridge is stocked and stuff like that. But then I know up in Utica, we've got tons of Bosnian refugees. We've got tons of refugees from other places where in a time of war, right? It's like for a lot of people, morality is out the door, right? It's got to be like who are the only people and you can go to like an extreme example and take like, you know, the Holocaust, like the people who went to the concentration camps. There's actually really interesting literature out there about the people who did the best, right? Victor Frankl. Yeah, exactly. Like who made it out or had the best sort of,
let's say had the most resources for resilience within the concentration camps. There's always the religious people, right? The people who had something that they believed in that was beyond themselves. They had a moral code. They were able to hold on, come together, keep hope, all these sorts of things. And the people whose faith was not there, like were totally blown away, complete like, you know, depression and often sometimes suicide, sometimes, you know, just the sort of egoistic sort of, yeah, I got to get mine and it's me against everybody else. So sometimes, yeah, I think about that. So then in that case, if we can sort of pique people's interest in looking for an escape, a healthy escape, not a numbing escape, a reference point for morality beyond sort of the human limitations, then we're going to look for God. We need to look for God. But how do I know God exists? Without sort of turning this into like a polemical fleshed out, what is the cost of God not existing? There's a lot on the table there. And I personally prefer also the, so more of a psychological approach or like a psycho-emotional approach, or if I can throw the word spiritual in there in terms of my strategy, I don't need to prove this to anyone, anything at that point. If I can't prove God, I'm not going to be able to prove man. And what constitutes the components of the human being. But the idea is I don't fear atheism actually too much. And atheism seems to be on the decline. And even if it's not on the decline rapidly just yet, it will be on the decline because of just poor life quality. As you said, poor ability to mitigate life's blows, less family values in general, less reproduction rate. It's just loneliness, fractures, fractured social relations. The outcomes are really horrible actually. Yeah.
And so that is what I try to stir people's interest using. That if we say no God, and you don't actually say that. I call people out on this gently because they don't. Atheism for most people is like a placeholder. It's really like a lived agnosticism or something, right? Or the verdict is out. I don't need to think about it right now. I can just distract myself from it. We tell them, but can you really distract yourself from it? Do you really want to sell yourself a lie and then come back to it later when you can't do anything about it? Is it sane and logical? Is it respectable for someone to just not have answers to where you came from and where you're going, right? And so it's just chaos, right? You're resigning to chaos and the clock is ticking. And if you turn out to be wrong, the stakes are very, very high. And so that's why I don't fear atheism because atheism forget all the philosophical debates. It cannot retain its constituents when it refuses to answer where we came from, where we're going. And then people just over time, they'll be like, yeah, man, how in the world do I wake up on a bus? No idea how I got here. No idea how I'm driving. No idea where I'm going. And I'm just supposed to keep telling myself, it's all right. Just trust the process. Just enjoy the ride. Just take in the scenery. Just tell yourself a few words of affirmation, right? I deserve to be going to the right place. I am not abducted right now. This is not sustainable as a worldview. And so what's the alternative now? I also feel like it's very rare to find like a really hard, hard materialist, right? It's like the average person on the street. They know that there's something out there that's beyond the material world. Even if you forget about, you know, like the divine or creator or something like that, just in terms of like, you know, love. And in terms of, you know, I guess we could say providence, right?
Feeling like there's some sort of, you know, people latch on to these ideas like karma and things like that. And unfortunately, they often get misdirected, right? But it's very, I feel like it's quite rare to find someone who's just a true, honest, 100% consistent materialist. Nope, it's all atoms and the firing of neurons. And it's all just like, you know, whatever's measurable. That's the only thing that exists. Somewhat similar. Is that your experience too? What's that? It's all a happy accident till it's not, right? It's chemically till it's not. Yes. Is that your experience too? Is that sort of a similar sort of thing like with atheism? Yeah, across the board. I mean, sometimes it's happy moments like a newborn. And someone just, it just hits them like, wait a minute. You know, it hit me even though I was an atheist. But it was just like, it was a huge leap in my faith to see my first born. And it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. My wife, one person. I swear I was telling myself this. When did one person become two? How did a life get installed inside another life? Like you just lose your mind thinking about the incredible, the gift of life, right? The power of giving life. And then on the opposite end as well. When you lose someone and you don't know whether to ever be, you know, a reuniting again or even someplace in the middle where sort of the hammers of hardships, as they say, come crashing down. I remember, what's his name? Our brother who wrote Godhead and Miss Godhead. Lawrence Brown. Oh, mashallah. So his sort of return to divinity and then eventually Islam, right? His daughter was in the hospital first born and they said, there's no hope. And he said, I've always been like a hardline atheist. And I just, I went to the chapel and I just broke. I realized that I don't inherently have the ability to do anything, even about the things I care about most,
let alone ambitious dreams, career paths, and you know, and estates and all this. He says, so I just said, God, God, God, if you're there, I swear to you, you save my baby. I'm going to find you. And wherever I find you, I'm in, I'm all in. Right? And so irrespective of the latter part of the journey, just in the interest of time, people are incapable of accepting the burden of being God. Because if there's no God, then you're God. Yeah. And you're going to fail real soon. Right? All the time. I'm really glad that you brought up childbirth because that was actually a huge part of my coming to Islam is that I was kind of, did my research and was kicking it around for a while. But it wasn't until my firstborn was born that the responsibility just like kicked into overdrive. And I just like, you know, that urgency that you talked about, it's like, wow, like I have to figure this out. And while I was thinking about it, and unfortunately the Sixers lost, but you know, I think I make a lot of sports analogies, especially with like students and stuff like that. And young guys, they like the sports analogies. It's almost like you have a championship window. Right? It's like, how much does it take to win a championship? You've got, you know, your star player, your star duo, you've got the front office and they find the money for the salaries and everybody stays healthy. And, you know, there's no super crazy team like the Warriors of the, you know, like to face. It's almost like, you know, your life has almost like a championship window when it comes to figuring these things out. Right? And if the window passes and you haven't like committed, then it's actually really, really scary. Like you have a lot to lose out on, which is kind of like what you were saying. So for me, it's like when, when my firstborn, my oldest son was, was born, it was just like, it was like a, just a sack of rocks just like fell on me. And I was like, wow, I have to, I have to just figure this out. You know, I started praying,
eventually took the Shahadah and stuff like that because life's not a joke, you know, like these things, you know, where you feel, you feel your own mortality and your own finitude. I think in those moments, and you realize sort of things crystallize, right? Like the things that are important and the things that aren't. I have a question for you, you know, like just like we're kind of sort of contemplating whether it's more useful to say, well, it's not possible to be good except if you're religious, or it's more useful to say, actually Islam is the only religion that has, that recognizes good outside of religion, which is really interesting. I haven't used that with Dawa. There was a similar sort of question I wanted to throw at you because one of the things that I've used in Dawa lately, instead of going down the whole sort of like God is proven, right? It's like, well, there's this proof and the proof from complexity and all these sorts of things, order in the universe and stuff like that, that God is not so much proven, but he is found, right? And he is sort of discovered. Sort of the idea that the signs are imminent, but rather it's a moral sort of indication whether you're registering those signs or not. I'm interested as to your take on whether that's true or not, whether it's useful, whether it's sort of different strokes for different situations. What do you think about that? You're prodding me sectarian right now. But so there are Muslim theologians from the Sunni Muslim theologians have had different approaches. Of them are those who argue that proving, proving, I guess, proving, to your point, right? Evidentialists. Yes. Proving to begin with, especially through the logical route or the line of reason is the most powerful. And it certainly is a powerful route.
