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What France & UK's Electoral results mean for Muslims | Imam Tom Live
We delve into recent European election results, focusing on the influence of the Muslim vote and the political engagement of Muslim communities in France and the UK, including insights from Sadiq Khan's impact. We'll also address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, highlighting findings from the Lancet report on civilian casualties and displacement. Imam Tom will discuss the tactics of tokenism in winning the Muslim vote, criteria for meaningful appointments, and a post-war plan for Gaza. Additionally, we'll explore the concept of habits through James Clear's "Atomic Habits," focusing on how to create good habits and break bad ones.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Welcome everybody to Yaqeen Institute's weekly live stream program. I'm your host Imam Tom. We have another jam-packed episode for you this evening and thank you for joining us. Shoot us a comment in the chat. Let us know where you're tuning in from and especially if you've got any questions or anything that's on your mind, let us know now and we'll open up with that tonight. What do we have in store for you? Well, we have some electoral results that are in, especially from the UK and France. We have the Democratic Party in the United States in a tailspin and sort of rival factions taking sides on whether President Biden should stand down or continue his campaign. And then finally, people are starting to, as a ceasefire in Gaza seems to be more and more imminent, people are considering what post-war Gaza will look like. And so that itself is another phase of sort of pushing back and making sure that Gaza isn't done dirty. After that, we've got a couple reactions. We've got some interesting things. We talk about the issue of if you were an elected representative, what would be the criteria for participating meaningfully? A lot of times we have only negative examples of how you can do it wrong, how you can be tokenized, how you can be sort of brought in to serve the empire. We have a lot of examples of that. What would it look like to do it right? And I think developing these criteria are going to be really important for actually holding elected representatives accountable and realizing the need to run our own candidates and participate in a different way than what we've been doing thus far. Then, of course, we have Kitab al-Sir, which is talking about sort of the hadith from Sahih Muslim that are going over the expeditions and the military campaigns of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. A very, very important hadith about betrayal and the
betrayal of trust and the type of trust that is invested in every leader. You see how there's a theme here running throughout that every leader has an amanah, has a trust, and they are duty-bound before Allah subhana wa ta'ala to not betray that trust. It's been a long day, folks. I'm gonna need some water and straighten out my words. They need to not betray that trust. Now, what are the contours? What's the content of that trust that they should not betray when they find themselves in a position of responsibility? We're gonna have to talk about that. And then finally, we have our book, our personal development section on atomic habits. We're gonna be talking about basically the setup for the rest of the book, how to make a good habit, how to make a bad habit go away from a high-level view. And then the rest of the book, we'll get into the nitty-gritty details. But first, your questions, your comments, and who's with us tonight? Wa'alaikum Assalam. Sariha Ahmed from Atlanta. Welcome. Maureen Cleveland, I think, maybe, McCleeland. I think I remember you from before. Wa'alaikum Assalam from Gardner, Massachusetts. Shoutouts to Worcester and Yirka. Very good. Always good to have someone from Worcester tuning in. Sara from Canada. Wa'alaikum Assalam. Ali seeks to know 254. That's a cryptic one. I don't know what 254 is. Maybe an area code. Wa'alaikum Assalam from Northern Virginia. Mrs. S. Wa'alaikum Assalam. Pestify from the Maldives. Welcome again. Wa'alaikum Assalam. Bread and za'atar, ya salam. Always making me hungry. Bread and za'atar. Wa'alaikum Assalam from Illinois. It's great to see familiar faces every time. So I notice the same folks coming back for more. Sara asks a question. When Westerners say that there needs to be preservation of Western civilization, isn't it true that it can't be
separated from secular liberal values? That's a really good question, Sara. I think that, first of all, the first thing that jumped to mind, and I think this needs to be discussed when we talk about this group of people, because a lot of times, and this has come on the heels of many of the conversations that we've been having in the past few weeks, where people on the left are trying to make Palestine into just a leftist issue, or one issue among the many issues that is only on the left. And there's, in subsuming that and assimilating it and basically drowning the Palestinian cause as just a simply a leftist issue, it allows it to be assimilated into the culture wars, left versus right, and the sort of political scheme that the West is used to. All right, where am I going with this? Well, people are concerned about the preservation of Western civilization. There's a pain point there that needs to be taken seriously, and there is a, even you'll find my personal opinion, is that when a large amount of people are drawn to something, you often find that there is a grain of truth in it, and there is some descriptive power to it. Now, there might be a whole bunch of falsehood that's also packaged in within it, but sometimes you get further by treating seriously the pain points of other people and what they're suffering, even if you want to provide for them an entirely different solution. And I say this because, you know, I was able to travel to the UK, and I was able to travel Dublin a little bit, and to see some of the issues that European Muslims are going through and how, for them, it's much more wrapped into the immigration issue. And one of the things that's going on in Europe that also exists in the United States, but it's much more strong in Europe, is the sense that we are losing our civilization, that we are losing our culture. Now, that's really interesting. What culture is it that people are afraid of losing, and what do
they think is threatening their culture? Those are the really important open-ended exploratory questions, because they're not a hundred percent wrong. When I was in Dublin, I was in a hotel, and the hotel is by the airport, and all around, you couldn't tell that you were in Ireland. It looked just like a strip mall in the United States, meaning it was the same neoliberal, globalist sort of urban planning, suburban sprawl, big box stores, Chipotle, McDonald's, to the end of it. Now, if you take a person in a European country that sees that this is how their land is being turned into, that you've got in the United States, we have the Walmarts, the Walmarts come in, they push the little guys, the mom-and-pop shops, the little family-owned businesses out, and they displace them with, you know, cheap goods that are made in China, or whatever. They actually experience a real destruction of community, and that should be taken seriously. I think that that should be taken seriously. However, what they ascribe as is the culprit, what's the responsible party that is doing that? Now, the powers that be, the elites, will tell them, oh, it's the immigrants, they've come to take your jobs, or it's all of these people from North Africa coming, or it's the Muslims, or it's this and it's that. That is a dead end, and that's where they get it wrong. So they feel that something is wrong, and they're actually not wrong in that feeling that their culture, local culture, let's just say local cultures, are being steamrolled and wiped out. If we want to call it capitalism, if we want to call it neoliberal capitalism, if we want to call it this sort of homogenization, a global culture of consumer goods, consumerism, whatever we want to call it, it is true that local specific cultures
or local cultures are losing their specificity, and people feel that their ways of living are being undermined and replaced, and might not be able to continue. That is a legitimate point. However, what we lose, and I was specifically telling this to some of the Muslims in Ireland, that we have to be careful to not allow the Muslims to be shoehorned into the left, as thus we're just going to be part of this coalition of immigrants and LGBTQ and minorities, and we're going to sort of, you know, go with this wave. Why? Because Islam actually has a better solution to that problem than the nativism or the even white supremacy that people fall back onto to solve that same problem, right? So people are experiencing this thing, it's a legitimate pain point, and they say, oh no, it must be the Muslims, or oh no, it must be the immigrants, or our Western civilization is under threat, right? That's a construct, that's a social construct. What is Western civilization? Is the Western civilization Bosnia? Is it the Balkans? Where does it start? You know, does it go back to Greece? Okay, but do you have the oracles along with ancient Greece, or you just want to take the democracy, quote-unquote? It wasn't really democracy as we know it today. What about Sparta? What about all the different, right? This is a social construction. This is something that is more of a narrative and a historical revisionism than it is something that's actually necessarily based in reality. So that's what they've been given to say that, first of all, to describe this is what's under attack. We say, no, that's not what's under attack. Your local way of life, let's just call it your local way of life, is under attack. And it's not under attack, it's not under attack because of foreigners. It's not under attack because of Muslims. It's not under attack because of immigration policies. It's under attack because of a global monoculture, again, we can call it
capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, whatever it is, that is actually erasing your culture. But what is Islam's relationship to culture? That's the beautiful thing, that Islam's relationship to culture is actually a mutually beneficial and productive one. That when Islam comes to a land, as it came to North Africa, as it came to Sham, as it came to the Indian subcontinent, as it came to all other places, Islam dealt with culture in a much more nuanced and respectful and productive way. That it ran things through three buckets or through a filter with three outlets. Outlet one is affirmation. If there's something that was good and wholesome in your culture, generosity, dress that was appropriate, things like that, Islam approved it. No problem, you keep on doing that, that's fine. If something was a mix, good and bad, it purified it. So it took the bad elements and it got rid of it and it kept the good elements. And if there was something that was pure evil, such as infanticide, such as treating women like property, these sorts of things, then Islam denied it and got rid of it. Through that production, through that relationship with culture, Islam was able to do something that no other system has done before. And that was actually enhance and uplift the lands that it came to. Some people like to say Islam colonized the world just like Europe colonized the world. Absolutely not. When Europe colonized the world, it destroyed entire ways of living in the world. When Islam came to different parts, and there was conquest, it came and through conquest to different parts of the world, it actually synthesized and produced a local Islamic culture. There was a local Islamic Persian culture and a local Islamic Egyptian culture and a local Islamic Maghreb culture and a local Islamic Balkan culture. That was very, very rich, right? So this is what we kind
