Latest
1620 / 1956
46
Afterlife
"You Owe Me." Free Yourself from Riba and Debt | The Other Side: Barzakh and Beyond Ep. 18
50
Afterlife
Was it that big of a deal? Your Wudu is Serious | The Other Side: Barzakh and Beyond Ep. 17
118
Roman Emperor Who Almost Became Muslim & Conquest of Jerusalem | Al-Aqsa: Past, Present, and Promise
123
General Psychology
Tested Like the Prophets | UK Tour Wembley Stadium Lecture by Dr. Omar Suleiman
141
The Blessed Land of Al-Sham: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan | Al-Aqsa: Past, Present, and Promise
148
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Tamim al-Dari (ra): The Palestinian Sahabi That Met Dajjal | The Firsts
155
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Adi ibn Hatim al-Tai (ra): From Christian King to Companion | The Firsts
166
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Zayd ibn al-Khattab (ra): The Quiet Brother of Omar (ra) | The Firsts
171
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Tulayha ibn Khuwaylid (ra): From False Prophet to Shaheed | The Firsts
224
Culture
Israel's Ceasefire Rejection, Nurse Fired for Gaza, and the Law of Sacrifice | Imam Tom Live
343
Culture
Biryani Diplomacy: The Illusion of Political Influence & the "Flour Massacre" | Imam Tom Live
357
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Amr ibn al-As (ra): His Wicked Father and “Better” Brother | The Firsts
363
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Khalid ibn al-Walid (ra): The Legendary Military General | The Firsts
504
Quran
Juz’ 26: Mufti Abdul Rahman Waheed and Dr. Zohair Abdul Rahman | Our Afterlife and Our Purpose
620
Allah
Finding Faith Through the Prophet's ﷺ Conviction: Dr. Omar Suleiman | My Moment of Conviction
734
Social Justice
A Conversation with Afreen Fatima on the Plight of Indian Muslims | Dr. Omar Suleiman
745
Prophets
Why Is Asking "Why Does God Asks Us to Worship Him?" Flawed? (Part 2) | Yaqeen Whiteboard
781
Angels
Ep. 13: The Hadith of Jibreel (as) | Angels in Their Presence | Season 2 | Dr. Omar Suleiman
815
Afterlife
Sincerity Shines and Hypocrisy Blinds | Judgment Day: Deeds that Light the Way Episode 25
972
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Anisa, Al-Numan, and Amir (ra): On A Boat From Abysinnia | The Firsts
979
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Khalid Ibn Sa’id Ibn al-'As (ra): A Dream of the Prophet | The Firsts
995
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Zaynab Bint Khuzayma (ra): The Mother of the Poor | The Firsts Shorts
1005
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Shurahbil Ibn Hasana (ra): The Scribe and Commander | The Firsts Shorts
1027
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Al-Shifa bint Abdullah (ra): The Healer and Scholar | The Firsts Shorts
1080
Life of the Prophet (seerah)
Khawla Bint Hakim & Uthman Ibn Madhun: The Righteous Couple | The Firsts
1196
Islam in the West
Dr. Ahmed Osman: The Martyrdom, Funeral, and Burial of Malcolm X | Yaqeen Presents
1549
Acts of Worship
When the Prophet Sent People Home from the Masajid for Taraweeh | Daily Reminders
1664
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
1668
Social Justice
Overcoming Compassion Fatigue, Numbness, and Burnout - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Khutbah
1708
Acts of Worship
Day 24: When the Night Draws its Curtain —The Importance of Tahajjud | Ramadan Strong
1760
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
1761
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
1776
Contemporary Ideologies
Conversations at The Carter Center: Harmonizing Religion and Human Rights
1777
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
1783
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
1805
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
1834
Acts of Worship
Episode 6: The Highest Companionship in the Highest Garden | Prayers of the Pious
Black History, American Muslims, and Conversations about Race
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Dear brothers and sisters, this is your brother Omar Suleiman. I'm here with my beloved brother, friend, Dr. Muhammad Khalifa, who we're blessed to have as a senior fellow at Yaqeen, alhamdulillah. Blessed to have you as a brother and a friend. And your insight, and blessed to co-author last year, alongside Dr. Abdi and Dr. Wright, where we talked about ancestral knowledge, rooting, cultural resistance in Islam, and what that looks like. And subhanAllah, I don't think we anticipated the conversations that would end up happening amongst American Muslims about what the role of culture, particularly when it includes an element of resistance, right? How we fit that all in while still staying true to our ideals of the Qur'an and the sunnah. Is there a contradiction? How do we maintain orthodoxy? How do we not fall into some of the traps that people have warned about, and things of that sort. So I think it was a great paper, alhamdulillah. We had a lot of vibrant discussion in the process of writing that paper, and filtering our own thoughts. And I think that's the blessing of having multiple people writing on the same subject. And I like the way it came out, alhamdulillah. And I think I'd like to start there. Your biggest takeaways from this idea of ancestral knowledge, and benefiting from what's around us and available to us, while maintaining the Qur'an and the sunnah as a filter. What are your main takeaways and reflections on that subject? Yeah. Well, one is that American Muslims have often, because of how Islam came into the community, been told, and perhaps some have made assumptions, that there's a contradiction between ancestral knowledge, ways of approaching and understanding, and Islam. And so Islam has these broad objectives of the shariah. And then, in many cases, it can affirm what local people believe.
