Lecture
31 / 84
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
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Alhamdulilahi Rabbil Alameen. Wassalatu wassalamu ala Rasulil Kareem wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salam. Taseeman kathira. The discussion is meaningful solidarity. Meaningful solidarity comes through a sense of recognition of the value of the people with whom we stand. And meaningful solidarity comes of a recognition of the issue that binds us together. Those are two separate things. So part of it is recognizing our pioneers that we would not be able to stand the way that we do as Muslims in America had it not been for the great people that Sister A'ishah just spoke about briefly. And Dr. Sherman Jackson mentioned something recently that I think is very important. He said, ten times the slaves that came to America went to Brazil. Yet you don't see a large indigenous Muslim group in Brazil. You see it here in the United States. Why is it that Allah chose this place to have expressions of Islam in the 20th century lead to Islam in the 20th century and the autobiography of Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz, Rahimahullah Ta'ala, the fruit in Muhammad Ali, may Allah have mercy on him, the continuation in so many different forms and so many different groups that continue to uphold La ilaha illallah in the indigenous sense and still the African-American community being the largest group of Muslims in America. Why is it that Allah chose this place for that? And what is the hikmah of that? What's the wisdom of that? First of all, a recognition that they gave us shoulders to stand on as an American Muslim community as a whole. And there's something important to be mentioned here. Muslim and black are not mutually exclusive. So when you talk about the Muslim community and the black community,
sometimes you might fall into the trap of differentiating those two to where they're mutually exclusive. But what I want us to do is to understand that all Muslims owe a great debt to all of black history, meaning the sacrifices. I stood in Medgar Evers' blood in Mississippi, the carport. And if you don't know who Medgar Evers is, you need to look it up. The carport that he was assassinated in, the blood stained the carport in Mississippi. And you could literally go to the house of Medgar Evers and stand in the carport in a pool of blood, the stain of his blood. And then Malcolm and Dr. King and all of the sacrifices that went into the eventual passage of the Immigration Act in 1966 for which many, many Muslims who immigrated to this country owe a great debt to everybody that contributed to that. So all Muslims owe a great debt to all of black history, right? And that's the past. But I want to talk about the present. I want to share with you something that happened in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2005, right before Hurricane Katrina. Ayesha, when did you move to New Orleans? After? After 2005. Because I wanted to see if you remember this incident or not. There was a sister by the name of Dr. Jameela Arshad. Dr. Jameela Arshad was a black Muslim married to a Pakistani Muslim doctor. And she too was a doctor. Very prominent family in the Muslim community, very well-known couple. Have a wonderful son, Nadeem, who's a friend of mine. And subhanallah, I just want you to think about the scene. Two very successful doctors.
Dr. Jameela was on her way home one day, and she saw a kid that was riding his bike get hit by a car, so she stopped to treat the kid, to help, because she was a doctor. When she stopped her car to help the kid, like a good Muslim and a good person would do, a white man called the police on her, because he saw a black lady trying to help this kid, and said, I don't believe she's a doctor, or she's qualified, or that she is who she says she is. There's this crazy lady that's with this injured child. The police came, and without asking any questions, assaulted Dr. Jameela. Picked her up, body-slammed her to the concrete, to the pavement. When she said she's a doctor, they insulted her. They did not give her a chance to prove herself. She insisted that she was trying to help the child. And because of the aggressiveness that they showed in assaulting her, they threw her into the back of the cop car, and they locked the door on her. She had a seizure in the back of the car, and she passed away. The cops purposefully left her there in the back of that cop car to make sure that she wouldn't live to press charges for what she'd been through. The only reason why they even acted was because after some time, someone walked by and saw Dr. Jameela in the back of that car with foam out of her mouth, and told the cop, did you notice that the person that you have back there, handcuffed in the back of the car, has foam out of their mouth? He took his time. He said, I don't have the keys. He called his partner. He took another ten minutes or so to get his partner to open up the car in which they found her having passed away.