of, I know it's a long rant to an interesting question, but I think that there's a, first of all, it doesn't necessarily have to be tied, to answer your question, it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to secular liberal values. There is a way in which it can be tied to the project of actually how Islam stands to benefit people. It doesn't come to replace your religion entirely. Shout out to Brother Jalil who was in, Brother Jalil, a very, very important da'i to the Hispanic and Muslim community, the Latino community, Mexican-American Muslim, you've probably seen him in mariachi gear for Eid. He was struck by a car in a car accident, him and his family, may Allah heal him completely. If you look up his thing online, you can actually donate to his hospital bills. He's exactly, you know, I used to see this brother and love the fact that he would keep his local Mexican culture, what was halal, what was pure, and then obviously you leave the things like tequila and etc that aren't, right? This is how Islam interacts with culture. It doesn't dominate it, it doesn't displace it, and I think that if more people knew that, that would make Islam much more attractive. It's a very potential da'wah point. That took us far afield, but thank you for that question. Sarah is always bringing the great questions, I appreciate that. Ratul Dayoun, inshallah Palestine will be free soon. Inshallah, I believe it, within our lifetimes, inshallah ta'ala. Okay, Sarah continues her question, so what they preserve won't be something that is good for their society? No, or is that just that? Okay, we answered that. Thank you, though. Ahlul Biryani wa Samosa, from Maryland. You can be Ahlul Biryani wa Samosa as long as you're not diplomacy Biryani wa Samosa. Minami Islam Khan, from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Wonderful. I would love to visit Bangladesh. I do not have any plans, but I would absolutely love to visit Bangladesh. Know many Bangladeshi people,
obviously, New York City represent, and in New Jersey as well. Lovely people. I would absolutely cherish the opportunity. Hopefully, may Allah make it so. Faraha Mosey wa alaikum salam, from Florida. Aryodin Wirawan wa alaikum salam, from Jakarta. Very nice. Thank you for tuning in, our brothers and sisters in Indonesia. Excellent. Juju S. wa alaikum salam, from Anaheim, California. Welcome to the program. Sarah, you're making me laugh, Sarah. Ghada Khal Yaqeen, a fascist, called Omar Suleiman a sellout and is urging people to boycott. Ahlan wa sahlan. Yeah, we believe, we believe in Allah. Hasbuna Allah wa ni'mal wakil. If Omar Suleiman is a sellout, mashallah, tabarakallah, I don't know. You know, you're gonna boycott everybody until there's nobody left but you. Reminds me of the Khawarij, right? You remember the Khawariji mentality, right? When, at the time of the Tabi'een, when there were two Khawarij that came to Mecca to make tawaf, right? They were making either Umrah or Hajj, I can't remember. And the one guy says to the other, one Khawariji says to the other Khawariji, he says, can you believe we're the only two people here to go to Jannah? They're looking around at all the Tabi'een and stuff like that. And then that statement causes the one to realize the misguidance that he was upon. And then says, you know what, you can, if that's true, then you can have Jannah to yourself and I'm going to be with the Jama'ah, right? That, that comes to mind. Very good. But, you know, we're not bothered by, by, by people and their reactions. We just hope that we're doing the right thing and we have shortcomings and we ask Allah to rectify us on our shortcomings. But we keep on keeping on and وَلَا نَخَافُوا لَوْمَ تَلَائِمٌ And we don't fear the blame of the blamers. As long as we're right with Allah, then حَسْبُنَا اللَّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيلُ But I agree with you, Sari. It does really show that when Islam comes to, comes out and opposes the left, they rear back with vitriol. Look at how much hatred they
have. And I noticed that too. Look at how the left purports to be against the right and criticizes the right for Islamophobia. And yet, you know, people on the left like to say, if you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds. I would say if you scratch a leftist, a fascist bleeds as well. That, you know, all you have to do is challenge them in this particular way on secularism, on the hegemony and colonial sort of dimension to their values. And all of a sudden, we're all Islamic fundamentalists, apparently. Right? Whoa, wait a second. I thought that was Islamophobic. Oh well. Let's see. We have Jibreel from Michigan, وَعَلَيْكُمْ السَّلَامٌ وَرَحْتَ اللَّهُ وَعَلَيْكُمْ السَّلَامٌ وَرَحْتَ اللَّهُ Who else? Amina Kasupovich, وَعَلَيْكُمْ السَّلَامٌ وَرَحْتَ اللَّهُ وَرَحْتَ اللَّهُ from Tuzla. And I think that's Bosnian coffee next to that, I hope. Welcome to the program. By the way, this shirt, I don't know if you can see it close up, but I wore this shirt for Srebrenica, for the anniversary of Srebrenica, which is tomorrow, July 11th. Obviously, the Srebrenica massacre, one of the most horrific events of the Bosnian genocide, and a very important reminder to all of us Muslims as to the... Well, there's a lot of lessons. Maybe that should be a separate episode. But we've got some videos coming out, Yaqeen Institute does, Shaykh Omar doing things about Bosnia and Srebrenica in particular. But I don't know if you can see it, but the tiny white patterns on this shirt are actually in the shape of the white circles, which is sort of the flower motif for remembering Srebrenica. And that's purely accidental, but because it reminds of Srebrenica, I decided to wear this shirt tonight. Ruslan Andreevich, from Singapore. From Singapore, but your name is Russian, it reminds me of Russian. I had a classmate in Medina named Ruslan. I have a question,
I gave $1,000 to a person who was afterwards ungrateful and hurtful to me. I've been making dua against them for a few months. Well, I don't know what the type of hurt that you are talking about. But in general, Allah ﷻ tells us and in Surah Al-Baqarah specifically, that when we give charity to somebody, that it should not be followed up with reminders of the good that we did for somebody. And if you go to, I believe, before Surah Al-Furqan, Surah An-Nur, when Allah ﷻ talks about the ifq, right? This is the thing that occurred where the slander upon Aisha and Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr is her father. So naturally, he's very emotionally affected by the slander against his daughter that she did something improper. Now, Abu Bakr, he had a relative named Mistah, and Mistah was poor. So Abu Bakr was financially taking care of Mistah. However, Mistah got involved in the ifq. He actually was one of those people who were spreading, he didn't originate it, but he was spreading the slander against Aisha. So when Abu Bakr realized that this person who he was financially supporting was actually spreading the slander against his daughter, he cut him off. And he swore by Allah that he would not support him financially anymore. So Allah ﷻ revealed in that Surah that he should not do that, that he should continue to support. And the reason why is because is your donation truly for the sake of Allah? Or is it transactional? Are there expectations that are coming along with that donation? Are we expecting when we give someone something that they're going to treat us nice in return? If we have an expectation that is attached to our donation, then our donation isn't 100%
for Allah ﷻ in the first place. And Shaykh Abdullah al-Shanqiti used to tell us in Medina that if you give something to someone in charity, you should be prepared basically for them to spit in your face. That this is the way to prove that you're sincere and not actually doing business in the sense, transactional sense, like trading it for favors or good treatment or anything like that. It's a very hard thing. That's a subtle thing, Ruslan. But that excludes the situation in which the harm was extremely serious. But that's an important thing to keep in mind. Laura, wa alaykum as-salamu alaykum from Casablanca. Welcome to the program. Good to have you with us. Murad Ali from Alberta. Nafisa Toubande from NYC. Wa alaykum as-salamu alaykum. Lisa Morel or Morelle. Sorry, the Italian roots. I suspect that that's French, but in Italian we would say Morelle. Wa alaykum as-salamu alaykum. Yes, we're going to talk about that. Oh, we have a welcome. Yeah, we get to talk about French politics today. Yeah, Marie Le Pen was completely undermined. Of course, we'll see what Macron does, but there's some very important lessons here. So this will be particularly relevant to you. Wa alaykum as-salam. Nancy Yahya from Cairo. Good to have you back with us again. Ruslan, yeah, that's true. It might be better for you. Honestly, Allah ﷻ might be doing something good for you. And that's actually the phraseology that he uses in Surah al-Nur to talk about the ifq in general. Don't think that this is bad for you. Actually, this is good for you. He's talking to Aisha there. Wa alaykum as-salam. Azza Radwan from New Jersey. Courtney G. Ohio. Wa alaykum as-salam. Jaber Qaziqil. Hello. J. Wa alaykum as-salam. This is Muhammad Jibril's sister. Wa alaykum as-salam. Oh, masha'Allah. Welcome to the program. Kautar. Wa alaykum as-salam. From Al-Maghrib. May Sage from Uganda. Good to have you back with
us. Abdullah Amin Khan from India. Wa alaykum as-salam. Sendev. Sheikh from Senegal. Is your actual name Sheikh or are you a Sheikh? You know, I had a master student that I studied with in the Islamic University who was from Senegal. And one of my sheikhs from before I left was from the Gambia and he studied in Senegal as well. Senegal, land of the Hufadh. Masha'Allah. Tabarak Allah. Very, very famous for memorizing the Quran. Jabir from Afghanistan. Welcome. Oh, masha'Allah. Tuning in from Utica. Utica's in the house. Welcome. Hopefully, I hope to come visit Utica soon insha'Allah. It's been a minute. I can't understand what that emoji is, Fatima. They love Muslims if you play maybe soccer, I think, or football. Sorry, international lingo. Football. Yes, that's a football or soccer. Well, that's true. They love, what did Mesut Ozil say, right? Mesut Ozil said, when I win, and he was the Turkish descended German footballer. He said, when I win, I'm a hero. I'm German. When I lose, I'm an immigrant. It's a tightrope walk. Qazi Tenzina Khatun. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum from London. I was very impressed by London. London exceeded my expectations, masha'Allah. Julia Wati Abdul Jalil from KL, Malaysia. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum. Insha'Allah, I'll be in KL in two weeks from July 22nd to the 29th for the Umatics conference there. Very good. Zakiya Rahman. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum. Yes, you're right. We are in a tough situation this year. Both parties are worse. However, Trump and his VP candidate Tom Cotton will make it tough for Palestine. Yeah, I mean, there's no... SubhanAllah. We're in a tough situation. There's no doubt about that. May Allah give us aid. Qaid San from Dallas. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum.
