Lecture
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17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Addressing the Topic of Trauma and Faith - Sh. Omar Suleiman | ISNACON 2019
Sh. Omar Suleiman discusses some of the findings from the "Doubt Survey" an early Yaqeen Institute project where we assessed why people were leaving Islam or having doubts about faith. One of the trends we found is that many people's doubts stemmed from traumatic incidences. In response, Yaqeen created the Trauma Series to address the impact of trauma on faith and to help the community heal.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. October 20th, alhamdulillah, now going on to three years, was the birthday of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. It was the official outward launch of Yaqeen Institute. And when we set out, and obviously there was a lot of work that went into Yaqeen before we actually launched the Institute. When we set out to launch this Institute, knowing that we would have a difficult time for the first couple of years, is trying to explain what Yaqeen is. Some of you probably still don't know what it is. But inshallah ta'ala we've done at least a better job of providing the resources about what it is now, if you were to go online and to get a good understanding. And hopefully through this session inshallah, you'll get a broader understanding of what we're trying to do also. We set out to study doubt. That was the very first thing. What causes Muslims themselves to leave faith or to not feel solidified enough in faith to meaningfully absorb it and practice it as well as contribute through its lens. And the goal was to take people from doubt to contribution, and not just from doubt to belief, but doubt to contribution, doubt to belief to a place of contribution, where they feel not just solidified in their faith, but again, they feel like it is enabling them to do great things for the world around them through the lens of Islam as we all know. And because you can only give what you yourself have, if you don't have peace, you can't give peace. You need peace on the inside in order to be able to give it on the outside, or else it's very much so short-lived and not as substantive as it needs to be for the society around us. This is going to take a lot of deep research. And so the first survey that we actually launched was called the doubt survey, where we did the first analysis through 32 imams, chaplains, social workers, people that work hands-on with the Muslim community to identify the sources of doubt.
And doubt in this sense is internal conflict with the faith. How many of you know someone who has left Islam? Can I see some hands? If I ask, can you raise your hands again? If I was to ask that question at an Islamic convention 10 years ago, it would not have been even 50% of those hands. I mean, if you looked around the room, that's a lot of hands to go up. That people that we actually know that have actively left their faith. How many of you know someone that is struggling with the faith, including, it could include yourself, how many of you know someone struggling with the faith? Vulnerability. So when you look at the Pew studies, when you see 23% of American-born Muslims no longer even identify with Islam, that tells you something. But the statistics could be very telling. Why is it that 80% of American Muslims fast, but only 39% pray, when prayer is more important than fasting in the hierarchy of the pillars of Islam? What does that say about identity and belonging and different factors that come into play with our worship? So I looked at the doubt survey, and most people did not identify intellectual reasons for their departure from Islam, but deeply personal ones, because you cannot separate your personal experiences from your belief, from the way that you would view God, and from the way that you would view the world around you. We are complex beings, but everything is deeply interconnected. If the authority in your life has been abusive, then naturally when God is introduced into your life as an authority, you are going to view Him probably through an abusive lens, because that is what it was. If it was highly disciplinary, there are triggers in anything that is disciplinary associated with God in the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
If culture was presented to you packaged as religion, and you had an aversion to that cultural idea, thinking that it was Islam that might have turned you off of the religion. If you've been constantly bombarded with this idea that you are from a backwards way of thinking, an inferior religion, an inferior way of life, and you went to public school your entire life, and everyone around you felt sorry for you, pitied you, and viewed you as being oppressed, and you naturally started to view yourself as oppressed. All of those things are deeply interconnected. So there is an intellectual component, because what those things do at the personal level is they expose our intellectual deficiencies as well, and our spiritual deficiencies as well. But at the same time, dealing with the personal, and what that particular personal impact is on my faith, which is at the bare minimum, from an Islamic perspective, the definition of my life's purpose, and what the personal means with that. So, we started to address a lot of misconceptions about Islam. We started to talk about some of those intellectual attacks on Islam, and a lot of our research initially focused on that. And of course, those intellectual conflicts might stem from the personal, but we started to do a lot of work on the intellectual. And then we started to do a lot on spiritual, because you know what? There is a way to spiritually anchor yourself in a way that Islam and faith would be rooted in your heart, so that when the intellectual and the personal come, they cause your tree to bend but not break, because it's deeply anchored in the heart. There's a spiritual anchor in the heart. There's that relationship you have with Allah, that knowledge of the person of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam, which personally I think is one of the greatest ways to solidify faith in your heart, is learning about the seerah of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam, the person of the Messenger sallallahu alayhi wasallam.
