Roots and Implications of Pop Culture | Firm Roots
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. It's an honor and a privilege to be here in Toronto's very robust, very diverse Muslim community. Jazakallah khair for having this event here and on this especially happy occasion of Yaqeen's launch in Canada. Masha'Allah. Today we're discussing such an important topic, how to maintain firm roots in an age of prolific doubt. And as you saw from the video at the start of the day, that precisely is the vision and the mission of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. How to dismantle doubts, nurture conviction and inspire contribution. Out of those three, I would say that my paper today is about inspiring contribution, inshallah. And so what I'm going to be looking at is the roots and the implications of pop culture. And so the four parts of my paper today are going to be an introduction by way of speaking about the good word and the good tree. Next, talking about what is culture, then pop culture today, and then looking at some of the roots and the values in pop culture, as well as what the implications are for Muslims in the United States as well as Canada. Now it just so happens that the tree is my absolute favorite metaphor. And that's kind of a pretty big deal because the last 15 years as an educator, I've made a career out of thinking about metaphors, interpreting them, teaching them, whether it's spiritual metaphor, political or literary or poetic. So alhamdulillah, I love the title, Firm Roots. And it seems like I was meant to be here. So we're going to begin in the first part. We're going to begin with this idea of the good word and the good tree. So Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says in Surah Ibrahim, bismillah, are thou not aware how God sets forth the parable of a good word? It is like a good tree firmly rooted with its branches towards the sky, yielding its fruit at all times by its sustainer's leave. And so it is that God propounds parables unto men so they might bethink themselves of the truth. And the good word is the message of the faith, of course. It's the glad tiding. It's the promise to believers of Allah's pleasure.
The good word is a life of faith itself. The believer herself or himself is like a good tree whose roots are firmly planted in a line, his messenger, salallahu alayhi wasalam, and whose good speech and good actions, good intentions and good works, good knowledge and good manners emanate throughout family, throughout society, branches spreading wide and reaching for the sky. In other words, and this is why trees make the absolute best metaphors, our actions are the outer visible portion of our tree of life. It's trunk, branches and sweet nourishing fruits. And our faith is what grounds us, providing us sustenance and determining our health and our strength. Actions stem from faith. Belief determines and guides practice. As the ayatain from Surah Ibrahim show, the good word, like a good tree, is firmly rooted, its branches reaching the sky, and yields fruit all year long by Allah's permission. Goodly belief leads to goodly practice. However, in the same manner, corrupt belief leads to corrupt practice. In the very next ayah in Surah Ibrahim, Allah says, and the parable of a corrupt word is that of a corrupt tree, torn up from its roots onto the face of the earth, wholly unable to endure. I'm going to ask us to keep this divine parable in mind as we take a closer look at what culture is, what pop culture today looks like, and what this means for us as Canadian and American Muslims. So what is culture? We all know what it is, but let's break it down. I'm an academic, right? I can't help myself. So we will think of culture as a tree. And human societies all over through place and time produce and enjoy very distinct cultures.
These cultures are identifiable by their outermost manifestations, their customs, mores, aesthetics and products. These are the habits, traditions, values, beauty standards, sciences and arts of every type, including agriculture, animal husbandry, economy, politics, education, family life, cuisine, dress, music, dance, theater, literature, poetry. You get the idea. Just like a tree, the outermost extensions of culture represent the firmness and the grounding, in this case of values. What are a society's highest ranking values? They will be reflected in the culture that it produces. And these cultural products and values are further rooted and guided by the philosophy of that civilization. So you were able to follow the diagram on the tree. What is philosophy? Philosophy nowadays has a very bad reputation among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but it is extremely important and not to be taken lightly. A society's philosophy answers the most basic and universal human questions. What is life? What is the human being's purpose? What ought we to aim at? What are the most important values that will help us achieve this aim? Because a tree, from root to fruit, is a single organism, examining and tasting the culture reveals a lot about the nature and foundations of that philosophical ground, and guides us to understand what nourishment or what harm that tree is providing. Remember that Allah sets forth two parables side by side, one of a good tree and the other of a corrupt tree. So either its fruits can nourish you or they can harm you.