I mean, the creator of the mind does not contradict the mind. He may boggle our minds, but he will never sort of be contrary to sound reasoning and sound minds. But then there is the other line of reasoning, of course, most famously championed by Ibn Taymiyyah, Rahim Allah, and those who sort of adopt that approach, which is that no, God is given. God is a given for those whose fitrah has not become corrupted. Right? You have an inner sense for recognizing God. And so that lens will be blurred through many different ways, social conditioning, you know, just depravity, so on and so forth. But once you sort of are able to break that shell or Allah, you know, permits for that, those layers and layers, years and decades, sometimes of that crust that solidified over the heart, sort of you break, there's a breakthrough, then it is found. It is a given. And a person realizes that this does not need to be proven. If this needs to be proven, then nothing can actually be provable. And this is like, Rene Descartes was Tamian in this respect. And others, of course, it's just sort of the one most famous for expounding on it in the most detailed way. As far as we know, historically, but like Rene Descartes, when he wanted to say, you know, I'm not going to take anything as a given. I'm going to be skeptical regarding all things. And then he started questioning all. The only thing I know is I can think, so I'm going to use my thinking to publish everything else. Then he actually hit a dead end. And he said, wait a minute, how do I know I think? How do I know I'm not basically a figment of Shaitan's imagination? How do I know the demons aren't manipulating me? You know, in matrix terms, how do we know we're not plugged into a... Right, simulation, right? Simulation. And so he said that in the end of it, when he had that crisis of faith, he said,
I came to the conclusion that God is not a deceiver. So he removed God from the intellectual inquiry. God has to be a given or else we can't actually move forward. Because if someone is going to say, how do I know there's a God? Prove it. We're going to have to say, well, how do I know there's a you? How do I know there's a me? Right. And so endless regression, radical skepticism is not a pathway to knowledge actually. And so that was the Tamian approach. It's what, even on the pastoral level, I found to be more effective, even though to be very honest, since I invoked the Tamian, he does say that the rational approach is good for people that are sort of oriented that way. Because people, some people are more oriented in the spiritual. Some people are more oriented in the sort of empirical or sort of logical or whatever else, the philosophically oriented. And school, he's saying, so that may be sort of a segue to bring them back to this reality. But this reality is that we all know it unless for, in perfect justice, of course, Allah Azza wa Jalla has veiled someone from the most evident reality. We cannot believe without Allah's permission. Right. And Allah says that, you know, some people, if we had given them every sign, then they still wouldn't believe. Right. So there you have it. You know, that's, that's very interesting. So, yeah, I mean, I, that's basically what, what I sort of have settled on as well. It's almost like different techniques or different strategies. Strategies as the situation sort of calls for it, but it is sort of an interesting thing. It kind of reminds me of language. And I think some neuroscientists have also, you know, they've talked about the God spot, quote unquote, right. Just like the idea that a human being, we're not, we don't come into this world as a blank slate. Like with language, for example, we're hardwired for language. We come with like the metas, the meta tools to acquire language in a really quick, intuitive way. That religion or faith or whatever we want
to use to talk about that is, is a very similar thing. And we come into it hardwired, ready to believe. And that actually is really, I think if, if we look at it and think about it downstream, what, what, what happens from that sort of baseline assumption, it's really essential to kind of our purpose. And I think, you know, you were talking about order versus chaos, right? So believing in something that's beyond ourselves, believing in something that is unseen is something that sort of, I think is, is a choice for, for order, right. In, in the universe and, and a rejection of the idea of chaos, but it's also kind of a choice for purpose because I don't really see there being any purpose to anything if we don't have and have that God spot and recognize it and sort of understand that, yes, there is something beyond, or at least the purposes that sort of like the hard materialism or, or a godless sort of world offer, they're very thin, they're very weak. They're not really, you know, the purpose is just to be happy. Really? Is that, is that all like, you know, thrills, one thrill to the next, one sort of enjoyment to the next. It doesn't seem like a very sort of robust thing. Do you have any reflections about sort of how that choice either opens up possibilities or closes doors to possibilities for, for purpose in our lives? I mean, I, I used to work for an organization that ships out free Qurans to people, you know, by order. We ship out like 80 to 100 Qurans a day individually upon request. And whenever someone would say, I just became Muslim, I want a Quran, or I'm thinking about becoming Muslim, or I've read the Quran, I want to become Muslim, I'd always try to like populate a database for testimonials to help the donors also know that their money is going to good places. And there's, you know, good fruits. And so it'd be very interesting
to me because back in the day, like the scientific miracles in the Quran were a big thing, right? But nobody, almost nobody who's becoming Muslim is quoting the scientific miracles or anything remotely as convoluted sometimes as the scientific miracles. Yeah, it is just the straightforward theology. And I guess by extension purpose, right? A God centric God determined purpose for our lives. I mean, one of the craziest stories, it was a sister, her name was Heather. She said that she was attending a class in college, currently the time she was speaking to me, I believe. And the class was on terrorism, and the history of terrorism. And so you know, if it's worth its salt, yeah, we're gonna get some runtime on that syllabus. And so he says, when they got to like 20th century, terrorism, and then kamikaze, and then, you know, sort of radicalized Islamists. As a preface to speaking about the Muslim terrorists, there was like a short blurb on what Islam is just, you know, one on one, a paragraph, she said, she itemized it for me said it basically mentioned the six pillars of faith, and like the purpose of life, you know, were created to transcend the horizontal plane, right, the vertical devote our lives, something greater than us. She said, I realized I was Muslim all along. I just didn't know. I was like in a class on terrorism. The one paragraph blurb before they launch in the throwing us under the bus. And this is not like an isolated incident at all. There's so many I remember there's another girl, sister, her name was Ashley. And similar story. That's why I sort of my memory web is firing. Yeah. So she says, I was watching a show
called sleeper cell. Yes, very. Yeah. I didn't know what it was. She says, you know, and sort of it piqued my interest. And I want to read more. So I jump on YouTube. And I'm like, what sleeper cell apparently used to be this like show on on HBO Showtime, class. And there's this counterterrorism. Yeah, there's like a star cop, you know, who foils the plot and what's the plans of these scary bearded guys? Islamic? Yeah. So she tells me and it's just like floors me. She says that when he was caught in one of the episodes, whoever he was, right. And he's in the jail cell, mind you, a non Muslim acting Muslim, a non Muslim acting to be a terrorist Muslim, big beard, a little bit a little bit of coloring. Yeah. And yet he's the guy who invites her to Islam, right? peaks are injured. You know, when he was in the jail cell, and I saw him put his head on the ground. I said, that's for me. It's not the terrorism part. But we've got to we've got to do it out for us. We've got to do it out for us. Yeah, of course, the Quran talks about that, right? The anti fragility of Islam, and the more you try to fight it, the more you give it free commercials. But the idea is, yeah, I don't live to stick my nose in the sky. I live to lower my head and say glorified is Allah Azza wa Jalla, the most high SubhanAllah. And so this is everyone like just this is anecdotally, but it's also not like when Pew Research Center. Like we often say the Quran is the number one reason to become Muslim. But what about the Quran? What about it? Is it the linguistics? No, not in this era. You know, is it the science? Not quite. When Pew Research Center tried to sort of gauge wait a second. It's not the watermelons with the Allah sort of on the side. No, not that one either. I gotta check update on the data. But as far as I can tell, it is actually like when they were gauging the rapid growth of Islam among the populations, I think in Europe in particular, but in the US as well, of course, this parallel