All of that that is based in the heart, and that belief in Allah, and knowing Allah, and who Allah is, and connecting all of the questions that you have to the attributes of Allah, that render primary concerns about Islam to secondary concerns about Islam. All of that is extremely important. And so we launched the Proofs of Prophethood series, and these things about solidifying the spiritual in the heart. But how do you then deal with the personal? Now here's one wrong way to approach this. The wrong way to approach this would be to suggest that there's no value whatsoever in counseling, in therapy, that there are no concepts of depression, just read, أَلَمْ نَشْرَحْ لَكَ صَدْرَكَ and everything will just go away, or that all of these deeply traumatic things that have taken place have just a scripture that needs to be recited, and then it's all going to go away. Spiritual bypass. Bypass the entire corpus of advancement that we've made in how we personally take care of ourselves, and how we internalize the experiences around us in a way that's healthy, not just spiritually healthy, but emotionally healthy, that allows us to make progress in our lives. Whether that purpose is worldly in its nature or it's towards the hereafter, but how do you deal with everything that's taking place? So the suggestion can't be that the solution to depression is just read Quran, and bypass it all. And the solution also cannot be to equate depression with low faith. That connection does not exist in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. That's an interpretation that I think is very faulty, but it does not exist in the Quran and the Sunnah. However, it is very useful to understand the connections between what happens to me on a personal level,
and what that means in terms of my faith, and how I can make sense of that in a way that's productive, and in a way that allows me to take the first steps towards not just rectifying that chaos in regards to my faith, but that chaos in regards to life as a whole, and how I start to put that back together. And so Alhamdulillah, at that point, you know, we had the blessing of reaching out to Sister Sara Sultan and Sister Najwa, and you know, really exploring deeply. Both of them have a background in therapy. So they have the secular background as well as being grounded within the tradition of trying to put together a series on the relationship between trauma and faith. On the relationship between trauma and faith, and the relationship between our personal, and everything that happens to us at an experiential level, because Islam is a lived faith, it's a lived experience. It's not just sorting out creedal concepts. It's a lived experience. It is supposed to touch every element of your life. So I need to better understand how that connection plays out in a healthy way in my life. And Alhamdulillah, they did incredible research over almost the course of an entire year, and I've been producing Alhamdulillah, we've been releasing a chapter of that research on about every four to six weeks, Alhamdulillah, Rabbul A'lamin, on the relationship between trauma and faith. And I can tell you that it's groundbreaking, and that I myself have personally benefited from it in ways that I think any person, any person that is either in the position of caregiving in any capacity, or any person that is in need of care, which I think all of us are, we're a deeply traumatized community, deeply traumatized community. And we have a lot of issues, and one thing I've realized in a lot of our group sessions recently, is that most collective Muslim gatherings, whether it's a halakah, or whether it's a group of people in hajj, become group therapy sessions.
Just without calling it that, but you know, we have a lot that's built up inside of us, and we don't have healthy outlets, and inshaAllah ta'ala, what I hope this can do is this can be the beginning of embarking on a healthy conversation, inshaAllah ta'ala, about the relationship between the personal and the trauma, and our faith, and you know, and crafting healthy solutions, inshaAllah ta'ala, for the community, both at the individual level and at the collective, inshaAllah, so we can start to move in a more productive direction, bidhillah ta'ala. And I want to leave you with this one point, inshaAllah ta'ala, before I hand it over to Sister Najwa and Sister Sara, and I hope you attend both sessions, inshaAllah ta'ala, and really benefit from the incredible work that they've done in this regard. A lot of people think, it's not just equating low imam and depression, which is the problem. A lot of people think that if I do something, like counseling, or start to try to put these pieces together, that that is because I failed to do it all myself with just what the Quran and the Sunnah gave me. So it's like, why did, you know, by doing that, by trying to get help, by trying to understand these things, it means that I couldn't put it together myself. Yeah, it was easy to recommend it to someone else when I saw them in a bad situation, and say, hey, look, maybe you should get counseling, or maybe you should do this, or maybe that. But for me myself, I'm going to be strong and do it all through the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet, salallahu alaihi wasalam, and I'm just going to understand it myself and put it all together myself. We are made up of so many different components as people. And if any of you have ever taken a tazkiyah class with me, you would have heard this statement, you cannot be disciplined in anything unless you're disciplined in everything. Cannot be disciplined in anything unless you're disciplined in everything. Eventually the areas of your life that are not put together are going to bleed into the other areas. And they're going to have real impacts on those other areas of life.