But for us, when my parents came to the Nation of Islam, and then through Warras al-Din, and then as we started to learn more about the religion, many of the people who taught that religion could not disentangle themselves from their own ancestral knowledges. So they made assumptions about their ancestral knowledge as being more Islamic, and others that seemed foreign to them as being not as Islamic. So if you don't mind me saying on that point, what's being put out there, the idea is not that this ancestral knowledge is superior to others' ancestral knowledge. It's that everyone, consciously or subconsciously, operates with a whole bundle of ideas and things, and it's important not to impose one over the other in that sense, and always have a core animus in that. Setting the stage, the broad stage, and then making sure that we operate within that. That would be precise. And as well, we have to un-invisibilize. So the fact that some ancestral knowledge has been prioritized over other types of ancestral knowledge has become an invisibilized process. So if you go to just a typical measure, we're here in Minnesota, you would go to most mosques here and say, okay, talk about ancestral knowledges or epistemologies that belong more squarely, you know, within one cultural background. They couldn't separate out how theirs, and because maybe they have positional power in a mosque or organization, how theirs has been sort of privileged above others, and how others have been suppressed. They couldn't trace that out for you. So it does require some – I mean, even though we wrote this piece, I see it as an introductory piece, right? The actions that should follow should require leaders across the states, really, and everywhere to say, okay, are we being – because we can't come on the scene and accuse white folks of doing this with white privilege and then step into a Muslim center
and we're doing the exact same thing from our own – sort of like in our own organizations, and then we step out with the Black Lives Matter shirts on and stuff like that. So we have to be consistent in how we call out privilege and how we try to lift up the voices that have been more sidelined. So when people hear that, a lot of times I think that sometimes it's really just comfort. Some people just feel more comfortable, you know, if we now have the privilege. And there's another type of privilege, which is the economic privilege, that a lot of people can settle and build a suburban masjid. A bunch of families can build a neighborhood around that masjid, and it can be everyone from not just this country or this broader background. It's not just Indo-Pak. It's specifically Hyderabadi. It's not just Arabic. It's specifically a Syrian masjid. And I think a lot of people do it from a sense of comfort. And isn't that kind of the history of religion in America too? Absolutely. When I was in New Orleans, next door we had a Chinese Presbyterian church, and people were just like, what's happening in New Orleans? Why in New Orleans a Chinese Presbyterian? Is that really a problem? And I'm asking so we can flush that idea out. A lot of people would say, what's the issue? We'll be good with the inner city masjid. We'll try to be respectful. We'll try to show up at other masjid's fundraisers. But is it okay that everyone kind of just goes and does their own thing? It is, as long as it's not an invisible process and an assumption that one is more Islamic than another. I think it's perfectly fine for people to develop spaces. But the problem is that when it's a shared space and when folks don't have other options of other places to worship or other organizations to go and hear lectures, and then it's invisiblized that this – I don't have a problem with any epistemological sort of makeup. I don't have a problem with any type of cultural background.
The problem I have is that when you invisiblize some as having priorities and then you make claims about Islam or about Islamic space that it should look more one way or another, that's the problem. So if I'm understanding correctly, someone moves into a city and says, I've got three masjids to choose from. None of them really speak to my cultural makeup, especially if I'm a convert, white convert, black convert, Latino convert, which is, masha'Allah, we have a growing Hispanic population. And so if I understand what you're saying, even those spaces where people naturally kind of form around things that offer comfort, especially with immigrant populations, things that remind them of back home and things of that sort, that there has to be a great attempt to not make other people feel less Muslim because they're less of that particular nationality when they walk into that masjid, less of that cultural background. I mean, I also would push back and say, not with you, but the idea, I don't think it's healthy for the long-term vision of Islam in America that we follow that trajectory. When they say Sunday is the most segregated day in America, I don't think we should aspire to that. And I think that spaces where people are sort of forced to have multiple cultures in a masjid, yeah, it gets more tense. People have to argue a little bit more because this person comes from this country, that country. But I think what eventually is produced out of that masjid is going to be richer. It's going to be better for the community. And I think that is some of our history is that when people came into contact with each other in shared spaces, though it's not pleasant sometimes because it's less comfortable, you know, we're human beings. If we're not going to fight about or have our arguments about culture, we're going to find other things. There's ego, right? So people from the same country, same city will split off and make another masjid, right? That's right. Or make another institution. So that, too, is a part of the American story, though, which is you have Western-leaning, white-privileged-leaning narrative spaces, and black folks show up and say, okay, hold on a second, we need a black history month
or we need a black student union. Or Muslims have showed up and said the same thing. I don't think it's any problem with the pushback. I was only speaking about that when you enter into a space to invisibilize one cultural background as the Islamic norm, that's the problem. I agree with you, though, that if people are being marginalizing, that's un-Islamic. That is if people are not recognizing the human being. But I think that we would agree also that when an immigrant comes, many of them not voluntary immigrants, have come, that they also need to be humanized. I don't have any problem whatsoever with you saying, look, this is for older, Desi individuals in our mosque, this is our night, this is. But when you put the khatib, or when you put the activities, or when you put the causes for concern that you hear in the announcements, and they all resemble one cultural experience, that's when I think it becomes more problematic. Okay. On that note, so there's the philosophical, then it gets to the very practical. Our lived experience as Muslims living together. I think the debate over how can Islam be a universal religion, but then is there room for particularism? Especially when you talk about the indigenous, and especially when you talk about the historical African-American experience. I think that debate especially played out in the community of Imam Wadid bin Muhammad, with the Bilalian movement. What that meant, what were the implications of that. Now going forward, as I think right now you've got a class division that's happening, as you're seeing the landscape of Muslims in a lot of places in America. So Dallas, where I live in Dallas, Dallas has the worst racialized poverty in America. It's a horrible situation of apartheid, and Dallas people don't mix. Now, so someone might tell you Dallas is wonderful. They mean they're Dallas.