exists. The number one and number two reasons were the beliefs just make sense. Existentially, I believe this, this can't be the end and I'm not it and this whole anthropocentric, you know, human at the center of it all just doesn't add up and doesn't feel good either. It's like self abuse. And so the purpose and serving a higher purpose than myself. So they said number one, I read the text myself. I read the text myself. And the beliefs just make sense. Those are the number one and number two reasons for why they sort of chose Islam. And if I could share with you like a quick story on the opposite end, for someone just shared yesterday some publications by the PRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, about the number one reason why people leave religion. And if you're talking about us, they mean relieve Christianity, right? The Muslims are only 1% of the population. So they don't have statistical significance in studies of this magnitude. But the number one reason is we don't believe in the beliefs, we don't believe in sort of the proposition, it just doesn't add up. And so I know one brother, who I sort of I'm, I used to help him week in week out, just think through some thoughts after he came back to Islam he had left. So he was a hafidh of the Quran, but of course, like didn't understand the message of the Quran, didactic and sort of wrote memory. He left Islam, joined Bible study, cover to cover for the whole year. And then as soon as he finished Bible study, he became Muslim. Yeah. You know why he became Muslim? Wallahi, this is literally his words to me, tawheed. He said, I realized the doctrine that I embraced had nothing to do with the doctrine I was studying, just wishful thinking. And indefensible dogma, so I can invoke the word dogma here. And once I got through it all, I said nothing can match the tawheed doctrine, the purity, the clarity, the purposefulness of the tawheed doctrine in Islam. And so he was back, despite the fact that we still had to go through
like weeks and weeks of shubuhat, of like, you know, misunderstood, but why this jihad thing and why this woman thing? But still, tawheed was enough that there's nothing that can ever compete with this theology of Islam. Definitely. Well, that's a perfect segue to it. So like the first sort of question that we posed was just like, why believe in the unseen? Or why believe in any sort of divinity versus nothing? Okay. Sort of like hard materialism versus vague something. And now that anecdote gets us to the second question. Let's say somebody decides through whatever sort of path that, okay, yes, there is divinity. Yes, there is something beyond. Okay, well, then they still have a choice to make. And that is, is it one? Right? Is it tawheed? Or is it not? Right? Are there the ancestors? Are there the crystals manifesting? You know, like all the stuff that people believe in these days. Or older stuff, you know? Trinity, right? One versus three, three in one, three persons, one God, you know, all those sorts of things. Or other sort of systems such as that, you know, incarnation, like in Hinduism and things like that. So let's talk more about that. Like why, in addition to just being simpler, because like the Christian evangelical counter argument, right? Yeah, the evangelical counter argument would be like, well, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's more true. Right? And in fact, this is more elegant, right? Three in one, and it's more complicated, and it's more nuanced, right? Like people will, I've heard, which makes me chuckle, but nonetheless, there has to, how does a person come to discern or decide that the divinity is really just one, as opposed to potentially multiple? I mean, I was cheesing when you first said it, for a particular reason,
because there's been a, and since we've accepted that this podcast is going to be a walk down memory lane, and that was stories. Maybe that's, that's, yeah, yeah. So I went through an evolution of like, how to prove to people, there's one God. And it started in New York City, and New York City, a lot of street dawah. Some of it could be UK-esque. And one of the brothers that was Huh? No offense to our UK audience. No, no, I think they take pride in it. I mean, I don't particularly subscribe to that. But raw, on the street, in your face. Yeah, the concept of like pride is, that's like the urban, the urban dawah style. The urban dawah. I take it back. I declare my public apology on stereotypes. Allah bless our brothers and increase them. By the way, I'm a huge Aira fan. Huge Aira. Yes, same here. Mashallah. Mashallah. So in the streets, people had very different approaches. Like someone would say, well, how do you know I'm not God? I used to have a friend, he's my man, Jamaican guy, his name was Duke. And he used to say, it's like a great question. So let's experiment. Please hold your breath for five seconds. Like, you know, and then we had this another Yemeni cat, he was, he had just come out of prison. And he said, Oh, my God, you know, these people think Allah is human. I was like, What do you mean? And I had no idea what God bodies were sort of like an idea of like, arm, leg, leg, arm, head, Allah. And of course, if you spell it, that's two days in the middle. That's new to me. I never heard that before. Yeah, it's of course, it's like acrobatics. I've had I've had 5%, 5%ers and nation members sort of tell me that they are Allah. I've had that happen. But I've never I've never had that. That's interesting. These are 5%ers.
They're sort of known in different pockets of segments as far as God bodies. Oh, okay, that's new terminology. It could be like a term within particular places, institutions otherwise, right. And so he says the guy used to wake up in the morning, he was on top bunk, I'm on bottom bunk, and he would just say these words of affirmation, like, I'm God, I'm God, I'm God. And he says, I just got to a point where I just grabbed him one time, and I threw him down and turned into like a brawl and said, you got and I'm beating you up. So alhamdulillah, I can officially walk away from that phase of my life and say, that's probably not the ideal method of, you know, hashing out the differences. Um, has a role, though, has a role and an audience, you know what I mean? It's like, and that's, that's the beautiful thing about Dawa. And a lot of people don't appreciate is that, you know, Dawa is sprawling. And, you know, it's not mutually exclusive, right? That's like, you've got the person who's the bookworm, and in the university that needs a certain thing, and you've got the person on the street that needs a certain thing. And they're not opposed, they're not, you know, enemies, like the person who can call to this person, the person who can call to that person, they're on the same team. Right? I think I think that's something that people need to realize a little bit more these days. And so, Quranically, also, for those that want to have a mild conversation over some chamomile or something. There are some very beautiful sort of prompts to think about, if you're willing to think about why this is nonsensical, the multiplicity of gods, right? multiplicity of divine beings, and of them is that you really have no authorization to say that. And that's it. Even, you know, the term throughout the Quran, these are what names you call them, the Quran is just turns the lights on for you,
right? You could have everyone in society telling you something. And so naturally, it sticks, where, you know, so impressionable. And then all of a sudden, the Quran says, Yeah, but these are names that you call them. Ibn al-Qayyim explains that very common phrase in the Quran, when it's dismissive of shirk, of setting rivals to God, he says, Think about it, it's like you calling the skin of an onion steak, right? Yeah, what's that gonna do? You can call it whatever you want, it's still not going to be steak, it's still not going to give you your essential amino acids, and it's not going to have proteins, or it's the skin of so you called it that. So let's go, let's just not have selective memory, you call that God, number one, right? Another Quranic principle is very profound, is that the Quran in two different verses speaks about the impossibility, the logical impossibility of there being multiple gods. In one of them, it says, If there were other gods besides the one and only, the think of Greek gods, right, that they're sort of the universe being their battlefield, and their power grabs, the universe would be in ruins. So without getting into the complexity, without being a Stephen Hawking's or someone, you know, of that level of intelligence, just simply looking at all just it works out, you know, the supply chain existed before the Industrial Revolution. All of that, even on the micro level, even on the local level, means that there wasn't two chefs spoiling this broth, there wasn't two captains sort of playing tug of war over the ship. There wasn't one being saying the sun's coming up from that way, another one saying it's coming up from that way, then they split the sun in half in the tug of war. So that's one notion. And that verse, the scholar said, is dismantling in the souls, the concept of dual or multiple equal gods. Right? So it can't be multiple equal gods
could just be finished. Yeah, you know, a person might say, I'm sorry to get sort of philosophical here, but the person might become polemical, I mean, and say, what if they're they have equal power, but they happen to be aligned? Yes. Yeah. And I was actually gonna say the same thing before you said it's a common retort. You're gonna word it better than me. That's a common retort. What if they have the same will? Or what if they never disagree? Right? Equally powerful, but they never disagree. How would you answer? Well, usually I say, well, if they have the same will, then they're not two beings, right? And you're just playing language games, because that's one of it, right? The most fundamental quality of a being is its will, its volition, right? And on the other hand, if you are saying they have the exact same will, but they're so they're two beings, and it happens coincidentally happens to align all the time, right? No one has leverage over the other, and they are distinct. Well, that can they disagree hypothetically, right? You're gonna have to say yes, because it's two separate beings. If they can disagree, then it is impossible for them to never disagree since they're an infinite being. Yes. So if you do the math, theoretically, they can. It must happen. Law of probability has to catch up. And so that's sort of the Quranic notion about let's not ever imagine the folly of multiple equally powerful gods. Right, right. The other one, and this is a very relevant one, because it speaks to how religions per se, or God's message per se, has been appropriated by people for power and control, which is the notion that there's a hierarchy of gods, right? Yes. And there's gods, and there's demigods. And so Allah Azawajal says elsewhere in the Quran,