This rocked the Muslim community. This brought an issue that used to be just a black issue to the entirety of the Muslim community, and confronted the entire Muslim community with the question of police brutality. You could not pass this off as this was just another one of those kids that shouldn't have been walking around with their pants sagging, or wearing a hoodie, or showing some sort of aggression. You could not do that. This was literally a Muslim doctor, and she wasn't killed because she was Muslim. And that's an important point that I want to get to. A black Muslim doctor that stopped to do the right thing and was killed for that, and we ask Allah to accept her as a martyr, as a shaheedah, because she stopped to do something noble and was killed in the process. She stopped because of her Islam and her humanity and the goodness of her. But you can't make up anything about this narrative. And of course the cops said she was aggressive, she assaulted us, despite all the eyewitnesses saying otherwise. They framed her as an aggressor, and we had no choice but to take this 5'1 woman, big officer, and body slam her to the pavement, put all of his weight on her, and take her life. We had no choice. And the story always goes that way, doesn't it? We had no choice. Philando Castile looked suspicious. Philando looked like he was reaching for a gun in the car, so he had to get shot seven times in the driver's seat with his daughter in the backseat. Alton Sterling, even though he's on the ground and he has no way to reach anything, we had to shoot him dead because you never know, he might have been, he was about to pull something.
Jordan Edwards, 15-year-old boy in Dallas, ideal super kid. Well, the car was backing up. Actually, no, the car wasn't backing up, so the officer fired shots into the front seat and blew his brains out, literally, in front of his brothers. Oh, no, well, they were drunk. There was no alcohol in the autopsy. Oh, the car was coming back. Actually, the body cam footage showed the opposite. The car was going, oh, well, he heard gunshots somewhere. The officer, who was, by the way, an Iraq War veteran, Allah knows what he did in Iraq, said, well, he heard gunshots somewhere in the neighborhood, and so he thought it was coming from the car. The story always goes this way. We have a young man in Dallas, Texas, Botham John, who was murdered in his apartment, sitting on his couch. Oops, wrong apartment. Can you imagine to what extent this ridiculousness has gotten now? A white officer is able to say, wrong apartment. I was on the wrong floor. I thought I was going to my, but I got on the wrong floor. I had no choice but to shoot him because he acted aggressively. You walk into someone's apartment, pull out a gun, and shoot them dead, and then say, oops, but the door was kind of open. Actually, the door doesn't open. I've been to that apartment. The door slams shut. It has a safety feature. Oh, well, I thought it was mine. He has a big red rug in front of his apartment to make sure that no one mistakes his apartment. And not only that, they did a search warrant on his apartment, and they found a little bit of marijuana, while the officer was able to clean up, scrub her social media, move out of her apartment before she was taken in because of the outrage in the streets in Dallas for 30 minutes, got her mug shot, and now is out.
And now she's in the court system, and they've got her with her long gold locks, and they're dressing her up in a certain way, and they're trying to spin this narrative of this poor young woman that's being bullied by the city of Dallas because she killed an aggressive black man. Stephon Clark. Oh, well, he was next to a truck. It was his grandpa's truck. Oh, well, you know, we thought he had a gun. It was a cell phone. Well, we thought his cell phone was a gun 21 times. A week after Botham in Dallas, Abdullah, a man that was known as Dullah Beard in Michigan, a Muslim brother who was in his house, the cops went in the middle of the night, busted down his door, said they had a search warrant, shot him 21 times in his own living room. The problem was they had a search warrant for the house next door. They said, well, he had a gun. Wait a minute. He was trying to defend himself. If someone busts in your house at 2 a.m. and you have a gun, aren't you going to defend yourself? Why did you have to shoot him 21 times in his own living room? We had no choice. What is it that makes black bodies so disposable in America? And I say bodies not because they're reduced to bodies. I say bodies because the people that shoot them only see bodies. What makes them so disposable in America? The same thing that makes Palestinians disposable in Gaza. This is what I want you to understand for a moment. When you identify an entire group of people with an identity, a criminal identity, a violent identity, a suspicious identity, a terrorist identity, you can always spin the narrative
to make them only governable by force, brutality, and violence. Now, by the way, Muslims, if you only cared about Stephon Clark when you found out he was Muslim, you're part of the problem. You're part of the... Stephon was not murdered because he was Muslim. He was murdered because he was black. Whether he was Muslim or... I mean, the person who shot him, those cops that shot him, didn't know he was Muslim when they shot him. So when you found out there was Salat al-Janaza and that I was going to be there and Imam Zaid, and that's when you started saying, rahmatullah alayhi, and poor guy, and horrible, and all of a sudden, the hashtag that you have no issue using, you're part of the problem if that's what you did. So we're not, as Muslims, we have to take a step back, and I want us to ask ourselves this question. Do we understand the issue and the playbook with all black lives in America, not just black Muslim lives, with all black lives and what's happening here, and what's happening in this country right now? 1,017 people is your body count for 2018. Think about this for a moment. And so you think to yourself, well, they were dangerous. Well, it's understandable. Well, maybe there was an apprehension. The cop thought, the cop felt threatened. Do you know why we are ready to escape to those thoughts? Because maybe that's how we feel. Maybe that's how we feel around young black men that wear hoodies. Maybe we justify that with ourselves. And so, well, I understand why the cop did it. We keep on making, in America, black victims complicit in their own death.