They're not talking about South Dallas, and they're not talking about any of the institutions in South Dallas, or the realities of South Dallas. They're talking about their suburb, which is broadly associated with Dallas. But that's what they mean when they say Dallas is wonderful. And Dallas is not wonderful. I mean South Dallas is a horrible situation. We've got the worst child homelessness in the country. One out of every three children in Dallas lives under the poverty line. One out of three children. The school to prison pipeline, horrible. The cycle of violence, it's vicious, right? But when I say Dallas is wonderful, I'm like Valley Ranch is wonderful. You can come to our mezzanine in Valley Ranch, and we have a welcoming community that we pride ourselves on. We try to welcome everyone. Converts, people that are from different backgrounds, people that are from different backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds, people that are from different convert backgrounds, men, women, people with special needs. We try to make that sort of our calling as a masjid, to be that masjid that welcomes people. But how do we, I mean, just the wealth gap is getting worse. And so these masjids are going to reflect that reality. Islamic institutions are going to reflect that reality. Political priorities. And I think it's going to become, and I might be wrong, you tell me, it's going to become less about race, more about class. If I belong to a class, a higher income class, where the goal is essentially to be inducted into a power structure, which in America is dominantly white, right? And to aspire towards that. And so my political priorities are very different than as a community. Whereas other people have a very different political priority. And I think, Allah o A'lam, I mean, it seems like obviously, you know, race will always play into it. Culture will always play into it. But how do you see it as a scholar, the income part of this, the class part of this, that gap? So I interpret even the question differently because oftentimes, like I work with a lot of superintendents at the work I do, a lot of principals,
a lot of school leaders, government officials, ministers of education, and stuff like that. And one very palpable idea here in the United States is that, and the reason I interpret the question differently is because it's often a way that white people push back against talking about race and engaging race. And they'll say it's not racist class, right? And data, and I know you weren't doing that. Right. But I know for sure you weren't doing that because I've heard you talk, and I know that you know that issues of race are very real. Here's the thing, though. Well, it's racialized poverty. So race and class are inherently intertwined. Right. Absolutely. But when you go to, for example, who scores worse, who's kicked out of school, who's removed to school, who's more likely to enter the school to prison pipeline, and you control for race. I'm sorry. And you control for class. It's still very racialized. So let's go to higher income families and just look across the board at black, Latino, white. You find almost the same gaps, even when you do have higher class. Going on to the lower class. So, for example, here in Minneapolis, when it comes to learning data, lower class, lower SES. I shouldn't say low class. I should say lower socioeconomic status. White students outperform wealthy black students. OK. When you look at, for example, education level and recent data, like, for example, an African-American male with a college degree and no prison background has less opportunity and income. Now, this is census data, like national data, than a white male who has a criminal background and no degree. Right. Right. And so you find all of these indicants that not race.
And not only that, if you read some of the historical scholars like me and why not and others, they make it very clear that what Western histories of colonization reveal is that the ways that racial hierarchies were initiated in this country were then extended. Right. To people who are from different religious groups, people from different language groups, people from different socioeconomic statuses. But if you read some of the early historical writers of the Spanish American empire, earlier Victorian America, they would argue that the initial hierarchies and discourses that set those higher hierarchies into motion were race based. Lastly, every single indicate you come to drop out, homicide, arrest, police murder, discipline, even within school detention rates, suspensions. And it's all disproportionate. It's all racially disproportionate. So what does this mean for? And I think this is specific of the question. What does this mean for masjid Islamic institutions going forward where people are trying to figure it all out like you walk into a masjid now and you get a feel for the. There's something that's indicating something like you get a feel. A masjid has a feel. Once you walk into a masjid, it immediately gives you a feel. It gives you a sense of what we call a school climate. There you go. So what's the masjid climate? Now, a lot of so there are people that are well intentioned. There are people that want to say, OK, we recognize that that things have have been wrong. They've been done wrong. We recognize that our masjid, bring it down to like a very practical level. Our masjid has not been has not been helpful. Right. We need to educate ourselves more on race relations in the community. I tell people the story of police brutality all the time, but my masjid in New Orleans,
you know, New Orleans, of course, pre Katrina, New Orleans. I'm from New Orleans. Pre Katrina, New Orleans is very different from post Katrina. New Orleans, the race dynamics entirely changed class dynamics. Right. You know, the Seventh War, Ninth War, all of them got turned into, you know, high end real estate, which which drastically changed the demographics of New Orleans. But in my masjid, funny enough, there was an incident of police brutality. And I've talked about this. I don't want to go into details. It's very it's a very difficult subject to talk about, honestly. But there was a sister who was African-American doctor, Dr. Jamila Arshad, married to a Pakistan doctor, Dr. Kaleem Arshad. And she was murdered by the police on her way home. She was trying to help a kid that got hit by a car. He was riding his bike, hit by a car, and she stopped to help the kid. And they made the assumption that she wasn't a doctor. They didn't believe her. She was trying to resuscitate the kid and threw her into the back of a car. It was a horrible incident. Everyone in my community, I don't want to say everyone. We still have some people that, you know, if only she follows instructions, that garbage. Right. But for the most part, everyone in our community or a lot, the majority of our community had a completely different understanding of police brutality. Now, it was different to them because it was now personal. It was no longer, you know, something happened in the hood. And then, you know, the mom told us about this and this and that. You're saying this new understanding came as a result of as a result of that incident. Right. Yeah. And it provoked the conversation. What do we do different? What do we do better? Right. OK, we understand. Basically, you know, and I want you to just think about it when you have someone who is who came from overseas, who didn't get the police brutality thing, who kind of bought into the just do your job, respect the law and everything will go right for you.