If there were other lesser gods, the way you claim, that's what the Arabians, right, the pagans of Arabia, the idolaters, and every idolater, and every polytheist in human history usually goes that route, right? Yeah, yeah, of course, there's the big guy, the big g, but then there's also others. True equity between gods is actually fairly rare in idolatrous systems. It's almost always a hierarchy. There's usually even with the Greek Zeus is on top, and then the other ones are sort of below, and etc, etc. So, okay, yeah. Awesome. So the Quran then says if that's the case, which is the majority, then they would have sought the favor of the lord of the throne, of the almighty, the supreme. Yeah. In other words, what, why aren't you? Go to the source. Cutting the middleman. That's right. How is it logical to accept a dependent being who like needs and fears and wants from a god? Just go to that god. I got a little another Daoist story for you, like relevant to that. So, you know, growing up as a Christian, and I was a practicing Christian, I understood and studied and read the Bible and stuff like that. It's funny, because when I accepted Islam, a lot of my extended relatives that didn't like it, they almost like acted as if I had forgotten everything, like I had never heard of Christianity before. So sometimes they would almost try to like explain like very, very basic things. I had one, one person tell me one time, you know, they were, they lost something. And so they made a prayer to St. Anthony, right? Because St. Anthony is the patron saint of losing things. Okay. And so I was like, like, I am familiar with Catholicism enough to already know that. All right. I said, I said, back to my aunt, I said, Well, who did St. Anthony pray to when he lost something? And, you know, it's like, I'm guessing he prayed to God. When I lose something,
I go straight to the top. You know, there's no real answer to that, you know, even even with with Jesus, right? According, if you take and obviously, we don't agree with the narrative of the Bible, as it stands now, with crucifixion, etc. But, you know, if you take it at face value, there he is on the cross, dying, praying to God. So what are we doing? If we want to be like Christ, then we should do like he did, we should pray to God. You know, I, I used to teach at a seminary for a new Muslim converse called Knowledge Gate. It was like a little startup type thing that me and my friend started back in Brooklyn. And one day I was teaching, teaching how to pray, and wash up and two Jehovah witnesses walk in and sort of they were a little bit overbearing, and they wanted to have a conversation. In front of class. Oh, yeah, of course. And he's just like, okay, fine. And so we did that. Long story short, they said to us, you know, you believe Jesus is a prophet. And we believe Jesus is a prophet. I said, What? Wait, you don't believe he's God? I honestly didn't know at the time. They say, No, we believe he's a prophet. I said, Oh, that's amazing. Then they go. And we only pray to him because like, Oh, God. Like, what was the point of like, saying he's not God? You claim sort of you assert that he's, you know, worshipable. They had you. They had you. I just felt so deflated. I was like, hold on. But why don't you just pray to God? If he's a prophet? Like, what's the bifurcation here? They're like, No, we can't approach God. And that's always sort of the logic. And even in the claim speaks about this in terms of like the minor shit that could happen within the Ummah, you know, this, this idea that I am unbefitting.
You know, I am beneath approaching God directly because God is pure and I'm sinful. Yeah. And so it's a common law sort of guided me just to ask them in complete innocence at the time, like, I was not very trained in this discourse with Jehovah's Witnesses in particular, I said to him, Wait a minute, you can't approach God because you're sinful and God's pure. So what's Jesus? Is he sinful or pure? And he stopped for a second. I said, because if he's pure, you can't approach him the same way you can't approach God. And if he's sinful, then he can't approach God the same way you can't approach God. And then he promised to come back next week and never came back. But that notion that it sort of it. Is it befitting to be taken as a God if they're not perfect? What is a God? Yes, it's not the perfect being, you know, Napoleon, not Bonaparte, Napoleon, who used to rap with Tupac? Oh, okay. Okay. I wasn't sure where we were going. You know that Napoleon was supposedly Muslim, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sort of the the agenda, right? Yeah, yeah. The curious agenda. It's just I say that because people nowadays are still want to talk about I'm just like, guys, it's irrelevant. He came, he left. Let's just, you know, if he was Muslim, we just we'll find out later. Yeah, yeah. Not that I believe there's any substantiation behind it. Anyway, Napoleon Muta'a, Muta'a Bil, who used to rap with Tupac, he has the first time I ever met him, he has an amazing story of why he chose Allah, right? Why he became Muslim. And Tawheed, he said, and this is what's crazy about it, it shows you the compelling explanatory nature of Islam. He says, I, my parents were killed by Muslims. SubhanAllah. Like, you know, not good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bug life. And so that that would already disqualify you from ever wanting to consider Islam.
Like in my head, it's like, all right, that's like, if the stocks, this, the odds are stacked against anyone, it's someone whose parents were murdered by Muslims. Then he grew up in foster care in Christian home. And that, again, is going to sort of like compound the odds that you're being indoctrinated into Christianity growing up. He says, and there was something about Christianity that never settled well with me. And I couldn't like, not object to whenever it was preached, which is the notion that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Wow. So he's like, in my head, like, that's not a God, God, that's somebody with powers, you know? And he said that used to haunt me that, what do you mean God has a day off? What do you mean God rests? Like, what if I need God on his day off? What if I need God when he's resting? I need God. God should not need anything. He should be sort of available to me with unlimited resource and unlimited care. And he's got my back. He doesn't clock in and clock out, he says. And until years later, I came across one verse in the Quran. I don't recall how he was introduced to the Quran, but I guess someone was preaching to him on the street, Muslims that were casually discussing Islam with him. And they said, God said in the Quran, he is the one who created the heavens and the earth and everything between them in six days. That's the sort of Christian Genesis story. But then he says, And not the slightest fatigue touched us. He said, yeah, that's a God. I have a brother in the masjid here who became Muslim in Ramadan. And he just googled us, showed up. He said, Hey, you guys are the Jesus Mosque? I was like, yeah, we're the Jesus Mosque. He's like, listen, I the reason I came here is because I have been Christian my whole life. And I never knew what we believed about Jesus. I was like, what do you mean? He said, I just discovered that we believe he's God. Yeah. He said, and I'm not buying that.
And I've never believed that. And I cannot believe that. And so I googled alternative explanations, found Islam, looked up masjid, you were the close man. He just walked in first day of first Monday of Ramadan. He took the shahadah in my office in the quiet. He's like, by the way, I went home. I spoke to my mom. She didn't know it either, that we meant like the big G. Right, right, right. It just doesn't sit well. It doesn't sit well if you're if Allah gives you the sort of the divine grace and inspiration to think through it and break past the groupthink, the herd effect, the inherent conviction. No, it really does run afoul of sort of, I think, human intuition. But that one doubt that you mentioned is very powerful about approaching God directly versus approaching through another means. And it reminded me of something that happened, actually, in my time at Medina. I was hanging out with some guys that around Jabal al-Hajj, right. And they have the shahadah and stuff like that and the masjid there and people selling tea and stuff like that. And somebody who was there on Umrah, they must have they saw us speaking English, me and a couple other students. And so he came and he said, you guys are university students. We obviously look like Jamia students. You know, we have a look to us. And yeah, he's like, can I ask you a question? He might have been from Bangladesh or somewhere. And we're like, yeah, sure. And he said, I have people in my country, you know, Muslims that, you know, they worship other things. You know, they call out to other things. And the logic is similar to what you said, that if there was a king, right, you don't approach the king directly. You have to go through like the messenger, the representative or even here in the U.S. We have like, you know, the mayor's office or the senator's office. You're not going to get, you know, an audience with the senator right away. You're going to get his intern or whatever. You're going to get, you know, someone who's a representative at the office. And he's like, how can I how can I respond to this? And humbly, you know, Allah just kind of put it on my tongue.