Now, culture is a modern behavioral concept, but classical Islamic jurists spoke about urf and adda, custom and usage. And I'm going to share with you some insight from Dr. Omar Farooq Abdullah's 2004 essay, Islam and the Cultural Imperatives. Anybody here familiar with that essay? Masha'Allah. So in my professional opinion, that should be required reading for every high school and college age Muslim in the United States and Canada. And in this essay, he talks about how Islamic civilization, a civilization that spanned from China to the Indian subcontinent, to Somalia, to Senegambia, to Italy and Spain, and as the evidence suggests, reached the Americas a couple of centuries before Columbus, how Islamic civilization traditionally related to various cultures. He says, in history, Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly, and in that regard has been likened to a crystal clear river. Its waters, Islam, are pure, sweet and life-giving, but having no color of their own, reflect the bedrock, indigenous culture over which they flow. In China, Islam looked Chinese. In Mali, it looked African. Culture has always been understood as second nature, and as such, Islamic law has always implicitly endorsed all good aspects of local culture. Urf as a legal category indicates that cultural forms have the weight of law, meaning if it is sound culture, if it is not explicitly harmful or haram, then it has the weight of law. The jurists were careful not to abuse or criminalize the sound aspects of local culture, for to reject sound custom and usage was not only counterproductive, it brought difficulty and harm to people.
And this is because what people generally consider proper tends to be compatible with their nature and environment, serving essential needs and valid aspirations. Indeed, it is from the Sunnah of our Prophet, to acknowledge the emotional needs, tastes, and cultural inclinations of all who embrace his teachings. So Islam as a civilization, historically, was the perfect balancing point, or aimed at the perfect balancing point, between the universal sacred law, which is the crystal clear river, and the indigenous cultural forms of people. And that's the distinctive and colorful bedrock over which that river flows. Culture is so powerful, it not only represents the underlying foundations of a people, but it can also change those underlying foundations over time. I'm just on a metaphorical roll today, I just realized while I read this, that water is the only thing that can change the shape of a rock, right? It just takes a couple of thousand years, but it can do it. So, keeping with our metaphor, culture, that flow, can even change the underlying foundations of that bedrock. Culture governs everything about us, and molds even our instinctive actions and natural inclinations. So this is important, because we think of instinct as coming from a recess so primordial and so deep within us, that nothing can condition an instinct. It's the opposite of something that can be conditioned. Culture can change instincts over time. It changes what you can consider beautiful, normal, good, aesthetic, and so on. So the roots determine the outer manifestation, but the environment outside can also affect the deeper values. Our instincts and our inclinations, our desires and our values, can be molded and influenced over time by actions and opinions that are culturally normal and that prevail.
Most importantly, perhaps, for our discussion of pop culture today, is that culture is rooted in the world of expression, language, and symbol. And this brings us to pop culture today. Now, if culture is rooted in expression, language, and symbol, what are the expressions, language, and symbols of popular culture today? So, since I am a teacher, I can't help myself, anyone here between ages of 10 and 30, raise your hand and just share with us some of the expressions of pop culture today. Don't be shy. What are some of the symbols of popular culture? Social media. Social media? Okay, good. You want to just call it out? Memes. Memes. How to slice a human's ability to meditate into a million small pieces so that they can never have muraqabah? Memes, right? That's what the acronym really stands for. Yes? Anybody else? Oh, Drake, fellow Canadian. Right, so we're going to talk about music in a second. So, celebrity culture, right? Sure. I'm sorry, sister said something over here? Does bread, as in butter, as in money? Okay, yeah, cheddar. And so on. Yeah, money. Money is like all reigning god according to some social commentaries, right? Any other expressions, symbols, or languages of popular culture today that you want to share? Maybe we haven't mentioned them yet. Vlogs. Gaming, video gaming, Fortnite. Masha'Allah, I'm not going to hate on anybody's habits, but yeah, definitely gaming is a huge part of how we interact with one another and as well as how we spend our free time. Thank you. Anybody else want to add anything before we continue? Vlogs. Sorry? Vlogs. Vlogs.