And now that world has been shattered, what do we do now? Right. And so a lot of these messages, then for some of these messages, the discussion is, well, let's start to integrate some of those voices that have been telling us about the reality of America's racist society for a very long time. And what that translates into in terms of policing, in terms of criminal justice, in terms of schooling, in terms of homelessness, in terms of all these different things. Right. And for them, it's like, all right, well, what do we do now? Do we we need to listen more? Obviously, that's that's that's something that that you tell everyone is, well, it's always good to learn, listen to experiences, learn benefits. But what does this translate into in terms of the structures of the Islamic institutions? Does this mean integrating more voices here? Does this mean the more privileged the people that will naturally and the privilege is going to grow? People that are naturally privileged and have better socioeconomic status need to spend more on masjids like there was an idea that we were talking about where. You know, some of the like like in our community in Dallas, like I said, racialized poverty is horrible, where the suburban masjids are going to be expected to spend on the inner city masjids. And, you know, what's that going to look like? Because in Dallas, you got swaths of of poor black and brown folks and you got like sort of the Latinos and there's a growing Islam in the Latino experience in Texas, particularly. What does this look like going forward? How do we start to fix this? Or what do you give people from a practical perspective? It's like a 20 minute question. Which what part of it? I want to answer. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I think practicing Islam in this sense. Right. So, you know, there's a lot of talk in this kind of work around allyship, forming allegiances and serving as allies.
While that could be useful, I think what's a more pertinent discussion is advocacy. Right. How can masjid because I mean, it's not just that mosques have a credibility issue with non-Muslims. You can go into some masjid across America and particular communities and they look like geriatric centers. It's that masjid and Islamic institutions are losing their relevance, even for Muslims in some cases. Right. People not finding comfort going there. I was raised I was born Muslim. I was raised Muslim. And I go into some masjids and I don't feel the embrace and the cultural and not even cultural, just like kindness, man. I mean, like, like, am I welcomed here or not? And that that is, I think, that comes across in several ways. First of all, just the interaction, the personal interaction, how one is treated. What are the topics of the khutba? Do I see myself in the curriculum of the masjid? There you go. What are the issues that I talked about in those announcements? What is the issue? Issues are you taking up? I didn't see many Muslims out there for Fernando Castillo when he got he got killed less than a mile from here. And there are, I think, three or four masjid in this area. There were a couple of Muslims around, but I didn't see any mosques taking that up. Right. And so how are you? So it's a question of relevance. So, for example, Muslims with this Muslim ban, OK, jump up and they want the Latinos, blacks and all of these communities to come and jump on board and support them with that. Are you there? Not you, because I've seen you, but are the is the community there when this border wall hops up? Is the community there when this police violence hops up? Is the community there? Where's the community stance on affirmative action? What's the community stance on black underemployment and a booming economy? Right. And so I haven't seen any of the masjid take these issues up. So the the masjid, the institutional agendas need to reflect.
Oh, absolutely. That's that's I think and I think that's lost on a lot of people. Oh, yes. That's really lost on it. Like they don't you know, it's like, OK, we need to we'll send some people to the protest. Right. I don't care if you come in, exoticize my voice in the mosque. You put a table up, you put me, you put one brother who came out of the nation and you put a moderator and you come in, you exoticize the voice. And then you say, check black history month. That's exoticization. Absolutely. Yes. You know, I'm saying when can my needs be met? How can my needs be met in advocacy, not allyship, but advocacy with the Muslim community? Right. Right. So, you know, for example, ICE, as I told you, I work in schools, has come to literally the boundaries. And when parents say, OK, baby, have a nice day at school and drop their kids off, Rue Ice comes up and arrest the parents almost on school grounds. What have the Muslims said about that? I haven't heard sanctuary muslims, you know, sanctuary movement, you know, 700 plus churches and synagogues. How many sanctuary mosques are there in the country? I was going to ask you that because I haven't heard of it. It's it's it is heartbreaking. Yeah. So you'll find I mean, and a lot of it, by the way, and this is not an excuse, but it does intertwine once again with comfort. Mm hmm. Wait a minute. This is too soon. We will. So it would be a lot easier to come to a mosque because Muslims are used to Salah. Right. Right. Charity. Right. We're going to prepare 200 meals and go serve the homeless. Right. We're going to. Yes. Yeah. I'm not. And let's play it. It's good. It's good because I think, you know, what I tell people is that, you know, we just did the Dallas homeless count where you go on the inner city and not actually we do the whole Dallas and find where the homeless populations are and take the time to speak to the homeless. Understand how you got there, survey them, let them do a needs assessment, track them, come back to them, right. You know, help all the other organizations that are combating homelessness, where to go and where in Dallas is very telling. And for a lot of most every time I've taken a group of Muslims, they're just, you know, because before that was step over the homeless person. It was ignored as populated.