Insha'Allah, I'll be in Dallas in about a month. Abu Idrees from Seattle. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum. Seattle is a very beautiful city. Enlightening Talks. It's also called neo-traditionalism in post-COVID pandemic. Yeah, that's a whole... That's a whole BAB. That's a whole can of worms we're not gonna go to. Rafa Abdallah. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum. Rafa from Tunis. Masha'Allah. Do I recommend starting a life in France in this time? Well, I can't speak to that personally. However, I'm afraid to go to France as a practicing Muslim. So I don't know. I don't know that I would recommend it. That might be my ignorance. You know, I stand in the possibility of being wrong. You should talk to maybe the sister, Morel, who's with us now, who's from France. Minami Islam. Very good. Starting learning French in Dhaka. Interesting. Fluent in French. Let me follow some progress. Oh, that's very interesting, Minami. I love learning languages. Yeah, Ruslan, you try to pray for people's guidance. You know, always try to pray for people's guidance and thank Allah for the opportunity to purify yourself. Let's see here. What else we got? Wati Shazer. Wa alaikum as-salamu alaikum. Abdullah Ameen Khan. Yes. Yeah, that's a good question. So Abdullah Ameen Khan asked the question, how did leftists hijack the Palestinian struggle discourse in favor of them? Why are we failed to narrate the Palestinian struggle in our terminologies and conceptual categories as a Muslim? Yeah, I mean, can the subaltern speak, right? That's what they say in the post-colonial circles. Strategy, unity, sectarianism, all things, you know, but inshallah, hopefully we're coming. Hopefully we're coming, inshallah. I think we're waking up. Muna Omar from Montreal. Welcome to the program. Montreal is a lovely city. Lars Amara. Wa alaikum as-salam from Sweden.
Allahu Akbar. I think that might be one of our first... No, no, we used to have someone tuning in from Sweden, but definitely one of our few people from Sweden. Let's see who else we have. Murad Ali asked, where do we start with political literacy as Muslims living in the West? That's a big question. That's a big question, Murad. I think that we have to, I mean, this is going to be, this is going to be like a stock answer because it's a big question, but we really do have to go through the Qur'an and the Sunnah from a political lens and distill some of the lessons that are taught politically in the Qur'an and in the Sunnah, right? Just the fact that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la talks about Qarun. How many Qaruns do we have that have been elected to office? People who are from us, but aren't from us, right? That have sold us out, right? Qarun explains and accounts for the phenomenon of sellouts, and we'll talk about that in a second, actually. We have all these interactions with power, both from prophets and outside of that. How does Musa Alayhi Salaam interact with Firaun, right? Do we delay political action until we achieve purity? How is Musa Alayhi Salaam commissioned? He's commissioned to do both things at once, right? There's a whole bunch of lessons to be learned, but we haven't put that lens on, and that's part of why we started transitioning to studying Kitab Asir during this program, the book of jihad, because even talking about jihad, we see that there's a lot of lessons, just about values, about how to stand on principle, what is in bounds and what is out of bounds as a Muslim. What's the sense of confidence that Muslims took to the different places that they went, even when they had large numbers against them? We really do need to mine, right? And I actually did a really interesting exercise this past Ramadan when I was making Khatmah of the Qur'an. I kept a legal pad with me, and I wrote down every single ayah that I found in the Qur'an that had some
lesson to teach about politics. And I'm in the process of systematizing that into papers, blogs, trainings, workshops, things like that. But unfortunately, everything takes longer than you want. Wauti Shazir from Michigan in the house, Wauti Alayhi Salaam. Minami is giving us a little bit of tips or intro to French politics, which I know very little about, admittedly. Abdel Nasser, Wauti Alayhi Salaam from Minnesota. Lise Morel, the far right, did win in France. Okay, so I'm mistaken there. I didn't expect this. Or sorry, didn't win in France. Yes, I didn't expect this. Nobody did, and we're going to talk about that, Lise. We're going to talk about the role of statistics and polls in politics. This is something that so many people misunderstand. People look at polls, and they take them as fact, when in reality, polls are just as much about shaping reality and creating reality as they are describing reality. And one might argue even more, but we'll talk about that, inshallah. Aminu from Nigeria, Wauti Alayhi Salaam. Zakiya. Yes, another one from Minnesota, Muhammad Ibrahim, Wauti Alayhi Salaam. Maryland in the house again, Qadiyya Al-Din, Wauti Alayhi Salaam. Oh, Pestify. Yeah, we should, we could do a whole entire episode on Bosnia. You're right. The new generation of Muslims don't know much as it is not talked about as much as the Holocaust. That's true. That is true. Sariha Ahmed, we don't have any choice in our elections. No, you're right. Most of us don't. How can we motivate ourselves to vote and overcome the stress? Well, voting, we have to understand, voting is not a silver bullet. And anybody who listens to some of the work that I've done knows that voting is only one tool in politics among many other tools. So you might find yourself in a situation where your vote has absolutely no value whatsoever. That can happen. You might
find yourself in a situation where the election, either local or national in your area, you don't have the power to vote for someone, but you can make sure someone loses. Okay, that's something. You have maybe the ability to vote in such a way where it's going to open up a door for a third party or another candidate down the line. That's another purpose of voting, right? So we have to get out of the mindset of we just wake up every four years and then cast a vote. And that's all of our political power. And realize that political engagement is a 365 day a year thing that when it comes to recruiting candidates, running candidates, analyzing how decisions are made, and analyzing how to change the way that decisions are made. How do we let so much money in politics that a foreign nation like Israel can come in and buy politicians, right? That's a huge mistake, right? We should be figuring out how to end these sort of loopholes and close these loopholes. So stay tuned for more. Yep, that's 100% true, Sada, even if you don't have an expectation. Yep, that's 100% true. Arjuman Debanu, alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. Ruslan says, yes, it is a Russian name. I spent a few years in Russia and learned about Islam from Central Asian Muslims. May Allah forgive me for being insincere. No, you're not insincere, Ruslan. If it happened to Abu Bakr, Habibi, if it happened to Abu Bakr, then of course, it's going to happen to you and me. It's just that, you know, the nature of a Muslim is that we forget, we're reminded. That's what we're tested on. When we're reminded, do we come back? Right? So we're all in the same boat. Laith, hello. Okay, Sada giving us more about Puerto Rico. Laith from Puerto Rico, bienvenido. Comet Odyssey from Australia. Welcome, down under. Minami is keeping us informed on French politics, mashallah. We have a very educated crowd tonight.
Wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. Raziuddin Khaja, thank you so much. Ameen to your du'a. Muhammad Nawashid, wa alaikum salam. Maldives, welcome. Wa alaikum salam from KL. Inshallah, look forward to seeing you at Umatics. Amina from Connecticut, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. MY from New York, wa alaikum salam. No worried about double comments, that happens all the time. That's the comment section. Arif Delvi, wa alaikum salam. From Detroit, very nice. Wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. From California. List of questions, allahu akbar. If anybody has any more in-depth questions that I can't answer in the program, you can always email me at imamtomfakini, simple, at gmail.com. So you see my name, you just run it all together with no spaces, at gmail.com. Ameen. May Allah protect the land of Palestine 100%. Zakia makes a good point about voting. Yes, being aware. Education is a huge thing. I'm amazed. I'm amazed, Zakia, because there are environmental organizations that give out report cards every year for all the representatives in a particular voting district, from the city level and municipal level, to the county level, to the state level, gives them grades. How did they vote on this issue? How did they vote on that issue that affects them, right? That's where we need to be. That's what it looks like to be organized. Alayna, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah, from Turkey. Welcome. Imran, wa alaikum salam, from India. Yossi, wa alaikum salam, Indonesia again. Okay, Jabber's got questions about these things. I think I'm going to kick those to later, inshallah. Harun Yusufi, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah, from Ghana. Mahmoud Nawshed, yes. Absolutely, there is benefit in lightning talks to studying
the late hajj medic Shabazz, otherwise known as Malcolm X, 100%. In fact, his later writings are really, really important, especially on black nationalism and black economics. I had the benefit of taking an entire college course or university course on Malcolm X, all of his speeches, all of his interviews and writings. Very, very important stuff. It is true, Imran, that right-wing and anti-Muslim sentiments around the globe are escalating. May Allah protect us. But I think that there are opportunities, right? There are opportunities, as I tried to highlight earlier. Okay, here we go. I'm trying to get to the end of the comments before we keep going. There's a lot of good conversation going on today. Okay, your name is Shaykh. Okay, very good. I thought so. I just want to make sure. Jesse Jolbe from Florida. Welcome to the program. Art Forge. I have heard many liberal leftist pro-Palestinian voices saying that they want the state of Palestine to be a secular democracy. What do you think about that? Well, I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. Many liberal leftist pro-Palestinian voices are saying that they want the state of Palestine to be a secular democracy. What do you think of this? I say that's exactly the type of colonial imposition that we're afraid of and talking about. This is an issue that Dr. Enes Atta-Kriti brought up in this program when we had him on as a guest when he said, what is the benefit of a secular state in and of itself? What happened to Egypt? Egypt has a secular state. What good is it doing it? Jordan has a secular state. What good is it doing it? We have the right to ask for more than that. At the end of the day, it's up to the Palestinians and the people of Gaza and West Bank and the rest of occupied Palestine to decide. However, let's just say that there is a disconnect. There is a disconnect between a lot of diaspora Palestinians and Palestinians on the ground and that there's some jockeying going on. This always happens historically if you want to talk
about the anatomy of historical movements and social movements and even revolutions. Usually what you have is a broad coalition of people that are agitating against something and then everybody is jockeying for what we're going to talk about in just a second, which is post-war, like what's going to happen after the occupation. There's different groups that are jockeying to try to control what that will look like. Juju, should orgs or people unite to support one humanitarian org such as etc. since they are attacked and have been most accused appears false. I think that a better thing, Juju, is to analyze how the decision is made. How is the decision made to cut off funding to that organization and how can we change the way that the decision is made? How many times have I gotten messages asking me to make a call to my senator or to send an email? They don't listen. They don't read. They don't care. That's weak. That's not power. We have to build power, build leverage, so that we're actually able to influence the way that the decision is made in a way that benefits us. That's what actual power is. Would you advise someone to avoid going to university in the U.S. if they can, since there's a possibility that schools invest tuition? It's a case-by-case basis, Ismail. There's not a one answer fit all to everything. There are some universities that have divested, and so it'll depend on the scenario. Very good, very good, very good. I need to rush up on my Malay. My Malay is very bad, but I can order kopi susu and kopi panas and these sorts of things, so we'll see. Sarah says, I was finishing the discussion you had with Paul