It's interesting that at least three-fifths of the symbols and expressions that you all shared are all on social media platforms, are all technologically plugged in, and I do think that that says a lot about where we're headed as a species. But let's think also about videos, poetry today, which is found in song lyrics, right? Movies and TV series and habits. So we've got cash money, we've got cars, we've got beautiful women, we've got romantic love, and actually what really passes for romantic love in my opinion, and this is something that I ask all my students to reflect on, especially the non-Muslims when I teach in undergraduate classrooms where most of my students are not Muslim, and I really ask them to think about what I call the relationship cycle. So all the songs on the radio, they fit into some tragic part of a never-ending loop, right, of a really sad and distasteful relationship cycle, where you can plot any song that's stuck in your head anywhere on this cycle. So is it the beginning of that cycle, hey I saw you, you're amazing, I've never felt like this before, right, category? Or are you in the next one, hey I gave you everything but you did me dirty, I can't believe you, right? Or perhaps is it the next one, hey I was broken by that last person but you, oh my gosh, right? Somewhere, like you are somewhere, and then there's other parts of that cycle as well, but they're all just kind of dead end. So this is what passes for romantic love. Sex, specifically sex without marriage or adultery and fornication, and this is so sad. You know, before we even begin to criticize or wonder about why gay and lesbian marriages or just the normalization of gay and lesbian and transgender sexuality in our society is so prevalent, well when it was heterosexual, it's still pretty much out of control, and outside of any reasonable bounds from an Islamic perspective, so there's that.
This concept of be yourself, what does that mean? Just whatever it is, it's not what you want, I just have to do what I want, and that's called being yourself or being myself. YOLO, do you guys have YOLO in Canada? Okay, you only live once, and you know, as a Muslim and as a mom, like this sounds really good, like imagine telling your children, like, beta you only live once, so make sure it's the right life and make sure you're on the right path, but that's the opposite of what YOLO means, right? YOLO means you only live once, so make as many mistakes as you possibly can, they're not really mistakes because you only live once. How is family depicted in popular culture? In my experience, family is depicted always as just holding you back from being yourself and from only living once. Religion is depicted as, of course, something always to keep a person back from how we understand freedom, so religion and freedom in popular culture are always pitted as antithetical, as opposites. And what we can do is, I just briefly went over this list of things that stood out, but we can go a little bit more systematically and just shed a little bit more light on some of these. So for example, if we look at the fact that all of our products are dispensable, and this is an aspect of popular culture, right? Popular culture is not just what shows on TV, but it's also what we're actually doing with our bodies, with our money, and with our time, and with other human beings. So we live in a product economy, and all of our products are dispensable. Nothing can be reused, and even reusable things are only going to last a very, very short time before they're thrown away and replaced. Now this is coffee cups, this is water bottles, this is clothes based on clothing trends, this is cosmetics, electronics, you name it. And we'll get into the roots and implications of these in a minute. More and more, our communities are virtual, and the brother before me, he also mentioned this as well.
We are slowly converting more and more of our communication to online and social media platforms, and one of the biggest dangers of this, and I'm not saying to pull the plug on all technology and social media, I'm saying that it has to be used responsibly, intelligently, and above all, morally. One of the biggest dangers of slowly converting all of our human interactions to online platforms, and our landslide into virtual communities, is that we spend more time on our appearances as a people, as a culture, and as individuals, you know, selfies, profiles, check-ins, and so on. We spend more time on the appearance than on reflecting on ourselves for the purpose of improving ourselves. That is something that can only be done in a quietude, away from a popular gaze, and an intimate dua with Allah, and with the guidance of a spiritual teacher, for example. Virtual communities, on a sociological level, also don't have any mechanism by which people can hold one another accountable. Something that families, masajid and churches, and neighborhoods can do, and do do, right? If you're doing something wrong, your neighbor's going to let your mother know, right? There will be people talking about it, and they will check you. When you're part of a virtual community, nobody's going to check you, and you're not going to check anybody else. People will drop in and out, and you're not even going to notice. Sexual relations, according to pop culture, are completely unfettered. There is no restriction whatsoever, and this has become the absolute norm. And every form of expression, habit, and symbol nowadays enforces this norm. Anyone with a smartphone and an inclination can partake in fornication or adultery. May Allah protect us and protect our children, of course. All notions of power in popular culture are material power, and that is to say that it's power over something tangible, like people, money, objects, territory, markets, and it is a power of conquest. The conquest to fulfill and maximize pleasure.