But the answer I gave him was, well, the king needs that because he's imperfect. Right. Like the king, everything that the king uses when it comes to the representatives, you know, he can't be everywhere at once. He can't know everything at once. He has to have the spies. He has to have the guards. He has to have the the whole entourage. Right. Because of his weakness. Right. Like that's actually all those people is who he depends on. And if all those people leave and there's just one sort of lonely king by himself, he's not going to get a lot done. Right. As opposed to, you know, the creator of the universe, the lord of all the worlds, then he knows everything. Right. And he's able to hear everybody's dua at once in all the different languages and respond and able to meet everybody's needs. And like you said, and not even have anything that doesn't even affect him when it comes to fatigue or it's not even an effort to do so. Right. So it's a subtle point, but it's something that's really important. And it gets us in. It's also not. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Please. Oh, no, no, no. For your thought, please. No, I was just going to steer the conversation to incarnation because I want to deal with that before we go on to the next thing. But I want to hear what you have to say first. So this is like a huge subject for me. Yeah, go. I don't I don't want to hijack your podcast. We got time. This is our I used to always wonder. So why doesn't the Quran address atheism? And it's perfectly wise that it doesn't address atheism because no such thing as God, we're going to respond and say, at least to ourself, no such thing as an atheist. We actually know deep down inside, you are incapable of denying this, even if you can distract yourself from it by staying plugged to whatever. Right. And so there's no such thing as an atheist. OK, so if there's no such thing as an atheist, like this has not troubled me, but like intrigued me for easily 15, 20 years since I started sort of like learning about Islam and you in my teenage years.
But if Islam recognizes that everyone has an internal recognition of the divine, everyone believes in God. Yeah. Then why does the Quran speak so much about how different God is? Like what is Tawheed? Tawheed is not some sort of like abstract fact. It's not a theoretical in the in the clouds. Tawheed means to single Allah out in everything that's particular, that's exclusively his. Right. That's what it means to be an Islamic monotheist, if I can use that right. Right. That's a lot. God is so different, to your point, from the imperfections of humanity. And so that's why the Quran goes to such great lengths to inculcate in the souls just how awesome Allah is, because unless he is separated, forgive me for the hand motions, but, you know, conceptually speaking, we're separating our hands. You recognize God's difference. God's not going to make a difference. Yep. That's the whole idea. You know, like theology or believing in God, deism, I don't just mean separatist watchmaker, but like in general, believing in a God, a theos, is alive and well. It always has been, always will be, inshallah. Right. The vast majority of humanity, like you said, can see to this point and accept it, internalize it. But the glory of God, the weight of God's greatness, the, you know, the immense love and compassion and justice and wisdom, that settling in the hearts is what makes God relevant. Yeah. And that's it's not a part of it is sort of like emotional, psychological. We talk about the God image and whoever wants more can read up Dr. Othman Omar Jiz, the alchemy of divine love at Yaqeen. Phenomenal research him and Dr. Hassan Alwan have been doing on this issue.
But even just now, I'll use the word theoretically, now that you know what I mean, just in terms of the informational element, not the experiential, like how do I project my assumption of God based on my relationship with my parents? That's the psychological front. But just informationally, look at how much the Quran speaks about who God is and isn't, because that's not a given. Like right now, we're so blessed from the Quranic worldview to sit there and say, you know, it's completely logical for God not to have like a board of trustees or intermediaries or all that. But it's also not. Yeah. God is not sort of God's existence, God's greatness and those sort of superficial abstracts is logical. But God's perfection is revealed. Yes. Is not sort of reason. And that's profound. That's very profound. It goes against the idea, sort of the, you know, there's, as you well know, there's a certain strain of thought that is like very hyper rationalist. Right. Well, if we just kept on thinking about it, then we would realize that not only does God exist, but it's a perfect God and that there are no intermediaries and stuff like that. And what you're kind of saying is that actually, no, we depend on revelation for that, that if the Quran, if we didn't have the Quran, for example, you know, that that would be something that people would differ about. And that we wouldn't have as much clarity about. Negative theology. God's so perfect that he can't be described. Yeah. Yeah. That that that is what I fear. Remember I said I don't fear atheism, but the nones, right? Oh, the nones of like, I can't. God's so great that I can't think about him. Like, whoa, hold up. You just like the purpose of life is dependent on you thinking about him the right way. And I think he is false humility, too, because a lot of people, you know, you'll see for those watching. Inshallah, when my forthcoming paper on perennialism comes out, I talk about a children's book called Old Turtle. I don't know if you've ever read Old Turtle.
You know, don't but read it anthropologically. Right. Because it basically is an advocate. It was written in 1992 for negative theology. Basically, like you can't say anything about the divine because it's so different and so completely just like special. It's like we just just throw up your hands. It's just like we can't know anything. We can't say anything. And that's that's you find the strain of thought. It's got a false humility. Right. That's tucked in there. And this strain of thought is actually fairly strong within like like Muslim populations. Right. In different sorts of, you know, groups. But it's it's counter to the Koran. It's counter to to the disposition that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala expresses through the Koran and clarifies. Absolutely. Only. The ayah says what? Those who disbelieve, who follow all these different dogmas will not stop until the clear proof comes to them. That clear proof is what? A messenger from God reciting to them his verses. That's the clearest proof. You know, say to them, oh, Muhammad, I'm only cautioning you with revelation. Nothing more powerful than that. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's that's that's a really significant point. So there's two things that I want to that I want to tackle before we finish up here. And one of them is incarnation. OK, the idea that the divine can become part of the creation. And the second thing I want to get to is sort of the formal deism, which you mentioned deism. But we're talking about like formal deism, the watchmaker, the idea that God just OK, I believe in a God. All right. He started everything and then he stepped back and he kind of is just letting everything sort of play out. So there are some let's go back to incarnation, let's say.
And this is sort of comes in with with Jesus and and the Trinity and stuff like that, that God can do whatever he wants. All right. That's sort of the tack that the pro incarnationists always sort of say. And we can throw in there with the with the, you know, with the Christians sort of there was a recent article that was very controversially released in a certain Muslim academic journal about Hinduism and idol worship within Hinduism and the basic sort of, well, we're not just worshiping the statue or the effigy or the image, we're worship, we're actually welcoming the divine to inhabit and incarnate the effigy or the image. And like for Muslims, like big deal, both both haram, both shirk. But that's a strong Shubha or a doubt that let's just say like many people fall into as far as human population goes, how do we respond to to people who claim that and claim that, well, God can do whatever he wants, the divine can do whatever they want, and if the divine sees fit to come into human form or statue form or enter into the creation at all, then he can. So let us establish first that one of the greatest blessings in Islam is the fact that it was understood best and lived best by its earliest generations. And that was sort of stamped. The approval of those generations was stamped Quranically. You were the best community ever brought up for humanity. And so the model communities being there gives us such reassurance that we're not grasping through the fog. We're not sort of reading into Islam what we want to read into it with all the cultural variables and Eastern, Western, pre-modern, post-modern antiquity. Right. None of this. It's just and there are certain factors that the earliest generations of Islam
had the utmost clarity on to give you conviction that cannot be challenged, that this is the desire of the divine. The divine wants you to know X, Y and Z. Reality is A, B, C. And of them is that Allah Azawajal is not a part of his creation. You know, for the first few hundred years, the Muslims were unanimously agreed on this being categorically incompatible with Islam. You know, Bukhari and others and these are like hundreds of years into it, say the Muslims unanimously agree that it is irreconcilable with Islam to believe that the creator and the creation, the lines can be blurred. Even SubhanAllah in the earliest sort of specialist groups. I call them specialist groups like spiritualists. Even the earliest Sufis like al-Junaid Rahimallah, it's reported about him as Ibn al-Qayyim cites that he said the reality of Tawheed is to recognize the distinction between creator and creation. Right. And so interesting. That was great visionary foresight to see that other nations and potentially sort of some threatening could happen in this nation of the line being blurred because Islam does recognize the concept of union with God, al-jami'i ma'allah, togetherness with God, right? God being the ultimate reality, but it doesn't mean he's the only reality. Right. So that sort of absolute necessary threshold needed to be established. And they all did and they all agreed on it. So it's reassurance enough that this is not sort of like an interpretive exercise. And depending on your hermeneutics, your interpretive framework, you can arrive at your own conclusions and it's all gravy. And oh, absolutely not. The ummah was not left in the dark for a few hundred years till God sent you or God sent whoever you trace your ideologies back to or your theology back to. That's number one. Very important.