But somehow, hey, they're not dangerous people. Mm hmm. There are various racial backgrounds that you find white homeless people, black homeless people, Latino homeless people. But it's like, they're not scary. Right. It's like, you know, before it was it was just a lot easier to just prepare the sandwiches and drop off the plate or to say, come to this pantry. That's right. Come to this pantry. Just pick up your food in the centralized location. But to like go to like alleyways behind grocery stores and say, hi, how are you? My name is and then have a script and then be warm and then make it be a little bit more comfortable. And then say, hey, what's your what's your situation? No one I've never been threatened by a person who was homeless. I mean, obviously, sometimes mental health issues, not like pulling a gun out on me. Like they're there. You know, most most of the mental health issues are self-inflicted. I used to work in a homeless shelter when I was going to be a grad and I worked the night shift, too. So, you know, they had curfew things. They had like non-intoxicant rules and stuff like that. And even in some of the most challenging, impressive circumstances for some of the homeless brothers and sisters, they were fully human, man, much more than sometimes even my colleagues in the university who would not be real with you, you know. But but you did touch on one other thing that I wanted to respond to. And why is this the case? I think that Muslims, I mean, we've been I've heard speeches from for the last two decades, criticizing this almost like selfishness that these immigrant communities sometimes have. And I've created I've heard other Muslim leaders criticize some of the historical African-American communities as well. I think, though, that their issues are different. I want you know, I think that more has to be written on this. I mean, I think it's a perfect topic for you to to take up. And that is that white that is the immigrant communities identities around entanglements with whiteness and Western identity.
And Western sort of hegemony. And so, like, you know, what was scholars who study identity and assimilation and all of these things argue, many of them is that for almost all immigrant communities have come to the United States of America. They had to almost like in some instances they had no choice. But in other instances, they had to select where in this racial hierarchy they would sort of like identify themselves. They definitely didn't want to identify along with black Africans or indigenous people. And they kind of in the beginning, I'd say for the for a long time, thought that they might have access to whiteness. And some actually may have. I think now, though, is a conversation that needs to be revisited by immigrants. I think that many of them know their fourth generations included that they don't have access to whiteness. And what that means is, is that how do you align yourselves in this sort of new political milieu, this post September 11th milieu? And how do you because I the reason I'm saying this is because I think that part of the reasons that the immigrant community has been hesitant and, in fact, reticent to align and advocate for issues that didn't have anything to do with their own existence is because that they may have saw that as a blocker to their pathway into whiteness. But it should be clear now that they're not going to ever get into that. They should be even a serious or perhaps some of the whitest Muslims know that when they tell somebody they're Syrian, that that's going to bring a different. Actually, I was by your prominent, much of a beautiful brother. I don't want to use his name to respect him because it was an intimate conversation. But he's a white Muslim. He's a scholar. And he was saying how he wears his kufi and his juba. And he said that, you know, in the process, it's like he knows like and he's as white as they come.
He's like, I know when I walk through the airports, I'm not white anymore because of my dress. Like he's lost access just because of his dress. And he said, whereas, you know, you know, African-Americans and other people would greet him with a different type. Like, oh, OK. They also see him as not white. And he was talking about his entanglement. And it's like it's interesting, the cultural apostasy, right, of being a white Muslim and especially wearing a kufi and like, you know, like he was talking about that, that entire experience as well. Yeah. So it's what you're speaking about in terms of there is no there is no pathway. It's becoming clear that the pathways, the community is not there. That that that in and of itself should not be the reason, OK, since we can't be white anymore or since I was white and now I've been racialized in some way. Now, let me align with issues that impact minority. I mean, we should do that because of our faith. Right. So this is actually this is actually one of the most, I think, important elements that I've seen missing in this discussion. Is that largely the community, when they talk about getting involved with issues, it's whether or not it's PR and to the benefit of that initial of that trajectory. Right. And so so even if they're saying we're abandoning that trajectory and we're going to a new trajectory, which stands with the margin line, it still is with the ultimate goal of gaining acceptance and gaining political and social capital. And it's not like, hey, look, you know, if the if the Sunnah of the prophets, I saw them does not inspire you to speak, not just speak out on these issues, but actually like be a part of finding solutions to these issues. And they're out there. They're out there. If you organize effectively, if you if you really are charged towards those things, they're out there. The solutions are out there. Absolutely. I mean, if the Sunnah is not enough, then don't don't reject other things in the name of the Sunnah. It's like, hey, wait a minute. You know, you've got to you've got to. That's not I mean, that's that's kind of veering into another subject. But when do we act out of scriptural imperative as opposed to good PR?