All of our decisions are basically pleasure-driven as a culture. Whether that pleasure be buying pretty clothes, trying a new makeup trend, smoking, drinking, being in yet another romantic relationship, or perhaps at a different level, the power to move up in the social ranks by affording a house in a well-to-do or a lighter complexion neighborhood. Or heavily weighing the salary of a job before deciding what you're going to do with the rest of your life. How much weight should we really give to the salary ranks of different professions before we decide day in and day out what we're going to be doing with our life energy and our gifts for the rest of our life? There is no concept in our popular culture that true power is spiritual power. That power is not fulfilling pleasures, but true power is in the ability to transcend pleasures, or to be ruled by pleasures. That would be true power. There is no concept in pop culture that true power is over the self. Power over the self, not power over someone else or something else. Only power over others is considered impressive in popular culture. Religion is considered the opposite of freedom because it can hold you back from being your true self in one way or another. The only time popular culture values religious expressions is when religion is somehow being turned on its head. For example, a gay church gets a lot of respect and a lot of recognition. Why? Because that's religion stepping outside its comfort zone and doing YOLO, like doing whatever we all feel is good anyway. Or, for example, finding God in places and experiences that are inimical to what God commands. That's when religion gets any respect in popular culture, when it's basically going against itself and not being its true self.
These are only the negative aspects of pop culture, but above all, popular culture is a field of contestation. What that means is that culture can be a battleground for competing values. Just as our society is throwaway, there are movements to reduce waste, recycle, and end the use of plastic bags, for example. Just as more people switch to virtual communities and social media communication, so too there are community associations, food co-ops, and other initiatives to restore more traditional forms of community. I saw a YouTube video the other day by a gentleman who's mostly just like a comedian, but he has a serious side, and he was talking about how... you've got to be more thoughtful with your phone and with social media. He gave so many good tips about putting your phone away, basically stowing it away, turning it off, unplugging for periods of time. He's not Muslim, but it was excellent advice. That's also an example of how to beat this tendency of how we're just all turning into what I call palmies. We just stare into these blinking lights all day long, and we don't really know what's outside of that screen. There's a contestation, right? There's other voices saying other things as well. Just as sex has become an appetite completely swollen out of proportion, and an act that's become meaningless and anonymous, so too do people continue to get married and aim at monogamy. Alhamdulillah, especially Muslims, right? So, just to kind of illustrate again this contestation, if somebody like The Weeknd sings about drugs and fornication, and somebody like Drake sings about alcohol and how he does whatever he wants to do, you also have people like Damien Marley singing about how to live a godly life, about marriage and about raising babies, and someone like Kanan who sings about how life is a struggle, not just for yourself, but how it involves you having to look out for your family, for your neighbors, and for your nation.