and your points on the impact of Western academia is very informative. How do you direct the next generation? Less about directing the next generation. I think that we need to provide them institutions so that they can move. That's why I think projects like Umatics are very exciting. Projects like Yachin Institute are very exciting, because they give opportunities for people to move. How can I be so outspoken on Palestine? I don't have to worry about getting fired. I don't work for Zionists. I don't work for people who are funded by Zionists. I work for the organization, and that provides me a certain amount of freedom to be outspoken. We need to create these pockets, whether they're even pockets in academia, pockets in the workplace, and pockets elsewhere. Jasir's question is sort of multi-part. One of our strategies is the canvas for a candidate to unseat the current Zionist council member, among other things. Is this the most effective use of our time in combating the genocide? Well, it will have an effect. I can't tell you if it's the most effective, because that would require me to have a knowledge of the other possibilities. Then it would be important, even if ceasefire measures are largely symbolic. So that's the critic. The critic would say, ceasefire measures at the municipal level are not very influential. Well, they are and they aren't. They set a discursive precedent. They are symbolic. So when a Zionist is able to get a city council to issue that we stand with Israel 100%, bring all the hostages home, this is what we're going to do. This is what we're going to do. This is what we stand with Israel 100%, bring all the hostages home, this sort of thing. It means something to them, and it also sends a message to everybody else that this is sort of the default, and you better sort of be careful or watch yourself if you're against it. So if you're able to get a ceasefire declaration—well, my audio cut out briefly—I'm not sure if this is the most effective
thing or not to do, but definitely there's a symbolic victory there, and it definitely has some effect. I can't tell if it has more effect than other things that are available for you to do. Yeah, Nusaybah, stay tuned. Stay tuned. We'll live stream the polling. That's a good idea. That's an interesting idea. Mom of five, alaikum salam wa rahmatullah, hamdulillah. Welcome. We're happy to have you with us. Nusaybah says, my family and I have a tradition of watching CNN and NBC for election nights. I can't stand to watch those anymore. Hopefully, we can watch our Muslim pundits from now on. Inshallah. That's what we would hope. We would hope that we're able to replace the bad with that which is better. Okay. Just to clarify, Jesser, the article wasn't necessarily about leaving the left but conditioning their support. Right now, their support is unconditional, and it actually is predicated upon us violating our values. So we need to make sure that if they're going to support our initiatives, then it is principled and along our principles, since supposedly, they're throwing their support behind us. Mohammed Noshad, one of the guys in the studio, will drop the email, inshallah. Yeah, I know, right? We have whatever is responsible for cutting out this audience, the audio. Okay. Jesser's got a lot of stuff to ask, and I'm going to say that we're probably going to have to kick that to email. But, exactly, inshallah. We have to put our boundaries. Right now, we don't have any boundaries whatsoever. We're so happy that anybody even turns to look at us, that we just let them completely abuse us, tokenize us, do whatever that they want, and then we don't have power, and that's not good. We're after power, and we shouldn't be afraid to say that. Everybody else says that. Everybody else is after the same thing. That's
how things get done. No, to be honest with you, Breton Zarter, I don't think that representatives or senators really care about phone banking. I know it might have a marginal effect, but consider this. Every elected representative, they care about votes, and they care about money, funding. So, if you can threaten that or promise that, then they will listen. The only time they listen to phone banking is when they get a sense, perhaps, that the phone banking indicates that it will affect either their money or their votes. Okay? So, don't lose the plot. Don't lose the forest through the trees. Right? They don't care that you call on the phone, but they do care if they think that the people that are calling on the phone are their constituents that will vote otherwise. That was exhilarating, and a good chunk of time. What do we got? 46 minutes here? All right. We're going to roll on to current events. We got a lot to talk about. Europe's election results are specifically, we want to talk about France and the UK. How did the Muslim vote come into play? Right? We heard a lot about the Muslim vote. There was actually an organization, a website, Mohammed Jalal doing his thing, thinking Muslim up in the UK, trying to organize the Muslim vote. Did it work? Did it not work? Did it work a little bit? Did it work somewhat? What can we learn about it? We're going to be talking about it and political engagement. What can Muslims accomplish with voting? We just talked about that a little bit. Voting is not a silver bullet. Voting is something that can do some things and can't ever do other things and can sometimes do yet other things. So we need to be crystal clear about how voting fits into our tool belt, so to speak. But let's get to France's electoral results. We've got, I think, there we go. So this is huge. This is very, very significant. That Le Pen, who was favored to win, came in third or lost, right?
Now, she didn't just lose. She also got unseated by somebody who, yes, they're on the left, and yes, they're pro-Palestinian. So again, we're not against ever accepting allyship or support from the left. But again, it just has to be principled. So what we see here is that it was a shock, much like when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. In 2016, you had a situation where everybody was calling this for the far right. Everybody was calling this for Le Pen. And then it didn't happen. What does this tell us? One thing that is super important that I see Muslims making this mistake every single day. Polls are not reality. Data is not reality. Numbers are not reality, okay? The people and the companies that run the polls and report on the polls, they have a vested interest in creating the perception of a certain reality that they want you to believe. If you believe that Le Pen is inevitably going to win, if you're not voting for her, you're considering voting for somebody else, how does that make you feel? It's discouraging. Now, this isn't conspiratorial, okay? This is not saying that people sit behind in a closed room and rub their hands together and say, you know, it's like, oh, let's just throw a wrench and everything. But there are biases that come out. People who run polls that favor, you know, that are more democratic-leaning or leftist-leaning, that even cooked into the way that they run their data sets, there can be bias. And it can only portray a truth. And sometimes that truth is aspirational. Sometimes that's what they want the result to be. And so it actually causes that result. And anybody in the Muslim world who inherited sort of an Islamic heritage should know that. Right? There was a joke that I was told some time ago that, and this is not a true story, obviously, but Trump wanted to know how to win the election.
And he asked Sisi in Egypt, how can he make sure that he wins the election? And Sisi tells Trump, don't worry about it. I got it covered. And so he does exactly what Sisi says. The election results come in. And it turns out who won the election? Sisi won the election with 99% of the vote. It's a joke to demonstrate that. If you're from any part or most of the parts of the Muslim world, you realize how, you realize how elections can be rigged. Data and polls can be rigged. They can be biased. They can actually indicate the reality, more so the reality that people want to have happen than the actual reality on the ground. And we see this here. This is exactly what happened. Reality on the ground was that the people who are pro-Palestinian showed up. They showed up. And that was something that was very, very inconvenient for the Zionists. The Zionists are already sort of putting out, I saw a call for people who are Jews in France to go move to Israel, you know, as if having a pro-Palestinian government was going to endanger them at all. Obviously, we know this is a fallacy and this is wrong. So we see that don't believe the polls all the time. Take them with a big grain of salt. This is a very, very important thing. And to never give up. We do things on principle. We don't do things just because we think that they're going to come out or not come out. Next, we've got UK's results. Now, UK's results were a little bit more mixed. So we know that Labour won and they won handily. And this is something that everybody said was going to happen. And Keir Starmer, the PM, he in particular ran on a ticket and a platform that did not account for the Muslims very much whatsoever. Okay, that they were very much, they decided to capitulate and pander to the Zionists rather than capitulate to the Muslims. However, there are other numbers that are not told in these diagrams that demonstrate actually how Labour is not as safe as they would like to portray.
There were two results from the organization of the Muslim vote that are encouraging. One is that the gap by which Labour won. Yes, if you look at the seats that they won, they won the most seats by far. They won the majority. They have enough to form a government. However, the gaps by which they won are actually quite small. And the gaps by which they won their elections are the smallest that they have been in decades, which is very, very encouraging. And the second thing is that there are actually five pro-Palestinian independent candidates who won MP seats in the UK election. Jeremy Corbyn, who's familiar to a lot of people, ran as an independent and was elected. Shawkat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Hussain Mohammed and Ayub Khan. So these are people that ran on pro-Palestinian platforms. They didn't run as Labour, they ran as independent and they got elected. This is a development and it shows a maturation in the process for the Muslim vote and for the Muslims of the UK. So it's not as dramatic as a result as perhaps that we would love, but it is a positive step in the right direction, hopefully. And finally, we have, I think, well, let's go catch up with the comments here before we move on to talking about we have a reaction to something that has to do with a particular UK politician and what principled representation does and does not look like. Well, let's see. Here we go. What do we have? We got a lot of questions from Jess here. Again, I'm going to kick that to email. What we have. Yes, we do have to definitely overcome the inferiority complex. A hundred percent, Sada, good point. Any plans for live Dogma Disrupted from Abu Ladris? Anything's possible. Anything's possible, Abu Ladris. Sada says cohesive endeavor would have helped where candidates should have stepped down and so they could be uncivilized. Yes, that would have taken more coordination, but that's a good idea of an example of something that can be done.