Yeah. You know, like the Muslims now can can take up other immigrant causes, because if we don't take up other immigrant causes or the causes of ice and, you know, or, you know, the abolish ice movement, which ice was formed out of Islamophobia, out of the DHS, which was an agency formed in a climate of Islamophobia. And so, you know, largely Hispanic communities are suffering as a result of a climate of Islamophobia. But if people say that, well, it's good PR or, you know, we should take up for them because they took up for us. No, that's that's such a faulty foundation. It is. When do you do things because it's the right thing to do? And because of the Sunnah of the prophets, I said, as a tourist, I've gone with them. So that'll be the one that I can. Are you not supported except by the way that you that you deal with these that you deal with the most marginalized in society? So it's sad sometimes, but I don't want to be a pessimist, an ultimate pessimist. I do. Inshallah. I see hope. I see people that are in the process of engaging these things just just and I do to imagining reimagining sort of their role as Muslims. And so I see people that are becoming much more sincere citizen. I'll tell you a personally after Philando Castile was killed. Alton Sterling, obviously, right before that, Alton Sterling was in Baton Rouge and somehow his where he was murdered is right next to the Muslim graveyard. So my mom, Alad Hamas, buried like right next to where he was murdered. Like I'm talking about like you could see. I remember just something about that hit me and then Philando Castile and that's where the protest happened. That was July 7. There were a lot of Muslims that came out. Absolutely. Now, after the shooting happens, yes, and you know, the shooting of the officers after the protest and it kind of it was scary because everyone at the protest thought they were being shot at. A lot of the Muslims came back to more and more of these things and I thought that trauma if you were there for PR or a glamour shot, you weren't going to show up to one of those things again because Dallas is as tense as ever.
But they still showed up. It's a small group, but I'm seeing people that are and I want to, you know, appreciate that and also think about how we can offer them pathways. Those that do kind of see, you know what Islam calls me to this. And I want to find a way to start tackling these issues more productively. That's right. In solidarity, even African-American Muslims, one of the things that was sort of rinsed out of us and that was almost like theologically discouraged, right? Like family reunions and other things like that has been this whole notion of how do we engage institutions? How do we engage urbanly? The NAACP, some of the other people that have been on the front line of fighting for the last hundred years. I'm not saying that we have to do everything through these institutions, but that's what that's exactly what advocacy means. And that's what, you know, beyond the allyship, like true engaged community engaged partnerships actually mean. And I do think that there is a pathway. And you're right. I've seen many, many young people and older people, to be honest with you, as individuals. I haven't seen a community shift yet. Perhaps down in Texas. There are some examples of that. It's slow. Yeah. Slowly but surely. Yeah. Inshallah. Slowly. But yeah, maybe not fast enough. Yeah. But I mean, you know, obviously the prophets, I sometimes hope and to expand. And by the way, not not to shift. That is why, you know, Sherman Jackson, Professor Sherman Jackson and others argue that there's so much credibility of Islam in the African-American community. Right. Why was it that in Philadelphia, Detroit, one can say, you know, 30 or 40 years ago, look, I'm accepting Islam and their family would be like, all right, go right ahead. That's that's not the case so much anymore. Even in African-American communities, it still is more than Latino white communities, perhaps, where, you know, kind of like parents and family members completely are upset by that.
No, but part of the credibility came because the nation it wasn't just because of the nation. It was because of the reputation and the actions of the nation and the credibility they had in the community that allowed, I think, folks to accept and embrace them. Because, again, they had credibility. They were doing something. And I think that's what we need to get to, you know, that sincere commitment. That's right. People's welfare. That's right. People's well-being. And obviously with that, inshallah, also would give us because there's a lot of a lot of, you know, concerns about the entire space of activism. Yeah. What are you signing on to? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. And so we're going to start violating the Sunnah. That's right. Going into causes. That's right. We don't really belong to us. Yeah. That we can't affirm or champion because of our orthodoxy. And I think that the more that you are present, the more right, the more weight your voice has to define an agenda. That's absolutely right. And if we have to carve out our own niche as American Muslims, championing very legitimate issues with prophetic paradigms, not for the sake of PR, but out of a genuine concern for the people, that gives us credibility to say, look, there are certain things we can do and there are certain things that we can do and we're going to do them with our absolute, with the spirit, with the prophetic spirit to the zeal of the Prophet. That's right. The himmah of the Prophet, the concern of the Prophet for these issues, not just not just because this is an issue, but really. And I think, you know, a lot of people when you talk about Malcolm, Muslim mosque and OAU, the Organization for Afro-American Unity, he wanted, you know, he only had 120 members at Muslim mosque at its peak, whereas OAU was a lot broader because it didn't require you to be a Muslim. But he really tasked those members of Muslim mosque. He said, you have to champion these issues. You have to show commitments to our people in a way that would make them, you know, consider Islam because he ultimately saw Islam as the solution to racism, right, in that sense, in the broad sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah. That's very true.