And you see how all the artists who I mentioned are Canadian? I'm a researcher, that's what we do. So, in other words, there are good words and there are bad words. In society, in culture, there's good trees and bad trees, right? And that brings us to the last section. So, we're going to look a little bit at what are the underlying values and philosophical assumptions of some of the cultural products that we find in pop culture today. So, let's identify those underlying roots. In this chart, for example, if we look at the cultural product of money, that we know represents a philosophy of having greed for more and more, right? Allah warns us in the Quran that we are obsessed with greed for more and more until we go down into our graves, right? And so, our obsession with money, and it can take different forms in society. If you look at any music video, and I'm not saying go and look at music videos, I do sociological research, that's why I watch them, right? But I don't enjoy them at all. But if you watch music videos and like the dollar bills are just being, you know, thrown away and the cars and like the money, it's just, it's a little bit crazy. But it's really showing that people have a fear of dying. And I really believe that as a Western society, that there's a crisis deep in the psychological, you know, recesses of the mind and the soul. Because as a society, we've rejected any concept of an afterlife, what are we, how are we to make any meaning about this life? How can there be any meaning? Social justice fails, and then we have no concept as a society and as a culture of any kind of justice, like real justice after death, after this life is over. And so, I think that this obsession with money and with accumulating wealth can at least in some small way be connected to that, right? The reason we want to build up our kingdoms on this earth with so much passion and all of our work and all of our energy is because we're afraid to die. And because we don't really think that there's going to be anything after we die.
It also represents, you know, our never-ending acquisition of products for consumption. We live in a horribly consumerist global economy, which is basically killing the planet and is responsible for destroying the life of farmers all over the world. That also represents a complete lack of charity on our part. So when we consume our products, we don't see the rest of that global supply chain. It's very neatly hidden out of view. We just see what we buy and then we toss it and we're done and now it's time for the next one. But this is also on a philosophical level and on a values level, this is us having a very bad and non-charitable outlook to the people on the other side of that supply chain, to people who live in countries, countries that are being just prostituted for a certain raw material, right? And so on. That's a different talk. If we look at material power and what I was saying that, you know, all concepts of power rest only on being able to have power over a material object. This is a philosophical value which goes back at least as far as and probably further to Plato's Republic, to the character of Thrasymachus. You know, it goes into the political realist tradition of Locke and Hobbes and Machiavelli and basically that's the only type of power that is real and that's the only type of power that's of any importance, is having power over something else. Again, this is another way of showing, I would argue, that the earthly kingdom is more important than the afterlife. Someone like Machiavelli believed in an afterlife as a Christian but then when you look at his philosophy and the realism that has stemmed from him, it, you know, certainly the earthly kingdom is much more important if he did indeed believe in that afterlife. When we look at our virtual communities, and as I mentioned, we don't have any accountability to other people. You're not accountable to anyone in a virtual community and no one is accountable to you. We see that the value here is what we call self-invention, right? So this is one of the hallmarks of modern society, modern popular culture, of secular worldview,
is really like, who am I? Huge question mark. I am whatever I want to be, right? I will invent myself. Today I like Thai food and tomorrow, you know, like every day you just invent yourself. You put pieces together and you say, this sum total of these small shards that I have collected for some reason or other, and some of the reasons might be genuinely connected to some part of you, and some of them are probably just passing trends, and some of them are probably, you know, deep psychological implications of other needs that are not being met, but that this mosaic of broken pieces that I've chosen for myself, this is the real me. So if you're my family and you don't get it, well, you don't get it. And if you're my religion and you're telling me it's wrong, well, then you also don't get it. And so what this shows us, the deep, deep philosophy, the deep religion under this type of cultural product is the nafs, is the sovereignty, I would say, the deification of the self. Popular culture tells us that every human being is like a little god. And I don't think I'm being metaphorical here. I don't think I'm stretching it beyond the plain implication. And so when the self is the sovereign, then you have all the rights in the world, but you don't have any responsibilities. I don't know if you've noticed that we live in a time of rights talk. This group has rights and that group has rights, and that's what identity politics is. It's these rights-based social formations. But do people talk about responsibilities? And how can you have rights without responsibilities, right? When we look at the pleasure-driven decisions in our popular culture and this concept of you only live once and, hey, you know, do whatever you want, you have people like Alasdair MacIntyre. He's a moral philosopher. He's a Catholic, but, mashallah, very useful deconstruction of how the secular worldview came to prevail in our modern times.