Number two. So how do you reconcile all these verses? Maybe that's for a theology class. I mean, just I would say. God being the ultimate reality, al-haqq, that is one of his names, yes, but it also means he's real in everything he told us about him. Right. Epistemic sort of first dibs, epistemic superiority. I think a lot of people and a lot of these arguments that come from esoteric sort of avenues, they downplay sort of what Allah reveals about himself and how Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala talks about himself and the information that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gives about himself. So it's almost like if we have a data set, then that has to be first and foremost. It's like we can't jump the line. Right. We have to first reckon with all of the information that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gave us about himself. And then everything else is after that. Right. A lot of preconceived notions. Absolutely. Yeah. All of that has to do with inside the ummah. But what about if you're talking about dawah to a Christian or dawah to somebody who's just not convinced that incarnation can't happen? How would you respond to that type of person? OK, just if I can just steal one sentence on the last category, everything about Allah is real because we spoke about it a little bit of in an abstract way, that includes he's a real creator, because if you believe it's all the same, then he hasn't really created, has he? So you're actually denying who God is. This is like a beautiful point. That's very nice. Multiple times with Dr. Hatem El-Hajj just to grab credit for it. He's real, including being a real creator, which means the creation has to be real as well. Yes, relativity. We're contingent beings. He's independent. But that's a major point. That's a major point because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and Sheikh Abdullah Shankiti used to always refer to the fact that the ability to create
was sort of the most conclusive proof that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala uses in the Quran. Right. Do they create themselves or are they created? Right. But what have they created? Right. These sort of sort of, you know, out of all the things that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala does, the creation is sort of like the most stark thing that reveals the difference, the fundamental categorical difference between the divine and the not divine. So existence out of non-existence is the clearest proof. So if we fudge the lines and we say that, well, this is just really a. Manifestation or in the neoplatonist sort of scheme, an emanation, right, then that wow, subhanallah, I had not thought of that before. That's that's very profound. Masha'Allah. Yeah. And so now outside sort of the the Muslim community indwelling. Well, let us say that God can do whatever he wants and God does and is to be believed for epistemic soundness, whatever he said he did, where is the paper trail? Where did exactly did he say that he authorized created beings or upgraded them into semi-supernatural, you know, lesser God beings or anything of that nature? Because anybody can use this line of thinking, which is really an aesthetic line of thinking. But in reality, it's just faulty analogies. Like the Christians going to say, you know, Jesus is peace be upon him. Jesus Christ, you know, raised the dead or cured the leper or fine. And so that does that mean he's God, right? He didn't have a father. Well, does that mean Adam is a greater God because he had no father, no mother, right? It's a slippery slope, philosophically speaking. And then you go into sort of Hinduism where any being or object at times can be reflective of the divine. Then we're either going to have to accept it all or come with a more epistemically principled approach,
which is he's our reference point, subhanahu wa ta'ala. Yeah. What do you think about, you know, an answer that I have given to this doubt sometimes is that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can do whatever he wants, but he cannot be everything, right? Because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, for example, cannot be imperfect. I think that's usually what I bring it back to. So that that precludes certain types of actions. And just the way that it's worded linguistically, it's kind of sort of like a language game to make it seem like it's an imperfection. But in reality, it's actually because of his perfection that he can't do some things. He can't lie. Right. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can't forget. He can't oppress or wrong anybody. Right. Are we going to say that, like, not oppressing is a nux, right, is some sort of deficiency? Or is it just the language game that we've constructed to make it seem that way, when in reality that demonstrates his perfection? Right. So that's a line of argument I've used to kind of say that, well, you know, to say that he can't become incarnate in his creation is not an imperfection. It's actually because of his perfection that he can't do it, because in order to do it, it would demonstrate an imperfection, a limitedness of, you know, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think about that sort of response? Is that you feel like that's sound or effective? Come on, man. So. I'll suspend judgment on sort of the wording, per se, but the principle of reframing it the way you do is, I think, very prevalent, Quranically speaking, because the Quran often uses terms like wama kunna or wama yam baghi, wama yam baghi is straightforward. It expressly says it is not befitting. Right. It's contrary to the definition, right, language game, the definition of God for there to be a son for God. Right. Yes, that's better. Son equals resemblance, son equals dependency, son.
Right. Yeah. And so it would be contrary to the definition of a uniquely perfect, perfectly unique God. Even our eternality, that son of God, is he going to be a God? But then he has a start point. He has a birth date, all of these things. And so even even the other ayah, wama kunna, and there's many wama kunnas, but they're always negating sort of what is unbefitting of the of a God. And he says wama kunna mu'adhibina hatta naba'atha rasoola, we would not punish without first sending a messenger. We would not. But the wording we would not means it is unmatching with our justice, unbefitting of our equity and our compassion. Right. Better language than he can't. Right. Yeah. I don't know. Just yeah, I just I shy away from it. And I think also quranically, just if we're talking quranic worldview and theology to the quranic worldview, not spending too much time on this is also important. And that's why sort of like in passing, the quran response to some of these potential objections or propositions or counters. But the quran spends way more time speaking about illustrating for us even the form of stories, historical events with prophets, with rebels. Right. Who Allah is way more than who Allah isn't. Right. Because we spend too much time sort of tackling who Allah isn't. It actually unintentionally adds credence and validation. Like if I were to go to a king and say, you're not a loser and you're not a lowlife and you're not impotent and you're not. He's going to give me an extended tour of the dungeon he's going to do, because unless these were imaginable about me, you wouldn't have gone out of your way to sort of disqualify them. Retail. Right. Right. It's almost like there's a zam, there's an accusation and it almost grants it grants it some sort of validity to respond to it, you know, in the first place. So, yes, are there things contrary? And I know I know I get so many questions in the youth with this stuff.
Like, can God create a God as powerful as himself? Like, wait, I need to identify your request before you submit the application. Yes. What do you mean create something as powerful when he's not created? Yes. Right. You know, God goes against each other. Right. Or or the famous can can can God create a circle with four corners? Right. Or a rock so heavy you can't lift it. Yeah. Those are contrary, not just a definition of God, but definition of circle and rock. Yes. Rock is a finite object. Language is powerful. Yeah. No, it's important to you. It's important to the youth to demonstrate how how these are really just language games being played and that they don't they rely upon fudging the definitions of what these concepts are in order to sort of, you know, posture like they stand some sort of threat to divinity. And the most fundamental one, Sheikh, is truth. Right. I'll never forget when my my philosophy professor in undergrad, you know, she said something very wrong about Islam. And it was like an Abrahamic religions class, but she was like an atheist philosopher. And she looked at me and she she infantilized me. So maybe it's trauma. We can swap stories, Habibi. And she looked at me and she's like, you know, you religious people are really cute. You guys actually think that's the whole problem. You actually fundamentally think that there's such a thing out there as truth. You have your truth. And so and so the person she was citing from in class has his truth. And I wish I wish I had to know how, you know, back then to say, ma'am, is that true? Right. That true? Because you're claiming the truth is there's no such thing as truth. Yes. So it's a circular game that sort of someone could be, oh, man, as deep as profound. But it's just not right. It's just a ruse. We need a book. Dogma. We need a dogma. Exactly. No, we we need a book of these sorts of exchanges in the classroom because you have one. I have I have one.