Mashallah. Lots of people laughing at the tears of Le Pen. Is my real name Imam Tom? My real name is Tom. Walaikum Assalam wa rahmatullah from Hershey, Hershey, Pennsylvania. Walaikum Assalam MV. Sada, welcome to the program. Walaikum Assalam wa rahmatullah. Welcome. Yes, exactly. A Qadri from SoCal, welcome back to the program, points out that Leanne Muhammad, who was running as a pro-Palestinian independent, lost her bid in the UK by very, very few votes. And there were others as well. I forget the numbers. So quite a few independents, more independents that we're used to seeing. Many of those independents running on pro-Palestinian, pro-Palestinian tickets and them getting much more, much more favorable results than in the past. I wouldn't know that. That's a good question. OK, when it comes to do they have something like maybe some of our other viewers that are from France are more familiar with France can answer that. The question is, do they have an equivalent of the AIPAC lobby? They need to weaken first before we can have change in the U.S. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that one of the strategic advantages of this particular moment in U.S. politics is AIPAC is very hemmed in in what it can do, that people are very aware and not happy at AIPAC's influence on politics. And in fact, if you were to start a bipartisan movement to get money out of politics and to get foreign influence out of politics, I think now's the time. I think you have the best chance to get that sort of thing rolling now, especially compared to five or 10 or 15 years ago when it was just sort of accepted fact that this is, again, an opening. We have to look for opportunities to move and then move and step in unison when we see that opportunity. Yeah, all elections are dramatic in Iran. India, France, U.S., they all have their fair share of drama, which if we're able,
I'm not sure, are we able to cut to actually the Biden story first? We got to hear this man first. All right. Well, here, let's listen to this. So this is going to be, this is going to set us up for our conversation about principled representation. So here is the mayor of or the former mayor of London talking, being asked about the comment on the phrase from the river to the sea. Have a listen. The actual phrase from the river to the sea, it can be argued and there's a context involved in when you say it, where you say it. What I would say in a respectful way to those who protest is, you know, yes, we're going to have a conversation about freedom of expression. Yes, we're going to have a conversation about criminal law. But actually, if you know it's causing offense, distress to your friends, neighbors and colleagues who are Jewish, don't say it. We can get to conversations about freedom of expression. OK, so as you can tell, I mean, like this is a very, very milquetoast vanilla take from Saadat Khan and one that, you know, does not represent principled advocacy or representation of the Muslim community. And we'll talk about that, about what we would look for. Because remember, the whole relevance of this point is that we don't just want Muslims in power, right? We've been burnt by that before. Tokenization is a real thing. They will find the handful of Muslims that are fringe and say that, you know, you know, Islam supports LGBTQ and Islam supports this, Islam supports that. They will go out and find those people and put them in power. OK, that is how tokenization works. So we need to have our own principles and list of demands so that we make sure that we're not being tokenized by the people who are getting elected or by the people who run for office or even in our own communities downstream of that. So Saadat Khan fails. He fails at that. Spectacularly fails because he construes the issue, he frames the issue of from the river to the sea as, oh, it's causing distress to the Jewish community
without realizing that the Zionist element of the Jewish community is weaponizing their narrative of victimhood in order to silence criticism of Israel. That's really what's going on, right? First of all, not all Jews agree that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is anti-Semitic. Second of all, it's the Zionists who have relied specifically on trying to get this portrayed as anti-Semitic and equated with anti-Semitism so that they can shut down any type of criticism of Israel whatsoever. So Saadat Khan had a chance, you know, he, what do they call it, a howler, right? For those who watch football, he had the ball at his feet, the cross came in, he was right on the six-yard line, and he totally whiffed. He had an opportunity to push back on the framing of this particular thing and he fell for it hook, line, and sinker, which is not, that's not what we want in politicians. And we'll talk about that more in a second, but first we have to move to our next one, which is about Biden, President Biden, incumbent President Biden, who is participating actively in the genocide of our brothers and sisters in Gaza as everyone abandons him and his campaign is in a tailspin and he is being basically told to step down in very public ways by even elected representatives, some people within his party, he is refusing. And this is not a good look for the Democratic Party whatsoever, that they are, the time is ticking, it's very late in the election cycle, right? This is something that they should have had figured out already, they should have foreseen this, that he looks really bad, the Democratic Party looks really bad, and it's hard to imagine that anything good is going to happen for the Democratic Party, which we wouldn't necessarily not expect, because if we look and remember just back to 2016 and how they handled that election, how they completely sabotaged the popular sentiment and the popular will that was behind Bernie Sanders,
they played, you know, dirty games to sideline him and put Hillary forth and Hillary lost spectacularly in that election to Donald Trump. It looks as if the Democratic Party is heading in the same direction for this particular election. The unfortunate consequence of this, so the positive is that Democrats are very vulnerable, and as Muslims, we should think about how then we can actually influence that agenda, okay, is that when they're vulnerable, they're probably more vulnerable to suggestion and being steered than if they're coming from a place of strength. The downside is that people are criticizing Biden and his campaign for simply his mental acuity or lack thereof, as opposed to being guilty of participating in a genocide. Next up, we've got, so we've talked about the post-war plan for Gaza. This is a very, very important topic, especially as it looks like a ceasefire is imminent. The US and some of the resistance factions, they kind of are closer together on negotiations than they have been in the past. So it looks like some type of ceasefire is in the works or is imminent, we hope. However, what is Gaza going to look like after a ceasefire is something that nobody knows and is the site of a lot of jockeying and jostling. If we can go to the next media report, we have Lancet. Now, they say that they came out with sort of a bombshell figure, but if you're a Muslim and you're following this, this should not be a surprise whatsoever. It could exceed 186,000 deaths, the death toll in Gaza, which is not a surprise whatsoever. Now, the irony is that the United States recently prohibited the State Department from citing death toll counts from the healthcare system within Gaza, ostensibly because it's run by Hamas. Now, here comes Lancet, which has nothing to do with Gaza or anything,
and they come out with a number that far exceeds by several factors that the figures that the Gaza health system was putting out. So, we see again how statistics are never really just neutral. They are about creating perceptions, and that's a very, very important aspect to keep in mind. Whenever you, this is part of media literacy, whenever you pick up a newspaper or you scroll through an article or things like that, some of the things are made to portray what they want you to believe reality is. Now, we also learned that, what's the next graph we have? Nine in ten people, 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced at least once since the war began. May Allah grant victory to the people of Gaza and Palestine. So, we see that with the post-war plan for Gaza, there's a lot of jockeying going on. Israel is trying to push, and the US is trying to push, and even some of the Arab states are trying to push for a demilitarization of Gaza. This is very insulting to the resistance of Gaza, which has basically been the only bargaining chip that they have, right? And we know, again, with Sobrenica, just the anniversary of Sobrenica, just a day away, what happened to Bosnia and the Bosnians when they gave up their arms, when the UN came in and demilitarized them, they became sitting ducks. And so, this is something that was well, this is well-known, and this is an easy lesson to learn from. Yes, let's see. From the river to the sea, Courtney, you got it. Let's go to the comments. Let's see what we got. I 100% agree. Enlightening talks, that's a great point. Muslims ought to put their Sadaqah money beyond their 2.5% Zakat into Muslim institutions, Islamic studies programs, research universities. I love it. I love it. We have plenty of Masajid. I agree. Club and Raver says, all the audience is waiting for the Turks to come to the scene. Whoever it is from the Muslims, whoever it is from the Muslims. We pray for Turkey.
We hope that Allah grants victory to the Muslims of Turkey in all the struggles that they face, because they have a lot of struggles too. Amin, family of Quran. Amin, may Allah accept it and forgoes our shortcomings. Yeah, people do like, in Hollywood, do like George Clooney, but his wife has been silent and actually detrimental when it comes to Palestine, despite supposedly being this big human rights advocate. It's all evaporated and she plays the two sides narrative as well. Okay, what do we have here? Yes, Pestify brings up the point. There was an article, I think, on Washington Post by a Zionist that talked about having peacekeepers from Arab nations. Yes, this is another ploy of the Zionists to attempt to demilitarize Gaza, as if the militarization of Gaza is the problem and not the Zionist occupation of all of Palestine, including Gaza and the West Bank is the problem, right? It is deflection. So notice how this is why actually, you know, armed resistance has been just historically, descriptively speaking, most effective as a bargaining tool because it has forced Israel to come to the table and negotiate time and time again. And even the fact that they are trying to do this, they would want nothing more than the demilitarization of Gaza and the West Bank. As-salamu alaykum from Mauritius, 100%. Great, let's keep rolling. We have, what can we learn? What can the U.S. learn? So the U.S. elections cycle is coming up in November. We've seen France go through it. We've seen the UK go through it. Other nations are going through it. What can we learn? We have to be very, very aware of the tactics of winning the Muslim vote. Okay, we see have, we see the phenomenon of tokenism is very, very rampant that time and time and time again, we see that the people or the elites, the people in power
will always attempt to conscript and use Muslims who are willing to compromise their principles in order to save face and say that, well, we're not really against the Muslims. We're not really against sort of Islam. And we know that this is a lie. This is a very, very thin, thinly veiled lie. So it begs the question that if we have terrible examples from east to west, from north to south of token Muslim representatives that don't represent us, then the exploratory and positive constructive question would be what criteria or demands should we put in place of people who are thinking about becoming officials or elected representatives that would actually mean that their presence wasn't simply just tokenization. So there's a couple, and I'm sure that many of you could come up with your own. One of them is very important that they have to be accountable to our community. They actually have to be accountable to our community. And that means they need to be funded by our community and they need to be in our communities, not just show up around election time, not just be given the minbar for free, right? Not just the person who pays or the group that pays, they're paid by the lobbies, they're paid by the political parties to run, and therefore they're not put up by the Muslims and they have no accountability to the Muslims so that their agenda is determined by the party, their agenda is determined by the lobbyists. That's not what we want. We want representatives that are actually going to be accountable to the Muslim community. Number two is that when people go into a position of power, that they have to bring their values, not just their identity. As the saying goes in American vernacular, all skin folk ain't kin folk, right? That they will find that we remember Colin Powell standing in front of the UN, you know, trying to call for the weapons of mass destruction and justify the invasion of Iraq.