And he shows that, you know, in Europe, in Christendom, in early modernity, the motive for practical action was, I ought. Do we even use the word ought anymore? I think the closest proximity is should, right? I should. I should really call her back, right? But even I ought is stronger than I should, right? I should buy these shoes. They would look really nice with my outfit. But I ought to make sure I call my mother every day. She's my mother and I have to keep up with her. Ought is stronger. Ought is a moral imperative. It's not just, you know, should do something for some reason or other. And so MacIntyre shows that in our current stage, of which popular culture is one of the latest fruits, is that I ought has gradually turned into I want, as the practical rationality for all human action. So this is very deep. If we go back to the tree, these are the roots. You cannot change the roots just, you know, like, it'll take a lot of hard work to weed those out, right? This is fundamental to our modern worldview, Muslim or non-Muslim. These are kind of deep aspects of worldview that we all tend to appropriate in one way or another. If we look at religion as being antithetical to freedom, our modern conception of freedom is freedom from any external restraint, right? So in this case, it's freedom from submission of any kind. Religion, of course, is about true freedom, right? It's about the freedom to be in line with your fitra, with your primordial God-conscious nature. We all know Allah. We all said we know you. But now we have forgotten in various stages and steps. And so freedom, from an Islamic perspective, is the ability and the conditions being ripe to nurture our return to that primordial state of knowing Allah, submitting to Allah, worshipping Allah, loving Allah, fearing Allah.
But in the modern popular cultural sense, submitting to anything like God or like religion or like your family's restrictions on what you can and ought to do, that's all the opposite of freedom, right? So it's not freedom through submission. It's a freedom from submission of any kind. And that, if you really break it down and you take it down to the roots level, is an indifference to God. This is not news to anybody. We know that Canadian culture, American culture, is indifferent to God, right? You want to believe in God. You don't want to believe in God. Eh, do your thing, right? But as Muslims, and we're talking about culture, and we're picking the fruits of culture, and we're not understanding what's going on, we have to take it back, right? So we are not indifferent to God, right? God is the beginning, the end, the middle, the whole piece. There'd be no us without God. So we have to, and that brings us to the next part, produce culture, right? So the last one here is unfettered sexuality. And unfettered sexuality, the values that are implicit in this cultural product, is all of the above. But it's also, again, the reign of the nafs. So you know that the human being, you know, according to how our Muslim cosmologists and spiritual psychologists have handed it down to us, the human being is composed of the nafs, which is appetites, right? The qalb, which is the seed of intuition, and it's the part of you that can know Allah, if Allah allows knowledge to arrive in your heart and your heart arrives at knowledge. Then you have the ruh, which is light. It can't be corrupted. It's like the breath of the divine, and so on. And so between the qalb and the nafs, which one is supposed to be the ruler? The qalb, right? It's not the nafs. So the qalb, but not just in the popular culture sense. Well, you know, I do what's in my heart. That's not our theory of the heart. Our theory of the heart is much deeper and more profound than that, because we know that a heart can be sick.
We know that a heart can be sometimes sick and sometimes healthy, and we know that a heart, inshallah, can be healthy and sound and complete and salam, right? So that's our definition of heart. Just because it's in your heart doesn't mean it's good. As a matter of fact, beware of your heart, and always be cleaning it and polishing it so you can get to where you want to be and say, well, it's in my heart, therefore I am rightly guided. But in this case, unfettered sexuality in our society, swiping, hooking up, I mean, you know, I don't have to tell you, is basically the chains of the nafs have come off, and the nafs is leading the human, and the human is the one in chains, right? The qalb is in the chain. Your body, your account, our deeds, those are in chains, and the nafs is the ruler. Even Plato talked about this. He said the appetite should not rule. For him it was reason should rule. But for us, of course, it's more profound. So this brings us to the implications, right? The name of the talk is Roots and Implications of Pop Culture. So now that I've kind of suggested all of these things, now what? What does this mean for the Toronto Muslim community, especially for our youth, right? What does this mean? If we go back and look at some of the expressions, if we think about the expressions and the symbols and the language that we just went over, the conclusion that I'm coming to is that Muslims have to produce culture. Muslims have to produce culture, right? Where are our poets? Any poets in the house? See what I mean? Where are our poets, right? Where are our filmmakers? Where are our playwrights? Where are our artists, our fine artists? And we have to do so in a way that is culturally relevant. Toronto has a culture of indie genre bands. At least some Muslims have to produce indie genre bands, right? This sounds crazy, but, you know, hey, just go with it.