I think championing it. So last question, and by the way, Jazakallah khair, this is really helpful. InshaAllah we're going to be writing a lot on these things, inshaAllah. Hopefully we'll go into, I think carving a pathway is very important for people that want to do good. And in the process of wanting to do good, need to realize that sometimes they're going to say really stupid things, and they need to be willing to say that and be vulnerable and then be challenged. That's right. You know, like, so I think I'm, you know, I might think I'm doing the right thing and then, hey, I say something like, actually, your framing is off. And that's part of the ikhlas of it, the sincerity of it, you have to be willing to be challenged on it. And, you know, everyone has to sort of be a part of crafting as much as we can a unified direction that really represents the spirit of the Prophet, salallahu alaihi wa sallam, and the sunnah of the Prophet, salallahu alaihi wa sallam, as much as possible. With that being said, in the last, I think, few minutes, Black History Month. Yes. The framing of, or should we operate within Black History Month? So this is a debate we had at Yaqeen, right? So for the sake of the audience, too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we going to do Black History Month? Is it a Black Heritage Collection? Is it a Heritage Collection? And Black Heritage is one track, and then we do a Latino Heritage and talk about what do you think about, I think, the general idea of Black History Month? Should we, you're a scholar, right? As a scholar, do you operate within, or do we make use of it, or do we, you know, how do we as Muslims deal with it? How does society deal with it? And how do we as Muslims deal with it? And what does that mean for Muslim organizations? Because you mentioned exoticizing. We don't want to do that, right? And we don't want to invite… Black History Month, Cinco de Mayo. Easy Taco Bell, right? Right, right. You know, Trump tweeted he was at Taco Bell, and Cinco de Mayo says, happy Cinco de Mayo while he was eating a burrito, a gordita, right? So we don't want, you know, Muslim organizations might say, alright, we need to recognize Black History. We're going to celebrate Black History and Black History Month. And I pray that, inshallah, because at least with the issues and just the makeup that we have at Yaqeen, obviously, that we wouldn't fall victim to that.
But a lot of Muslim organizations, again, might be well-intentioned. Yeah. It's Black History Month. Let's put Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think about the entire discussion? Well, I think, I mean, it's not in the Quran or Sunnah, so that means that either side could be argued, right? And have validity on either side of it. Two things. Black History Month should never be used in order for people to think that they are now woke and that they're addressing the issue. That's the first thing that has to be clear. If you perform Black History Month and you exude anti-blackness, for example, if you love Black History Month and you come out in February and you're oppressive towards your students who are black, who might be from the continent or who might be African American, it's oxymoronic, right? How can you, on the one hand, choose and put everything in this month and not be concerned with issues that are much, much deeper and much more Islamic that deal specifically with blackness? And so that's, I think that that's one thing that needs to be clearly said. The other thing is that it's, I don't think that one can approach this as though all communities are the same, right? So, you know, you go to Detroit and folks have been talking about Garveyism is over 100 years, right? And you can come with Black History Month with people like that or somebody in Philadelphia. And then you go to like North Dakota where they don't even have like one representative of the NAACP and they have zero Black History teaching. Well, in that case, perhaps Black History Month might be useful. So I think that it's as much a contextual question as well as it is a question of legitimacy. I think that it could be argued that it's useful. How do you celebrate without appropriating? That's another, I think, another very important. You mean how do immigrants, because I'm black, but you mean how do immigrants celebrate without appropriating?
Organizationally, individually, communities, how do they celebrate? So, for example, we're going to celebrate Malcolm and Ali and you said, you know, and whatever the entirety of black Muslim history without. But if you obviously lowest denominator, if you still have anti-blackness actions or your words, whatever it is, then that's a disqualifier. Those communities, you know, organizationally, institutionally, communities, individually, how do they celebrate without appropriating? No, absolutely. So what one I once ran into a young African immigrant right here on campus and she had a Black Lives Matter shirt on. And I said, OK, that's good. What have you done about the anti-blackness in your own community? And I started I'm not going to say which country she's from, but I started listing all of the sub tribes in her country by their names that are not treated fully human yet. Even now, in 2020 in her country, I said, why would you skip? So, in other words, there has to be some priorities with this thing as we engage this topic of black history. Right. And so should you appropriate? No. Should you exoticize? No. Is it OK to allow for you to support organizations already doing the work? Yes. Is it OK for you to not just bring an African-American like me to come in and start talking about black history during February? And then after that, we have no relationship, but legitimately and sincerely engage me. And next year, as February comes around, I'll be there. You don't even have to say anything. It'll be done. You know, if if that's if that's something that an organization believes in. So I would caution anybody from saying we shouldn't celebrate as Morgan Freeman has said, you're going to relegate my history to a single month. I understand that. Shortest month. Right. The shortest month of the year. Definitely. That's a concern. But I can also understand, like you can go to some places in the United States where they talk about the Civil War as though Africans are subhuman and had nothing to contribute from the Civil War forward.