Palestinians, and the reason why I'm mentioning this, by the way, is because the topic I was giving was black Palestinian solidarity. Young Palestinians at the border of Gaza keep on being made complicit in their own death. Young Mexicans, we were at the border of San Diego and Tijuana. They were going to take those troops, which, by the way, are also army vets, the militarization of the border, that were about to unload tear gas again into the people on the other side of the border, and strike them, young mothers and children, made them complicit in their own tragedy. Blamed the moms. Blamed the dads. The point is, dear brothers and sisters, is that when you dehumanize a people enough, suddenly the unspeakable becomes justifiable, and we're able to turn a blind eye. What does this mean for us in terms of solidarity? The Prophet ﷺ taught us to speak about wrong because it's wrong, not because we could turn the wrong into a narrative that would make things right for us as a Muslim community. It's very cheap when, in order to mainstream a cause to Muslims as a whole, we tack it on to the black community just to get some points and some traction for our cause, without understanding the issue itself. You need to understand the issue itself, what's happening in this country, that the same playbook that's been engineered, that's been used against the Muslim community globally, has been used against, weaponized against the black community historically here in America. What does that mean? The media, which has portrayed Muslims globally as a barbaric people that cannot but be dealt with with military force, with weapons and brutality and occupation,
is the same media that has engineered us to believe that the ghettos that were created by the circumstances that are not organic in this country cannot but be governed by this police force that is trained and uses the same tactics as the IDF. They're occupying these neighborhoods. And it's really interesting that we can't see that, that we can't see that it's the same type of behavior, the same type of tactics of dehumanization being used over and over and over again. Now I don't just want to sound angry and turn this into a rally. I want us to actually walk back a little bit and be a little bit intentional about what we take from this in terms of our own lenses. One of the things that we've seen is that, historically speaking, we've had people that, we've had great black freedom fighters that took up the cause of Palestine, and that's still the case today. Malcolm X, Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz, many people don't know him, he went to Gaza in 1964. He actually went to Palestine in 1964, predating 1967, and he wrote an essay in the Egyptian Gazette on Zionism. He was the first black leader to speak about Palestine. Not only that, but you know what's really interesting about what Malcolm did? Malcolm tied Zionism to white supremacy and colonialism. He called it a form of white supremacy and colonialism. And he said that portraying the Arabs as a barbaric people, disadvantaging them, occupying them, comes out of the same machine
that's used to colonize different parts of the world, portray these people as subhuman, barbaric, regressive, unable to coexist with the rest of the world, hence justifying a takeover of their lands, an occupation of their people, and hurting them in unspeakable ways. And it's really interesting, because I want to tie this comment to something that Dr. King said about the condition of the black American. Malcolm wrote in that essay, they clip the bird's wing and then blame it for not flying as high as they do. So you destroy the infrastructure of these people, destroy their economic potential, destroy their political independence, destroy everything that they have, so that now, 50, 60 years later, the slums that you've created, the horrible condition you've left these people in, you get to look back and say, we want peace with the Palestinians. We don't know why they're so angry and upset. Why are they so violent? What's their problem? Taking advantage of the image that's been put in people's minds that there are two equal parties that live side by side, that are continuing to fight with one another, and that we need to make peace with them, completely, completely taking advantage of the past not being known to the consumer of that propaganda, and the economic and political conditions being made irrelevant. Instead, what's wrong with the people on this side of the apartheid wall? Why can't they be as civilized as this group of people? They clip the bird's wing and then blame it for not flying as high as they do. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to