So I can't leave one area of my life in shambles, and run to the area of my life that makes me feel better, and just focus on that. And I come back to a statement from Abu Hazm, rahimahullah ta'ala, one of the tabi'een, who was asked by Suleiman ibn Abdul Malik, rahimahullah, who was the khalifa, he said, why do we hate death so much? Why do we hate death as people? Why does death cause us the apprehension that it causes us? And he responded, he says, لأنكم عمرتم دنياكم وخرّبتم آخرتكم Because you have established yourself in life, and you have ruined your hereafter, فتكرهون الخروج من العمران إلى القرى So you, naturally a person hates to leave an area that they feel well established in, or an area of uncertainty in a place that's in shambles. If you apply that methodology to the things that take place in our lives, then you'll also find it to be true. A lot of times if things are not put together in one area of life, I'm not going to try to fix that, I'm just going to continue to indulge, disproportionately the area that makes me feel good about myself, the area where I feel fulfilled, and hope that I can continue to bleed into that, and just focus on that. But that's not sustainable, and it's not healthy, and it's not Islamic. Islamically speaking, whatever you do for yourself, to make yourself a more capable عبد of Allah, a more capable slave of Allah, and a more capable خادم, a more capable servant to the people, is rewardable in and of itself. So all those notions of self-care, and emotional health, and taking a break, insha'Allah ta'ala, make things better for us in that regard. I will just continue on this note, and I'll just end with something which I think is very important about the Prophet ﷺ, and who he is, and what we can take as a lesson from him. You know, you look at the Messenger ﷺ, you always see this perfect balance that he had in his life, that the Prophet ﷺ was who he was inside the house, outside the house.
His excellence in worship was represented in his excellence in his work ethic. His being a community leader was also tied to his being a good father, a good husband, someone that was considerate. So those qualities that you see that led to the excellence of the Prophet ﷺ in those different areas of his life were not circumstantial. So the quality of empathy, for example, was something that impacted the Prophet's ﷺ du'a, and impacted the Prophet ﷺ how he dealt with his family, and impacted the Prophet ﷺ and how he dealt with his community. That quality of seeing things through, the perfection of an action, making sure that an action is done right, was something that manifested itself in every aspect of life of the Prophet ﷺ with the way that he did his wudu' to the very famous... A beautiful hadith, one that really moved me from Abdullah ibn Abi Ufrah ﷺ, he said that, describing the Prophet ﷺ in his Shama' al-Muhammadiyah, he said that the Prophet ﷺ was not too proud, wa la ya'nafu, he was not too proud, an yamshi amal armarati wal miskeen, to be seen constantly walking with an orphan, or with someone who was poor, or a widow, wa hatta yaqdi lahum al-haja, until the Prophet ﷺ made sure that they saw the end of what they were seeking. So he wouldn't just touch something, he would see it through, right? So it's a quality that the Prophet ﷺ developed that he could take intentionally to every single aspect of his life. And so, when we're talking about adopting these qualities of the Prophet ﷺ in our different aspects of life, it's to help put us together in the most wholesome way possible, in a way that benefits our deen and our dunya, way that benefits our careers and our family lives, in a way that benefits our productive role as community servants, as well as not being sloppy with our acts of worship with Allah ﷻ. So it's to develop those frameworks, those qualities and that balance. And on that note, insha'Allah ta'ala,
you cannot expect religion to be put together for you if you don't give it its time. Anything in life, you gotta give it its time, so you gotta be attentive to it. If you want it to come together in a way that's healthy, you have to be willing to give it its time. So if you want things, if you're in a turbulent marriage, you need to be willing to give it time to reduce that turbulence, right? And you have to be willing to take the necessary steps. The same thing with faith. This isn't something that just comes to you. When it's in shambles, like I'm just gonna make dua, and why isn't it happening for me? Giving it its time and taking the necessary steps to put it together. And if this is our priority, to have our purpose in line, to have our faith in line, then we have to be willing to be extremely intentional about doing whatever it is that's necessary to keep it put together and streamlined, bismillah ta'ala. So with that, insha'Allah ta'ala, I'm going to hand it over, insha'Allah ta'ala, to Sister Najwa, Sister Sara, to talk about the research, insha'Allah, and how we can benefit from that. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
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