We have the US ambassadors to the UN with the assault and bombardment of Gaza that are vetoing the ceasefires, right? We know that they will always- conscript one of us. They will always use one of us to control and keep down us, right? This is always how it works. So we need to make sure that people, when they're going to go into politics or they're going to go to a position, that they are going to bring their values with them because the system sometimes- it will tolerate the diversity of your skin tone, it will tolerate the diversity of your clothing. You can wear a dashiki, you can wear a turban hijab, but it will not always tolerate the diversity of values. And so we have to be insistent on this, that we demand a diversity of values, that if we come to office or we come to a position, we bring our values with us. That doesn't mean we're a fifth column any more than anybody who's a Christian that gets elected to a position or a Mormon that gets elected or a Catholic that gets elected. And they used to use these same sort of things against Catholics, right? Next is that you have to make sure, 100% Abdullah, identity politics is an epidemic and too many people have caught that disease. Too many Muslims have caught that disease, right? We need to give them a shot in the arm ASAP. Save them. Defibrillator, clear. Last one, have an impact, don't be used, okay? Many people that are Muslims that get involved in politics, they end up themselves being transformed rather than them having a transformative effect. That's backwards, right? We need to make sure that if you're going into politics, that you're going to have an impact, you're not going to be impacted. And just as a case study, as a case study, if we're talking about the Palestine issue in particular, what are you going to see now? How is tokenization going to come to you? I'll tell you how
tokenization is going to come to you from now to November. Everybody's going to be ceasefire. Everybody's going to say, yeah, we're a pro-ceasefire. Pro-ceasefire is nothing any more. And I'm not saying it's nothing when it comes to, we want the ceasefire. We want the lives of our brothers and sisters in Gaza to stop being killed at will, as one article said. But all the traitors and the betrayers are going to come with you with ceasefire language. They're not going to talk about ending the Zionist occupation. They're not going to talk about ending the Israeli influence on US law and politics. They're not going to talk about ending the conflation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. They're not going to talk about that. They're going to portray themselves as somebody who is pro-ceasefire and act as if that is some radical position that they're making some big moral standabout. That is nothing anymore if you are somebody who's going to stand up. And you should, all Muslims listening, you should challenge these people when they come into your mosques, when they come into your different institutions and say, what are you going to do to stop Zionist influence in politics? What are you going to do to stop the Zionist occupation of Palestine? What are you going to do to protect pro-Palestinian advocacy and protesting from Zionist claims that from the river to the sea is anti-Semitic or from them weaponizing hate speech and weaponizing anti-Semitism against us in order to basically shut down any criticism of Israel. That's where it takes, I can't say the word, that's where it takes stones. That's where it takes courage, bravery, principled action. That's where it's actually going to happen. So Muslims do not be tricked, do not be tricked, do not be tricked. Be aware, hold these people to account, hold their feet to the fire, and don't let them play at the police and say, oh brother, this is not how we do. No, when Abu Bakr radiallahu anhu got in front of
the Muslims and took the bay'ah from the Muslims, what did he say? He said, I am not the best of you. If I go astray, set me straight. And that is the attitude that you should expect and demand from your Muslim representatives and your Muslim politicians. If you go astray, we will set you straight. You can bet on it. Let's see what we have in the comments. Let's see. Yes, nope points out. Zionists, they think that they're the only ones with the right to defend themselves. That's their whole game. Wa alaykum as-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Who we Muslims should vote for, thank you. There's no one answer to that question. It depends on your district. Are you in a swing state? Whatever. And plus this is a 501c3 yaqeen, so I can't say that here. But if you go to my other work on other platforms like blogging theology and thinking Muslim, I talk more about that there. Sada brings up the hundred percent. Yes, we do not need garrison states. We do not want Palestine to be a garrison state. You said it, Sada. We do not want Palestine to be a garrison state. And the secular liberal leftist, and I know the leftists always say, we're not liberals. Yes, you are. You're not as different as you think you are. That the secular leftist Palestinian state that they want is very, very, very likely to become just another garrison state in the Middle East. We see how that works out. Murad Ali praises me. May Allah forgive me for my shortcomings. Yeah, I mean, may Allah protect us. We believe in Allah, Murad. We believe in Allah. Allah is the one that will protect us or afflict us or expose us to affliction. Nusaybah says, at a micro level, college students can practice this by participating in student governments. Thank you. That's a very practical thing that everybody can do. And I'll even raise you one more, organizing the alumni. That is something that the Zionists have done very
effectively to the point where they can bully around university presidents. They can bully Yale. They can bully Harvard. They can bully UPenn. They can bully Oxford. They can bully Cambridge because their alumni donors are organized. If you have graduated or even if you're still a student, organize your alumni. Organize the donations. Another thing, Nusaybah, that you reminded me of is student newspapers. Student newspapers are often run by those who just hang around. They're not like New York Times. If you have just two competent Muslim writers that start as freshmen at the student newspaper, by the time that they're juniors or seniors, they're going to be top editors. So they will have an influence on the discourse on campus, 100%. Nusaybah says, my intention back then was to have a voice for MSA at the table, but I realize now that I could have pushed for more. That's a very mature reflection. Minami Islam Khan, thank you for joining the program. Have a great day at work. Yep. Yushella, 100%. Latisha, you're late, but late's better than never. Welcome. And Buongiorno Attica. Everything is good. Va bene, grazie. Thank you very much. May Allah bless you and your family and everybody else watching. Pestify says, Zionists are playing the long game. They are changing textbooks and laws to facilitate their powers. Muslims need to be vigilant, establish long-term goals. Yes, that's true, Pestify. I was in a meeting where it was going over how Zionists have nonprofit organizations. They always have these very vague names like Critical Studies or the Organization for Global Thought or things that are very vague in general. And their job is to shape the language that its own occupation of Palestine is what language is
used to talk about Palestine in college textbooks and high school textbooks. And so they have a whole spreadsheet of terms where rather than killing and murder, they will say, euphemisms. Rather than occupation, they try to minimize the use of occupation. And there finally is a group that's pushing back against it, but it's not Muslims. It's not Muslims, unfortunately. There's other people doing the work, but we need Muslims to be leading the fight on this. Oh, yeah. 100% Nusaybah. Yeah, CUNY. Unfortunately, I was able to go to CUNY and show up after the Unfortunately, I was able to go to CUNY and show up after the encampment got swept. Unfortunately, many of these universities, it's a game. It's a game, and we have to learn how to play the game. Alaykum as-salamu alaykum, Muhammad Jahid from California. Okay, moving along, we've got Kitab As-Seer wal-Jihad. We're going to talk about today a very, very interesting hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ said that the person who, well, I'll leave this as a question. Okay, let's have a little bit of interaction on this. What will happen to a person on the day of judgment who betrays their trust or betrays the trust? And this is mentioned in the Book of Jihad or the Book of Seerah, so it has to do with leadership specifically. The Prophet ﷺ said, something specific is going to happen to them on the day of judgment. What do you think it is? Alaykum as-salamu alaykum, Mulek Rahman from Queens. Very nice, happy to have you with us. The person who betrays a trust. Yeah, so the question is, the Prophet ﷺ said, a person who betrays a trust or the trust is going to have blank happen to them on the day
of judgment. Any ideas what that would be? And I'm going to pull up the text of the hadith here. This is in the Bab of Tahrim al-Ghadr, the prohibition of Ghadr, which is basically promising that you're going to do something or telling people that you're going to do it and then not doing it. You're probably familiar with that term from the more general hadith where the Prophet ﷺ talked about the qualities that a hypocrite would have. And one of them is, if they said that they're going to do something, Ghadr, it means that if they said they're going to do something, they don't do it. So the Prophet ﷺ said, avoiding Shaykh Google, safer for you. So the Prophet ﷺ said that every single betrayer, that's the word he used, Ghadr, will have a banner, a liwa' on the day of judgment where his name is on it. Fulan ibn Fulan, that is going to announce to everybody on the day of judgment that they were a traitor or they were someone who betrayed. So their betrayal would be made known. Now, if you go into al-Nawawi's sharh and Nawawi's sort of reflections on this, he's got a couple of really interesting things. He also cites Qadi Iyad for a few things. So one of the things, generally betraying trust is forbidden,
alhamdulillah. So notice how, again, justice, look at how, look at how, what would an Islamophobe, and I don't like that language, but let's just use it. If they were to study the book of jihad in a hadith book, what do they think that they're going to find, right? Kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, do this, do this, do that. And what do we have, what have we covered so far? Give glad tidings, spread, make things easy for people, don't do this, don't do that. And now we have, don't betray and don't betray trust. So not something that people would necessarily immediately assume, okay? So first of all, the fact that this is part of the book of jihad shows us that jihad is something that is within a strict set of moral rules that you have to follow. It's not some sort of figment of, you know, the right's imagination where we're just, you know, like going crazy, that this is something that is, because it's a sacred act, it's an act of worship, if it's done right, it has strict conditions as to how it has to happen, okay? Now, the fact that it's mentioned in this particular book is because it has particular application to leaders, okay? That leaders have more trust invested in them than other people. And this is backed up by the hadith of the Prophet shallallahu alaihi wa sallam, كُلُكُمْ رَاعِينَ وَكُلُكُمْ مَسْئُولٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِى Right? Every single one of you is a shepherd and you're responsible for your flock. And then he gives through examples. So the leader is responsible for all the people that are under him. The husband, right, or the father of a family is responsible for his wife and his family. The mother is responsible for the household and so on and so forth. And even a slave is responsible for the, you know, the wares and sort of the property of his master. Like this is the example that shows
there's varying levels of responsibility. So the Prophet shallallahu alaihi wa sallam says that this is particularly something that we have to be very, very aware of about not betraying the trust. And Imam Muslim puts it in this particular chapter because it's most applicable to the leader. Leaders have more responsibility than anybody else. Why? Because number one, the betrayal of a leader, if a leader betrays trust, either to somebody outside or betrays the trust of the people that he supposedly takes care of, it affects everybody. Whereas if any one of you doesn't, if, you know, we don't have a lot of authority, you betray somebody's trust, the impact is much smaller. Number two, Anawi says there's no excuse to betray if you're the leader. You've got all the power. You've got all the strings and levers of the government or whatever. You have the means to do whatever you want. So sometimes people betray because they're forced in because of a certain situation or, you know, because of a certain need that they have. You don't have that sort of extenuating circumstance if you're the leader. So it's even more of a betrayal if the person in power with all of the means betrays. Third, this especially applies to treaties and agreements. And if you notice who's the biggest violator of treaties and agreements in the world, it's Israel, right? That they have violated every ceasefire that they've ever agreed to. They violated the UN, you know, the Geneva Conventions, all the rules that everybody else agrees to. They violated them time and time again. And Qadi Iyad says that this applies to the general trust of leadership because when a person assumes leadership, it's almost like there's a social contract. There's almost like there's a hidden agreement that he has a duty to the people that he acts in favor of or to protect. And so Qadi Iyad specifically says if he deceives them, he lies to his people. He deceives his people. So imagine all those Muslim candidates that are