Toronto has a culture of art cinema. At least some Muslims have to produce art cinema, right? Why are we not doing that? Toronto has a culture of musicals, operas, rock and roll revivals. I don't know how people feel about rock and roll revivals. Although incidentally, rock and roll did have its very religious characters in that battleground of competing values, speaking against all of those negative aspects of rock and roll culture. The point is to do the work, right? To be in that battleground and to be the good tree, trying to show people an alternative to all the bad trees. Underground folk cafes. Where's the underground folk cafe with the halal lattes? But you get the point. When Musa, alayhi salam, faced the pharaoh and his magicians, they threw down their staffs, which turned into snakes. And Musa, alayhi salam, was afraid. And Allah told him, throw down your staff. And when he did, as you know the story, his staff turned into a snake that was more powerful, bigger, scarier looking, than their snakes, and it consumed them, right? And he was victorious. And Allah tells Musa, alayhi salam, that it was not you who threw, but I threw, or we threw, right? Allah threw. And so if today's magicians are creating illusions that venerate so many false gods, the false god of the self, the false god of money, the false god of pleasure, the false god of unfettered sexuality, there has to be an active practical effort by Muslims to normalize the values and truth of Islam in society. It's a fard kifaya on our community to produce culture in a way that enjoins good and forbids evil. Right? Amr bil maroof wa nahin anil munkar. And we have to produce culture in a way that avoids both cultural predation and cultural apostasy. So, okay, so you see how there's Xs through those two?
Cultural predation means to be culturally predatory. It means to burn and obliterate what is distinctive about a culture. Many famous classical Muslim jurists, Abdul Wahab al-Baghdadi, al-Sarakhsi, al-Shatibi, of course, and al-Tusili, they all declared that it was unjust to forbid the unique characteristics of culture, provided that they were not harmful or haram. Cultural apostasy is also not a viable option for our dignified participation in society. Cultural apostasy, and this is something, unfortunately, that's always heaped upon our reverts and converts to Islam, is the idea that you have to disavow, abandon, and disassociate with aspects of your culture because you're a Muslim. Yes, we are Muslim, alhamdulillah, but our cultures are Canadian and American, and so on and so forth. The only way the tree of our faith can take root is if we fully acknowledge this soil. So, this section is for my dear, respected aunties and uncles. Forgive me, but we do not need any more doctors, engineers, and IT specialists in our community. Thank you, though, for all of them. Our community has a surplus of that field, and that's a very useful job. Those are very useful jobs and beneficial in society, but what we do need is graphic designers, producers, animators, writers, poets, critics. We need lots and lots and lots of poets. Dr. Omar Farouk Abdullah says that the intelligent use of indigenous language has been an aspect of Muslim culture wherever it flourished. So, poetry is an indigenous language here in these lands. Poetry is very important, just like it was important at the time of the Prophet ﷺ. Like, they used to battle. They used to freestyle. They used to get up and say, like, I'm the most amazing one, and here is why, and you are nothing. If you turn on the radio today, that's the poetry that our children are just getting all the time, nonstop.
So, where are our poets to get up there and battle with their poets and have our snakes eat their snakes? Like, where is that? Where are our poets like Hassan ibn Thabit, who can sling rhymes fiercer than the arrows of our enemies? And did his poetry not please the Prophet ﷺ tremendously? Would our poetry today, speaking about Allah and His Messenger and the correct philosophy and goodly values of life, also not please him ﷺ? If we produce good words today, to enjoin the good and forbid the evil in our shared cultural space, wouldn't Allah bless us with branches that reach the sky and fruit that grows in every single season? Inshallah. Jazakallah khair. Wassalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
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