a cruelty that's been employed against African Americans in this country, and a history that most people don't appreciate. Most people don't understand, if they come to this country, why is it that this condition persists? Why can't they just pull themselves up by the bootstraps? You know what Dr. King said? It's very cruel to tell a man who doesn't have boots, why can't you pull yourself up by the bootstraps? Completely ignoring slavery, completely ignoring Jim Crow, completely ignoring the American people. Everything about mass incarceration, the war of drugs, and how it's been used to maintain slavery in this country, completely ignoring the school-to-prison pipeline, completely ignoring policing that is meant to create an apprehension with children around cops, completely ignoring all of the poisons that are trafficked and put into a community to keep it subjugated. And you say, why can't they just pull up by the bootstraps, clip the bird's wing, then blame it for not flying as high as you do? It's the same comments. The thing that I want you to pay attention to, historically, with the black Palestinian solidarity in particular, and what meaningful solidarity looks like, Malcolm started that trend. Malcolm was also, by the way, Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz, rahim Allah, I was the first one to talk about Vietnam. The first black leader to take on the Vietnam War, that which made Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so unpopular. He was not hated for his I Have a Dream speech. Dr. King would be hated for taking on some of the positions that Malcolm took that made him so toxic and untouchable. The anti-war stance, tying racism to poverty, understanding the way that racism factored into poverty, racialized poverty in this country.
That's when Dr. King became too unpopular. This is a 1967 newsletter from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 1967, they took up the Palestinian cause. This newsletter had an entire section called the Palestine Problem. The Palestine Problem listed out intelligent arguments against Zionism, talked about the factor of land, talked about what was going into the robbing of these people and indigenous people of their resources and their land, called Zionism a settler colonial project, talked about the dehumanization of the Arabs as part of the lead up to the occupation, and took on this cause. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of course, which Dr. King was heavily involved in, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also took on the anti-Vietnam War stances. Many scholars say that that's actually why it crumpled, was defunded, lost the ability to function, was because it took on such wildly unpopular stances. Black leaders in the past took on the Palestinian cause to their detriment. There was nothing to gain for black leaders in America to embrace the Palestinian cause. They had no benefit whatsoever to doing that. There is nothing to gain today from the movement for black lives to endorse BDS, the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement. There is nothing to gain for Angela Davis, a civil rights icon, to insist upon Palestinian liberation as part of a global struggle for liberation. Mark Lamont Hill suffered, lost his job, was ostracized, lost most of his speaking invitations, not just his place on CNN.
Temple looked for a way to take the job of a tenured professor because he dared raise his voice for Palestinian rights. They have nothing to gain by tacking their cause onto the cause of the Palestinians. What I would appeal is that for those that champion the Palestinian cause, don't just tack on the Palestinian cause to the cause of black freedom without understanding what the cause of black freedom is in the first place. Having a substantive understanding, taking the time out to understand what is it that exists in this country that has maintained the same oppression that we complain about overseas and what that has manifested itself in. But understanding the playbook of dehumanization, erasing history, creating a different narrative about history, and then taking advantage of the ignorance that you created and manufactured through the way that you colored someone's history. When a people are brought to that level that this is the only way they can be dealt with, then you have the struggles that we have around the world. I read off, you know, you look at, I had a friend of mine, some of you might have seen, we released the Iqeen, the Jesus collection. And I did an interview with Reverend Andy Stoker, white pastor from the United Methodist Church, about discussions that we had with Jesus and then somehow it took a turn. He took his group to Palestine. By the way, we have some courageous Christian groups that have endorsed BDS. The Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church to an extent, the Episcopalians. I'm waiting for all Muslim organizations to also officially endorse BDS, but I'm still waiting. But just think about this.