going to come to you by November saying, yeah, we support a ceasefire. That means we're pro-Palestinian. Whoever deceives you, okay, or abandons compassion, that was an interesting one, I didn't expect that, or abandons gentleness towards the people that they represent, then he has betrayed the trust of his leadership. Very interesting, very interesting. Now, we're not for a liberal watered-down version of Islam. However, some people have gone to the opposite extreme in their opposition to a watered-down Islam to make Islam seem harsh or to say that, okay, well, this scholar at this point, they say that you can be harsh in this situation. That's 100% true. You'll find that in the tradition. You are allowed to be harsh in particular circumstances, and the companions were, and the tabireen were, and there's a time and a place for it. Even the Prophet ﷺ, sometimes he would get up on the minbar and he would speak and his face would become red because of his anger, right? Islam is not just always something cute and cuddly. However, notice that Qadi Iyad stresses that a leader has to have gentleness and compassion towards his people, and if he abandons that, he has betrayed their trust, just as if he had deceived them. I find that very, very, very fascinating. What have we got here? Yes, Sadiqah, Major Zionist Bloomberg, just handed my university a $1 billion donation. Oh, makes me feel like how will we ever move the needle with these unis? Well, I have some thoughts about that, Sadiqah. One of them is that within our lifetime, we have experienced the commodification of education. Higher ed is not about education anymore. It's about profit. That's why if you go back to the 90s or before, the presidents of
universities were educators. They were people who had degrees in education administration. They were people that often even lectured sometimes, like I'm talking about giving classes. With the advent of neoliberalism, late 90s and early 2000s, and especially in the 2010s, we saw the transition to a for-profit model. Now, who are the people who are presidents of universities? They're all bankers, corporate, IMF, World Bank execs. I should know. This happened at the university I was at. The whole model has been the neoliberal model of cut costs, maximize profits. That switch has made universities particularly susceptible to being controlled by moneyed interests. One tactic would be to try to organize Muslim alumni to donate in a comparable way as their Zionist counterparts are doing. There's room for that. But something that would be even better than that is to take the profit motive out of higher ed, to make higher education not about maximizing profit, to make it more affordable, to break the debt system that everybody is profiting off of. That is something that we need to study and figure out. Juju says, a bit tangential, but was wondering what you think will happen to Netanyahu with the imminent ceasefire. Do you think he'll be forced to step down? I think that he will probably eventually be forced to step down. I don't think that anything is really going to happen to him in the sense of the International Criminal Court or things like that. I don't think that Israel will allow that to happen because of the precedent it will set for future politicians. Israel leans heavily on the United States in order to exempt itself from being held
accountable to international law. It will throw everything it can at attempting to escape that accountability. That's all I can really foresee. Abdullah says, what are your thoughts on Israel's being hateful because of their generational trauma? A friend expressed this opinion to me today as part of the diaspora. I am too dumbfounded to respond lol. Yeah, I say that this is a very materialistic position. By materialistic, I mean it erases the moral component and the moral decision that every single individual and every single community has. You have a choice as to how you respond to your trauma. You have a responsibility, if you have a trauma, to manage it and respond to it in a morally and ethically upright way. It is not an excuse, especially when Finkelstein has a book, I believe, that's about the Holocaust industry, about how Zionists have particularly attempted to weaponize that traumatic memory, to continually re-traumatize, but not just that. Not just re-traumatizing the current and controlled very tightly the memory of Western Jews, but to shape the way that they respond to that traumatic memory. That's the big thing. You do have to take accountability to the way in which, yeah, exactly, watermelon 786, 100%, right there. Right there, 100%. Imagine what Palestinian trauma would justify. If we were to go with that logic all day, then according to that logic, and we're not saying
this, but according to that logic, then October 7th is not even anything. The sword cuts both ways. You can't have your cake and eat it too. This is a very exceptionalistic type of thinking. Everybody has a responsibility. Honestly, if you were to look, the Palestinians have been so moral in the way that they have responded to their trauma. They've been restrained. There has been, I think that you could definitely call it restraint. Despite all of the propaganda trying to portray them as, even the resistance factions as ISIS or this or that, it's all complete propaganda. That they have exercised a lot of restraint, given what they've been through. May Allah grant them victory. Nancy Yahya says, I think Qadir Iyad was describing our Mexican president. Yeah, well, not just him. May Sage, I think one of the hardest tests Muslims can be given is leadership, 100%. It's a test. A lot of people have failed and continue to fail, except those with the strongest minds, minds and hearts, 100%. Saudah says, I think we can also turn that around and say that if they've experienced it, then they shouldn't want others to go through it, 100%. Yes. Should it create empathy or pathology? We would hope that it would create empathy. Rather, that is a cop-out and is an ideological move to absolve them from any responsibility. What is waiting for all those in power now? 100% MB. Yes. A good example, Pestify, we've talked about such disparity between how hostages are treated from one side to the other, 100%. Okay, so we're going to pivot to our last segment here. We're going to keep going with our
book on personal development, which is Atomic Habits. Now, this particular episode is just going to be a setup for the rest of the book. God, again, you know I hate dust jackets, right? So we've got Atomic Habits here. He's going to go over the schema of the rest of the book. So there's not going to be a whole lot of practical takeaway for this particular one, but he's going to set us up to understand the rest of the book, and there's a ton of practical takeaway for the coming chapters. When we talk about what a habit is, we have to properly understand what a habit is. That's one thing that he wants us to understand, that a habit is a mental shortcut, okay? You've done something once in a certain way, it turned out good. So rather than have to start from scratch and trial and error and wonder what to do next time in the same exact situation, your mind creates a shortcut to basically clear some memory from your hard drive and basically say, all right, this is what worked last time, this is what we're doing. So there are four stages to this habit being formed, whether it's a good habit or a bad habit. And this is something that's recognized and we'll talk about it. So the first one, and we can show the graphic of that, number one is the cue, okay? That there is a cue, there's something in the environment that alerts you to a situation that requires a type of action. The second stage is the craving. So you noticing that situation causes a desire within you for a certain thing. It could be just to change how you feel, it could be something tangible, whatever. The third one is your response. What is then your action that you basically develop to respond to that craving, which is reminded or sort of you're tipped off by the cue. And then the last one,
what's the reward that you get in accordance to the action that you did in the response, okay? So we'll talk about this. Let's talk about maybe how to categorize. There's a couple different ways to categorize this. One way of categorizing, we can split it up into your relationship to reward. Everybody likes rewards. Maybe your reward is an ice cream cone on a hot day. It's been really hot here lately. Or your reward is scrolling through your phone. Honestly, that's the way a lot of people unwind. Or your reward is some quiet time alone, or to sit down with a book. Whatever reward you're after, you can understand the first three steps of habit formation as a relationship to that reward that you're ultimately after. So the cue would be noticing the reward, okay? You could be, I don't know, you come downstairs, you wake up, and you're hungry, okay? There's your cue. That's your tip. That's your notice that there will be a reward. If you feed yourself, you will not be hungry anymore, okay? That generates a craving. You start to desire certain particular foods or whatever it is. You want something. So that's your wanting the reward, all right? Your response is what you're going to do to obtain the reward. So either you're going to reach for something quick, a granola bar or something like that, or you're going to break out the skillet, fry up some eggs, whatever you're going to do, shakshuka, nihari, whatever you're eating for breakfast. That's what you're going to do. And then once you've had the reward, and you've actually successfully obtained that reward, you basically put a stamp on that process. And your mind is now making a shortcut and saying that, okay, next time I have the same cue, I'm going to repeat the same steps, and that'll give me the same reward. We can also categorize it into two. We can split them
up one and two in one camp, and three and four in another camp. One and two represent sort of the problem phase, okay? You notice something, then you get a craving. That's the problem. The solution is the response you take to get that thing, and then actually making sure that you get it, okay? So, knowing that, we should have enough information to intentionally notice how to create good habits, and by flipping it and inverting it, how to stop bad habits. We don't want to create bad habits, we want to stop bad habits. Let me explain to you what I mean. So, for example, the first law, this goes into his laws, and this is the rest of the book. Law number one is make it obvious. If you want to establish a habit, the habit has to be obvious, and being obvious has to do with the cue, what's going to tip you off to do this particular thing. The second law of habit formation is make it attractive. That craving that you want, it has to be a real strong craving, or we have an incentive to make the craving as strong as possible, as long as what we want is good. So, enhance that craving, it's going to increase the likelihood that you're going to be able to form a habit and stay with the habit. Number three is make it easy. Your response has to be easy. If your response is too difficult, you're going to fail with your habit, or you're not going to stick. So, making your response as easy as possible is a key to a good habit. And four, make it rewarding. Make it satisfying. Your reward that you get should be satisfying. If you've gone through all the trouble and you didn't have any satisfaction at the end, your mind is going to cut that shortcut and say, well, what's the point? We didn't get what we wanted, okay? Allahu Akbar. Pestify is making eggs. I ate eggs for breakfast every single morning I was in Medina,
I think. Fried up eggs were the staple. I do know nihari. I do. I haven't had it in a long time. I used to eat Pakistani food in Medina sometimes. There's many Pakistani places in Medina. So, here we go. So, those are the four laws that he's going to expand upon. We've got make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. And they correspond to these four phases of cue, craving, response, reward. Now, let's say we have a bad habit. How do we break that? Well, it's simple. Your bad habit is made up of these same four components. So, all you have to do is invert the laws. Rather than making the cue obvious, you actually have to make the cue invisible, okay? Instead of making the craving as attractive as possible, you have to actually make it unattractive. Instead of making the response easy, then you actually have to make the response very difficult to do. And then finally, instead of making the reward satisfying, you actually want to make the reward or the thing that you get as unsatisfying as possible. So, there we have it. Good habits make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Bad habits make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, and make it unsatisfying. That's the rest of the book. We're going to get into a lot of other examples, but we're going to start that next week, inshallah ta'ala. Let's see. This is your final chance for comments and questions, and then I think we're going to wrap it up for the night. What do we have? Mrs. S, I don't consider it as a bad habit. 15 plus years, I only can sleep while listening to Surah Yaseen. I can't figure out why this Surah, mashallah. May Allah make Surah Yaseen a source of benefit for you in this life and the next.