You know, when I was right before I took my jihad, I took a class on Islam and had a similar experience with a professor, non-Muslim professor teaching about Islam in a very problematic way. And it's a very I think it's a fairly common sort of thing, sparring in the classroom, infantilizing professors, arrogant professors that sort of trying to cut you down as a person of faith. We really need to gather some of these stories, I think, and put them together, because I think Muslim college students could benefit from from realizing. And I have the same sort of the same sort of reflection. It's like, man, I know what I would say now if I were back when I was a 19 year old kid, you know, 20 years old, you know, you don't either. You're you know, you're just sort of a deer in headlights. Right. You're sort of caught in the moment. And you didn't expect this person, this professor to act that way towards you in my case. And I don't want to take up too much time with this. But I had somebody basically it was it was a particular book and some very sacrilegious things were done that were against Islam. Like the Koran was desecrated in a particular book that we had to read as required reading for the class. And I was not a Muslim, but I was coming, you know, I was researching Islam. I was very sympathetic to it. And I put up my hand. I said, you know, I think that that was wrong. You know, I think that he shouldn't have done that. It's very disrespectful, et cetera, et cetera. And the response that I got, this professor said, well, what would you like to do? Would you like to issue a fatwa to have him killed? So that was the you know, these these moments are very real. These moments are very real. And I know that they're on the minds of a lot of youth. So it would be a good thing, I think, if we gathered some of these sorts of stories and showed sort of both what people are up against, how, you know, the academia is not a neutral space, right? The classroom is not a neutral space. It's actually a battlefield, an ideological battlefield every day, every class, but
also with a with a mind to try to embolden students, embolden Muslim students and prepare them and make them feel like they're not alone. But that's a whole other probably podcast. Yeah. So last thing. So we're talking about now. OK, so somebody they've come to the conclusion that whether there's something or nothing, they say there's something. OK, there is divinity. There is some sort of divine force they've come to. They had to make a choice. Is it multiple or is it one? Is it Tawheed or is it not? And they've come to the idea that, OK, it's Tawheed. There is no sort of either multiple incarnation or pantheism or idols of any sort of any sort. It's just Tawheed. OK, there is one thing left, and that is who is the God that they believe in? Right. Because the content of who that God is is significant. And it's what we were just talking about. You know, there are valid, I think, Christian points. Sometimes Christians, when they I've heard Christians respond because Muslims sometimes will say, hey, we believe in the same God. And some Christians will hit back and they'll say, well, actually, no, you don't, because we believe that Jesus is God. We believe in a Trinitarian God. Right. And you guys don't. And that's a fair point. I mean, like the content of what we are defining God as are different. Right. Even if like the figure sort of in a historical sort of way is the same. Differences make a difference. Differences make a difference. Exactly. And so there's sort of this conception. You can believe in one God and you can believe in, you know, sort of the absurdity of shirk and the absurdity of sort of incarnation or idol worship. But one conception that remains is the sort of deistic conception of God, which is that God, he started the universe. He you know, he's a watchmaker. He pressed the start button and then stepped back and let it all happen.
What's the difference between the content or the substance of who that God is versus the God of Islam versus Allah, the God of Tawheed? Yeah, if that's God, then it's not right. Like what makes it not God? Maybe that's a different way to put it. So let me try, since we are sort of building to the conclusion to circle back to my preferred pastoral approach, because I am so confident that the souls go on strike from a God like that. Right. They will refuse to trust, to submit to Islam. Why would I submit to a God that, you know, left me out to dry? You know, OK, fine. He created me, you know, at some point in time or he created, you know, an atom that became me through the evolutionary process, you know, but a God I cannot relate to. I cannot bear to think about. I cannot bear to think about for so many different reasons. But and that is why saying Tawheed as a worldview is really about believing in a God in such precise and detailed ways that you're able to see the world as a reflection of his greatness, his actions, his wisdom, his power. So it's not Tawheed as like a singular thing. It's seeing the world through his names and attributes. Yes. Relating all things like the the most recent book I was reading. I know it's a little bit different, but an easy parallel is Hold On To Your Kids. Oh, nice book. It's a great, funny story with the book, but for a later time. The idea is that orientation is the most fundamental need of a human being.
I need like direction, orient myself. Of course, he's using it with regards to parents, and that's important. But he's saying, like, think of the example of being lost in the forest, not knowing how to get out. Do you really care what you're going to eat? You don't care. I got to get out of the forest, out of this jungle, this confusion, the entanglement. And so clarity on God is what we mean by Tawheed. Separating God from false gods is what we mean by Tawheed. The better you can do that, the more you can sort of invite someone. And that's sort of the Quranic narrative. I remember one time, a shorter story, a guy came into the Muslim Youth Center. I was, like, late high school, and he said, you know, you have a distant God in Islam. Right. That's a common critique from Christians. Right. Not personable, not approachable. Right. Whereas our God came in the flesh because humans need to relate to God. Right. And I wish I would have said. Yeah. Right. One of those. Right. Another book. Another book. What I wish I would have said. But the idea is, yeah. So what are the qualities of the God who came in the flesh? Like the personable, how much acquaintance do you have with him? And almost anything anyone will ever recite has an entire name for it in Allah's names and attributes. Yes. God is Al-Wadud. He's the most loving. SubhanAllah. So without tainting him by blurring the line with creation and creator and creation, he is Al-Wadud. He is the most loving. SubhanAllah. The most merciful. Every surah in the Quran pretty much starts with the most compassionate, the most merciful. And so and I got to just be honest, saying this even to Muslims, that reintroducing yourself to Allah is the only way you're going to actually want to have a relationship with him, which is the greatest treasure on earth. Knowledge of Allah. You know, Abdullah al-Mubarak, that famous aphorism. He says that masakino ahl al-dunya, right?
He's almost like sympathizing and saying like these poor people that are obsessed with the material world or the worldly life, not just material, even like obsessed with ego, right? They left this world. Their whole life expires. Walam yathooqoo lathidha al-aishi feeha. And they didn't get to taste the sweetest, the most delicious thing in life. They said, what is that, O Imam? He said ma'rifatullah, to be cognizant, to be recognizing of God. So it's the sweetest thing in life. It outdoes, you know, the pleasures of all of the people that indulge day and night in shallow pleasures. But how do you do that? It's through like, how did God create me? Going back to that point and give me oxygen and a planet and didn't give me the most important thing I need, which is guidance in my day to day and a framework to connect with him, which is my greatest need. Yes. Like that is a source of resentment, not the source of relationship. Definitely. Yeah. No, the deistic God is kind of a cold, remote, sort of uncaring God, basically just, you know, turns over its quote unquote children, right? Not literal children, but like, you know, if we have kids like it's like setting them off into the world and you're on your own as opposed to the Tarbiyah, right? Throw them in the deep end as opposed to the Tarbiyah and the here's the guidance. And this is sort of an expression of my mercy and the constant sort of care and upkeep and things like that. Two completely different conceptions of of who God is. That's what I think they should have, and he says to his people like obey God, you know, accept God. And then they were unethical, cutthroat capitalists, basically. That's what they were in that time. And he said to them, look at the justification. Inna rabbi ala sirati mustaqeem. Why? Why?