Like, where do we get hip hop music from? Where do we get R&B? Where do we get stoplights? All of these things, like all of these wealths that have impacted the culture of the world of humanity, like came out of black communities. And for you to talk about that in an exoticizing way or not to give it its due or true history, I mean, Mohammed Ali, all of these, you know, great intellectuals that have come, the first sociologists like W.B. Du Bois and many of the early models of how to make cities happen. You know, you have to understand, like Rondo here is an area, as you know, the federal government use like the Federal Highway Act and eminent domain in order to kind of erase over a thousand African-American areas that were built up after white Americans said, you can't stay with us, you have to stay there. Nobody here can sell their house to you. Right. And with no resources, very strapped, they built some of the most economically viable ethnic enclaves in this country only for. So this is for those people who like the bootstrap theory for policies to come through and destroy with airports or expressways, their neighborhoods, that that black wealth, those black economic epicenters and cultural wealth was completely destroyed. Now, if you can't see the wealth coming out of that and there's no talk about that, of course, you might need something like a little, you know, boost like Black History Month. But that should be only the beginning. It should never be the end. And, you know, it just really depends on the community. So, yeah, no, but I think it's helpful. I think I think it's helpful. So I think to recap that, obviously, being willing to tackle your own, I mean, or not being outwardly hypocritical or just outright hypocritical about, you know, celebrating on one hand elements of black history with an agenda and then not being willing to tackle racism in your own community. The second one is immigrant communities doing a better job of actively tackling racism within their community. And there have been some initiatives.
There's like Muslim Ark and some others. Absolutely. I'm just trying to tackle that within the community, right. And being willing to have difficult conversations there. That's right. Giving voice to African-Americans within the community throughout the year. Not just that's right in February. Can you come speak at our conference? Can you come to speak at our message? And not only voice, but using the epistemologies found in these communities to frame policy, to guide actions, to guide discourse within mosques. You know, it has to go beyond. I eat rice, you eat bread. You wear that, I wear this. It has to go much, much, much deeper. Excellent. And, you know, defining the community's agenda. So not just defining the community agenda from one vantage point, which tends to be, you know, from a particular culture, from a particular socioeconomic class or whatever it is, but broadening the community agenda. Absolutely. Yeah, that's, Insha'Allah, I think that's, we're going to be hopefully having more papers from you, Insha'Allah. From us. From us, Insha'Allah. Co-authoring on some of these subjects about some of these things. And, you know, JazakAllah khair. I think it's really excellent. And can you tell us about some of the stuff that you're doing outside of Yaqeen, Insha'Allah, your curriculum, the stuff that you're doing because, you know, with curriculum in the school, prison pipeline. Alhamdulillah, all praise be to Allah. So my third book was, edited book, was about the school to prison pipeline and culture in schools. And that gave way to my fourth book, which is on Harvard Education Press. It's called Culturally Responsive School Leadership. Alhamdulillah, to date, almost 10,000 copies sold, even in a year, year and a half, which is phenomenal for an academic book. One of the reasons that it caught on like that, though, is because I didn't write for other scholars. I wrote in a scholarly tone, but it was directed toward practitioners who would read the work. And I can say, Alhamdulillah, a number of superintendents, principal school leaders have been picking the work up and literally effecting change in the districts,
making schools more humanizing for minoritized students, ensuring that the community knowledge, that ancestral knowledge, because see, it's invisible to leaders, many school leaders. It's invisible. They can't see it. They think it's bad behavior. They think that it's disruption. They think it's some obscure cultural practice. And many school leaders are not able to recognize that as wealth, as ancestral knowledge, as something they can use in their building. So the same arguments that I'm making about mosques, we're doing that in a 2.5 day academy. We're happy to come almost any of the 50 states to bring the academy. We also do equity audits. So equity audits are a way that allows school leaders to not just understand why they have disproportionalities, like why some students are suspended more or do better in school, but it allows them to pinpoint exactly why they have disproportionalities and how they prioritize equity work. So those are a couple of the projects that we're doing. MashaAllah. Well, I mean, your work is, I think, a benefit to everybody. And we can all benefit within the Muslim community and outside of it. So where can people find some of this work? Harvard Education Press under the name Muhammad Khalifa or Amazon. The website is culturallyresponsiveschoolleadership.org, which stands for culturally responsive school leadership institute. CRSLI.org. Yes, CRSLI.org. They can find out about that. And you have a, you know, you've got a rich history. So this was just for the sake of the benefit of the audience. We didn't plan what questions we didn't. We just wanted to have a very free-flowing conversation. So with that being said, I want to invite, I think, we want to start a conversation, inshaAllah, to honor. So invite criticism, invite further thought. How do we develop this, these thoughts further, inshaAllah, that we can take into consideration for some of the papers that we're hosting at Yaqeen more broadly, and then more specifically that we're co-authoring, and even more specifically that you're writing, inshaAllah. InshaAllah. And also, I think, we don't have a podcast yet. When we have a podcast, I want to dig deep into your personal history, because it's really fascinating. Let's do it.
You know, the places you've lived, the places you've taught, and some of those experiences, inshaAllah. Yeah, let's do it. So, JazakAllah khair. Wa alaikum wa rahmatullah. Appreciate you. Wa alaikum wa rahmatullah. Thank you. Wa alaikum wa rahmatullah. Appreciate the opportunity. Wa alaikum wa rahmatullah. Wa alaikum wa rahmatullah. Wa alaikum wa rahmatullah.
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