Latisha Muhammad, I am from Trinidad. Welcome. Have you guys heard of doubles? No, please enlighten us. What are doubles? I would love to know. I feel like Trinidad is going to have really good food, though I haven't been there. Ahmed Hamdudu, could this be applied to addiction? Absolutely. Addiction is very, very much about habit formation. It's a big topic because a lot of people have attempted to make addiction simply be about chemicals, which is sort of disempowering. It makes you feel like there's basically nothing you can do. Addiction is largely, not maybe exclusively, but largely about habits. That's why smokers, for example, they will often smoke after coffee. A lot of people, smoking is tied to their consumption of coffee. This becomes a cue. It develops a craving. They have the response. They have the reward. It's a very, very difficult thing to break. There's some really interesting research that he gets into because he does deal with addiction throughout the book. We're going to see some of that. I encourage you to tune into future episodes where he's going to talk specifically about addiction, especially smoking, and how this type of knowledge about habits and habit formation and habit breaking can actually help you with your addictions. Atik has a question. If I don't mind, do you like ricotta gnocchi or classic potato gnocchi? Gnocchi, as long as it's gnocchi, I like it. No problem. Gnocchi is a favorite. I won't be picky. Though I've made potato gnocchi myself, I don't think I've remembered making ricotta gnocchi. Gnocchi is good no matter how it comes. Abdullah asks, a lot of my bad habits come from trying to self-soothe. Yes. What good habits can we
practice instead to self-soothe? A hundred percent. We're going to get into that, Abdullah, especially with phone use, especially with phone use. He talks so much about phone use, I'm so glad that he does. The phone is really bad. It's really bad for habits because the cues are not obvious at all. How many times do you open your phone to do something, and then you do five other things, and then you close your phone and you didn't do the thing that you opened the phone to do? That is exactly an example of something that it's not obvious. There's too many cues associated with the phone. It's very, very difficult to actually stick to habits that are phone-based. He'll talk about it more, so we're going to go into that. Another thing that he says that's directly related to the idea of self-soothing is that a lot of times the cue is just about we have a negative emotion, and the craving is that we want to change the way that we feel. The response that we've developed is escapism, doom scrolling, a lot of this stuff, channel surfing back in the day, is exactly about this, that we really are searching for a different feeling. We want to feel differently than the way we feel in the moment, and so we are reaching for that easy response. Doom scrolling is very easy to do. You don't have to move. You don't have to talk to anybody. You don't have to do anything or say anything. You're just with your thumb or with your index finger. It gives us a little bit of relief. It changes the way we feel a little bit, but at what cost, so we're definitely going to be talking about that. Does this apply to OCD? I have read about the cycle for compulsion. It looks similar. I'm less familiar with that, Juju, so I'd be happy to benefit from whatever you have to offer, but I could see a way in which something that is compulsive is tied to your habits, especially with the cue. If you're triggered by a certain cue, then you get stuck in this loop. I
could see where that would be true. Ahmed says, because I'm at a level where I hate everything about my addiction, and yet I keep relapsing. Yeah, let's talk about it. Then keep on tuning in, inshallah. Hopefully, this book can be of benefit to you. Hussain Hassan, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. How do you think we should feel about the U.S. upcoming election? We talked about that all day. Sorry, you have to rewind. This is not the chance for the Ottomans to conquer Vienna or anything else. This is something that is a small battle in a larger struggle for Muslim empowerment. We need to keep our eyes on the prize and have a sense of proportion and scope and look for our opportunities. That's the CliffsNotes. I'll take a follow-up question about gnocchi. I'll say it's simple with butter and garlic. Garlic butter sauce is simple. Okay, what else we have? Leticia, it's basically, here we go. What's a double? So now I can go to Trinidad and order a double. A sandwich with two pieces of flatbread with curry chickpeas and spicy condiments added. That sounds good. It sounds good. I used to eat, one common thing we used to eat in Medina was, they would call it mushakal, which means mixed up or a mixture, which was balila, chickpeas. I think, is that the ordinary word for it? Atika, could you help us? Is that, is it balila? And lentils. So dal, there you go. Dal and balila mixed up together and then a big nice thing of roti. That was for two reals. That was good. That was good stuff. Yeah, Sada, well, very Italian. I mean, sorry, that's what you got. Um, May Sage, how can one rid themselves of the nasty habit of procrastination? Yes, May, we're going to get into that too. Procrastination is a huge, is a very related thing to this cycle that oftentimes, you know, we'll talk about it in
depth inshallah, but oftentimes when the response is too difficult, right, we will reach for the easiest response, even if that means we don't actually do the thing that we have to do. So it's, uh, it, this process does definitely play into that. Amin, pastify, amin, wayakum. Okay, chana is chickpeas in Urdu. So the balila, Umar, help us out here. Balila is actually Arabic for, for chickpeas. I didn't think that was true, or maybe that's a different dialect or something. I'm not sure. So we have chana and dal and roti, and then we have, okay, so balila comes from somewhere else. Whatever it is, it was good. You know, the old tandoori ovens, you know, where they put the roti across the thing and, and put it inside the oven. And then when it's ready, and they, they, they take it off. That was a staple. That was a staple food. Okay, you all are making me hungry here. Iraj is talking about tiramisu. Oh, okay, but hold on there. Slow your roll there, Iraj. Don't, don't, don't commit any blameworthy innovations. Chickpea tiramisu. I don't know about that. I'm not sold. Okay, uh, last one, I think from FCF, when you're self-soothing with bad habits, ask yourself, what do I get from this? And is there a better habit, even just a bit better, I can get the same thing, a similar feeling from? Yes. And as we will see, the author is going to help us make the more positive responses and the more, uh, efficient and effective responses easier. And it's very, very interesting how that, I was, I was shocked, honestly, as to how interesting it is to change your habits. I'll give you a teaser. Okay. This is something that, that, that he mentioned. So for example, if you, um, want to get in the habit of running, okay, running is a dreadful or is a dreadful event for a lot of people. You, you don't look forward to doing it. Okay. So if
one wanted to become a runner, then the habit would simply be to, uh, to set out your shoes and to put your shoes on and to get into your proper outfit. Right? So this is a way of making the habit easy. And nine times out of 10, once you're in the outfit and you put the shoes on and you've gotten out the door, then running happens. Okay. So sometimes it takes disaggregating a larger habit into a smaller step. That's going to lead to the greater thing. That's actually a little bit intimidating, but he will talk about that in due time. Mahmood Abdi, I have a habit of drinking coffee in the morning before I go to work. What do you think about this habit? I think it's a beautiful habit. I would recommend you continue with it. I drink three espresso a day, unless it has any negative health effects to you. Yes. Roti is very interesting. I have to go. Have I eaten kebab jabber? Yes, I have all the time. Uh, have you had fool? Yes, I have testified. I've had fool. I've had Egyptian fool in Medina, not in Egypt, unfortunately. Also had koshary, Egyptian koshary in Medina. Uh, they have, uh, Egyptian places. Yes. Fool is very good though. I do prefer hummus. Um, but it is what it is. You all are making me very hungry. I think we have to wrap this up. Yeah. The coffee stays Abdullah coffee stays. So I'd like to thank everybody for their wonderful participation. You've all made me very hungry and also very happy of all the food that we have across the ummah. We have a lot to exchange and offer each other as Allah SWT says in the Quran, so that you all right. That, uh, we are given our tribes and cultures in order for us to know one another and know one another. Right. So that is something that, Oh, roti shanai is the best. Julia, what do you roti shanai is the best and London? Oh, you guys had on my Lake. You guys are, are, are jumping the gun here. Yeah.
We are going to have an ummatic potluck and sell on CT Noriati. Yes. Nasi lemak, roti shanai are two of my favorites. In fact, I'll be honest. And this is a little bit of an innovation for an Italian, but roti, excuse me, Nasi lemak is the best breakfast food. Actually it's a tie between Nasi lemak and roti shanai. Those are two of the best, best breakfast foods in the world. If I had the ability to, I would have them for breakfast every single day and I would never get tired of it. And when I was in Malaysia last, I did have them for breakfast every single day. Okay. Lisa Morel says, Oh, we got a couple of things. Mohammed says, I have been having a health issue for three years now. It doesn't go away no matter what. So I'm stuck with bad habits now because good habits don't help me anyways. May Allah make it easy for you. May Allah make it easy for you and restore you to health inshallah to Allah. And we hope that there's something of benefit in here. Inshallah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm ready. Lisa says, I've been waiting to learn more about Islam, more specifically about things like Dr. Omar Suleiman addresses in his Juma talks. If you listen to them, I can't major in Islam for now. What do you recommend? Yeah, I mean, that's a great place. Yes, Yaqeen Institute has so much to offer when it comes to the basics of Islam. My wing of Yaqeen Institute deals with a lot of sort of contemporary issues and societal issues. So if you're looking for the basics of Islam, then go to Yaqeen Institute's website. There's a lot of information out there for you and videos as well. And it's, we've got a very sort of, a very user-friendly experience for inshallah. Keltar, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah. Ameen, ameen. We forgot, we forgot Moroccan cuisine for the Moroccans that were watching. And Rafisa and couscous in the end of it. But anyway, yes, the Ummah would have a beautiful, a beautiful, a beautiful, what's the word?
What do we call it? Picnic or a beautiful potluck. So may Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la gather us in Jannah, inshallah, so that we're able to benefit from each other. May Allah bless you all. Thank you so much, everybody, for your excellent participation as always. SubhanakAllahu wa bihamdika sharafa wa la ilaha ila anta astaghfiru wa atubu ilayk. Until next time, salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.
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