Because my God is upon a straight, balanced, perfect path. You want equilibrium in life. You want direction in life. You want definitive guidance, not just like Monday morning memes that who knows whether they're right or wrong or how to apply them or if it's just my algorithm lying to me. Right. Inna rabbi ala sirati mustaqeem. And so even the guidance God gives, but even before that, who God is. You know, the concept of Christianity offering the opportunity of a loving God and Islam, not how wrong, how wrong can a person be? Yeah, every place in the Quran, if you look at the pairing of reward and punishment in terms of Allah's actions, you'll notice a very obvious pattern that when it speaks about the punishment. It speaks about it as an action of God. And when it speaks about the mercy, it speaks about it as an inherent quality of God. So it looks like it's, you know, the complementary pairs, reward and punishment, reward and punishment. But if you're paying attention and there's so much you should really catch it. It's really saying, God, in the event that he acts in punishment, it will be severe. Right. God, who he inherently is, is the most loving, the most merciful. It's like very different. It's the same. Right. Subhanallah. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot. And that's like, you know, I think it's fascinating that the Christians, they try to they try to claim a monopoly on the redemptive power, on the redemptive power and on the love, the love attack. Right. And so some of them, they say, you know, it's like our God is a God of love. Your God's a God of laws. And they're really just exposing themselves. Right. Because they don't have any familiarity. And I'll say this, not only do Christians get it wrong in the sense that they don't have a monopoly on the whole love department when it comes to their conception of God.
But I think the substance and the details of love or the implication or the let's say the the how does that love play out is much clearer in Islam than it is in Christianity. Christianity kind of, you know, hangs its hat on this whole sort of very dramatic supposed, you know, crucifixion, you know, ransom, whatever. But I mean, the rest of the Bible, OK, is is is the God of the Bible as loving as the God of the Koran? I don't think so. That's not the Bible I read growing up, like especially if you go into the Old Testament and I use something like, whoa, really? So it's not providing morality. That's historically. Yes. And then you think even fast forward is not providing morality, a gift from a compassionate, well-intending God. Yeah, right. Taming the beast of alcoholism and interest bearing transactions, zero tolerance policy on these things. Don't lie to yourself and say you can get that close to adultery and you won't fall in and so on and so forth. Muslim majority populations, as much as they've drifted, relatively speaking, from sort of the purest teachings of Islam, still benefit a whole lot from that love God extended. And of course, I mean, I think much of what I said here could be misunderstood as like high horse type stuff. There could be Christians listening to us and read the chapter of Mary. We are not talking Christianity. We believe that there's so much commonality because there should be. There's common roots, but the differences make a difference. And our belief in a loving God is why we're highlighting that in this crossroad, this is the path of the Almighty. Yeah, we're responding to common sort of misconceptions. And if some of a Christian, you know, they want to understand about Islam and they have a certain conception, you know, if they've spent two minutes searching on sort of evangelical or Christian websites,
that supposedly respond to Islam, they're going to be exposed to this line of argument that, you know, the God of, you know, Islam is a death cult. Right. That's one of the things. And and and the the God of Islam is a remote sort of uncaring or like whatever God I say, you know, what about all the Christians who have traveled to the Muslim lands? Like, what do they say? Where are you going to get better hospitality? You're going to get better hospitality, you know, in the Muslim lands. Are you going to get it in the Christian lands? Like just just saying, and these things aren't like conclusive proofs, but you have a lot of people, YouTubers and stuff like that that travel the globe. And what's the thing that we consistently hear back, like reporting from the Muslim lands? Like like you're saying, it's like we have a sort of hospitality, we have a certain certain etiquette, and it's not some inherent thing because of our skin color, because of just because of our culture. These are things that Allah taught us. These are things that are actually manifestations of the loving God and the loving law that he gave us and the duties and responsibilities that he imposed upon us for the for the creation, the proofs in the pudding. Right. Because, you know, I used to laugh because, you know, one of the one of the famous hymns in the church or you will know we are Christians by our love. Right. I'm not sure how familiar with the hymnology of the hymn sort of repertoire of the church. But the proofs in the pudding, you can claim that you have the most loving God and you can claim that you're the most loving sort of religion out there. But I would challenge anybody. Honestly, I would put the love that is expressed by Muslims the world over. I would put it up against anybody in a competition to to see, you know, who sort of is being if this is what a Christian is supposed to be like loving, et cetera, then I think that we're being more Christian. Sorry. Like I think that the Muslims like are killing it, like in a good way, of course, when we're talking about expressing love to other people. And does every group have problems? Of course. Are there exceptions to the rule?
Of course. But I think by and large, if you travel a little bit and if you expose yourself to different experiences, I think that that's on display for people to to find out for themselves. Now, I recall pure research as well. They did a demographic study recently in the past few years on religious communities in the United States and the most inclusive, I guess. Right. The most welcoming the way they framed it was one of the ways that they measured it and controlled for it was ethnically diverse religious communities in the US. Yeah. The Muslim community came out number one. Yeah. So if they could spend money, if they could spend money to get the diversity that we have, they would. Right. I think and it wouldn't work and it wouldn't work. Right. Because the Ayah says, if you spend, that's to say that even Arabs couldn't do it. Right. Let's just quote that Ayah if you don't mind. Allah says, and I mended between your hearts, meaning by sending you the Prophet Muhammad, by revealing to the Quran, if you would have spent all that's on the earth of resources, you would not have been able to mend between their hearts, but only Allah was able to do that. Yeah. And these things are important because, you know, as Muslims in-house problems, we know our problems. Right. And so sometimes we get fixated on our own problems and we've got tons of problems. But I think having that dawah dimension to your lens can actually be encouraging because you can actually look at what we're doing and say, hey, you know what? Are we perfect? No, like we're do we struggle with accepting other sorts of, you know, ethnicities or cultural practices within our own communities? Yes. However, if you go to the local church, like we're doing a way better job when it when it comes to that. I mean, there's some churches such as the Mormons, I believe, like you couldn't be a black Mormon until the 70s. Right. If I'm not mistaken about that, maybe we need a fact check on that.
But I've definitely seen people who personal narratives that that that have have claimed that we have. That's what Guy Eaton said in his book, Rahimahullah, May Allah have mercy on his soul. In his book, The Destiny of Man, he was speaking about how Islam is the natural progression and all objective, impartial thinkers need to just consider that, own that. He said the same way that the law of Moses came with the Jalal, with the might of God, because that that era needed it. And the law of Jesus came with the Jamal, the beauty of God. The law of Muhammad came with Al-Kamal, sort of the total package. That's actually the Arabic is Ibn Taymiyyah, but Guy Eaton was sort of paraphrasing this. And then he went on to say, to your point, he said, and you think about it in a strand of religion that has nationalized their religion. Remember how you said idolatry? You know, it reminded me, right? It's control. I get a God that looks like me and sort of dances to my tune, A'udhu Billah, right? Yeah, I have nationalized religion. It's from this bloodline, you know, elitist, in grouping. Yeah. And then you have another one that has reduced the God to an emotion. So they took these things in extremes, right? Reduce the God to an emotion. God is love comes and it's on the table for everyone for optimal outcomes in this world before the next. Allahu Akbar. That's, I think, a really good place to bring us to the end. Do you have any final thoughts or anything you want to say about Tawheed as a worldview? No, I think we we've oversaid. I'm just afraid. I think that will cause people to forget other parts of what we said. There's so much to say, right? I already there's so much to say, but I like the Divine Love is a good post read if you're interested. But it was always a pleasure. Mamtom. Barak Allahu Akbar. Thank you so much. We benefited so much and we always do. From your experience and your insight and may Allah increase you and make us all sincere and accept from us.
So that's all from us from Dogma Disrupted. Inshallah, we'll catch you next time. Subhanak Allahumma wa bihamdika sharawan la ilaha anta astaghfirullah wa atubu ilayk. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.
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