There's a white United Methodist pastor and he was talking about how they went on their spiritual trip and they met with Palestinian Methodist, Palestinian Christians. And then on their itinerary they decided to go to Ramallah. And so they were treated with some suspicion. Why are you guys going to Ramallah? And they got to Ramallah and they saw this huge Nelson Mandela statue. And they were so confused. Why is there a Nelson Mandela statue in Ramallah? I mean a whole roundabout in this humongous Nelson Mandela statue. And he was like, we have to actually look it up and talk about why is there a Nelson Mandela statue in Palestine, in Ramallah, in the West Bank, in Palestine. Because it was Nelson Mandela who connected the Palestinian cause to his cause and said, we know that our freedom is incomplete until the Palestinians are free. So Mandela connected the Palestinian cause to his struggle. He already had his hands full in South Africa. The point is that if you're really dedicated to these causes of anti-apartheid and anti-oppression and subjugation and dehumanization and the treatment of people like subhuman and they've socially engineered the people around them to not view them as people anymore and to make their debts forgivable, because, well, what was Stephon Clark going to grow up to be anyway? I have to share this with you because this was a comment that I actually received. It was hinted. It was hinted that Stephon Clark, you know, Jordan Edwards in Dallas, Jordan, you know, some people would defend Jordan Edwards and say, you know, he was a straight-A student, captain of his football team, ideal kid, and Jordan's family, I mean, his father loved him. Like, the absent black father narrative doesn't work there. The drugs don't work there. The failing in school doesn't work there. Like, all the typical stereotypes and racist tropes that are used against the black community, they couldn't find any of them in the media, you know.
So like, great family. His father, Odell, did an incredible job with his kids. Straight-A student, captain of his football team, no alcohol. Like, they couldn't frame him. They couldn't make him complicit, and it drove them crazy. And I hated that people would defend him by talking about how great of a kid he was. I don't care if he was a dopehead who was rebellious to his parents, who was driving his car recklessly drunk that night. Did that justify his murder by an officer, a long rifle being shot into his head in front of his brothers? So that's actually very inappropriate to sit there and to say, well, he was a great kid, therefore he didn't deserve to die. And someone said this to me about Stefan in Sacramento. He said, well, you know, he was a really troubled kid. Really troubled kid. You know, if Malcolm would have been killed at 22 years old, most Muslims would have been like, he's just a pimp, a drug addict, a thief. He had no future anyway. So if a cop unjustly shot Malcolm in the streets of Detroit or Boston or Harlem, most Muslims seeing that on the news would have turned Malcolm into an afterthought and wouldn't have said, ya haram. They would have been like, well, I mean, look at him. You've seen Malcolm's pic when he went into prison. Look at him. So what would have Stefan become? The potential of that young man to our community too. You don't get to judge whose value or whose life has more value than someone else. Instead, take a little bit of time to educate yourself on the systems that are used to subjugate here and abroad.
And it's not just a Muslim thing. Okay? It's not just a Muslim thing. We have to identify those systems and then work against those systems using proper strategy. Don't be opportunistic. Don't just talk about this stuff whenever it benefits the Palestinian cause or the Muslim community as a whole to tie yourself onto the struggle. Think about it. And then we bring it to challenge ourselves. Am I part of the problem? Do I contribute to this in any way? Am I one of those who has in my own life been guilty of racism? Have I treated people differently in my own life? Do I, I mean, am I part of the problem? So we also have to be willing to question ourselves. And I'll end with this. I think, am I over time at this point? Alhamdulillah. Okay. What's that? Okay. Alhamdulillah. You know, you mentioned the quote of Abu Dharr and what the Prophet SAW said to Abu Dharr. The Prophet SAW mentioned that you are a man in whom there is still presence of jahiliyyah. Like you've got some traces of ignorance in you. Let's walk back the context. First of all, Abu Dharr was black, and this is a story confusing to some, but Abu Dharr was a black Arab. Bilal was Habashi. His mother was Abyssinian. So when he said, Yabnas Saudah, son of a black woman, what he meant was son of an Abyssinian woman. So the insult was that you're not one of us. This is internalized racism, by the way. I'm from New Orleans, and in New Orleans, unless you're Creole and you have the complexion that I do, you probably won't rise to a high position in office. And this is in the black community. Right? We internalize, you know, the worst thing is when your colonizers make you like them.
And so we got our fair and lovely cream in the Muslim world, mashallah, and people treat their own with such disdain, such hatred. I mean, it's horrible to think about this, how this has creeped into us. Who taught you to hate yourself? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin and the texture of your hair and the shape of your nose? Who taught you to hate yourself? Right? Think about that with your Islam. Some of the things that you now identify with your religion. So Abu Dharr is a black man. I mean, if you were watching that, if you were transported back in, that story just completely changed now. You see two black men in front of you, and Abu Dharr makes a racist comment against the guy that's the same color as him. So let's peel this a little bit, okay? First of all, Abu Dharr, when he came to the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, admonished him. But here's the thing. Abu Dharr did not have the tarbiyah, the mentorship of the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, that the other companions did. Abu Dharr came, embraced Islam, left Mecca, then joined once again on the Hidra. So he was not oriented the way that the companions around the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, were. And the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, makes that comment to him. So that just because you said, la ilaha illallah, and then you came back later on, a few years later, doesn't mean that you've really implemented the program. You haven't really got this yet. You've got some time. You've got some work to do on yourself. Right? The khutba today, qalatil a'rabu amanna, comes right after, Allah talks about the Bedouins, right after, ya ayyuhan naas, inna khalaqnakum thakarin wa untha wa ja'alnakum shu'uban wa qabaila li ta'arafu. Allah talks about, O people, we created you, male and female nations and tribes, that you may get to know one another. Then Allah mentions the Bedouins. So Abu Dharr wasn't conditioned the way the companions were. They spent a decade with the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, in Mecca. This has already been taken out of their system. That's the first thing. So there's some context here to the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, saying,
you still have the ignorance inside of you. Second thing is this. Did the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, condemn Abu Dharr because he made Bilal feel bad? When you get caught using the ayn word, using racist language about people, and you say, no, no, no, I didn't mean slaves, I meant slaves of Allah. I meant, abid, I meant slaves of Allah. I didn't mean slaves. Slaves of Allah. Then why are you using it for only one group of people? When you get caught using that language, or the other racist terminology, I know Desis have their racist stuff too, and even amongst Africans, you know, you got some... I grew up in a Sudanese household, so I was so confused the first time I heard a racist comment from a person. I was so lost. I was like, what just happened here? I was like that guy that just got transported into the Sira and is watching Abu Dharr and Bilal and confused. I was like, why are people using this language, this racist language? Say, no, no, but I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean it that way. I mean, Abu Dharr technically, what he said, Bilal was the son of a black woman, so was Abu Dharr, so he could have said, what I said was true. I didn't say anything wrong. The Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, could have told Abu Dharr, I know it's true, but why did you say that in front of him? You hurt his feelings. But he wouldn't have corrected the poison. Instead, the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wasalam, spoke to an internal condition of Abu Dharr that had to get rectified. Racism is a disease of the heart. It's a form of kibir, pride. You think Allah created someone better than someone else because of the color of their skin? That sounds very familiar. That's kibir. That's pride.
How dare you think that Allah created you more civilized, with more potential, with more value, because of the color of your skin? There is nothing more satanic than that. What that plays out in is that we have to reassess our language, reassess our community on the inside, reassess our work with the entirety of the community on the outside. And there's one more thing, inshallah ta'ala, I think you gave me the signal, so I guess I'm done, then we have to go to our panel. And I think this is a very important point. I was at the Majlis al-Shura banquet in New York last week. Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid is the student of Allama Tawfiq, who was sent to Al-Azhar. He was a student of Malcolm X. Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz. Malcolm received scholarships to Al-Azhar University. He sent Allama Tawfiq, rahim Allah ta'ala, to Al-Azhar. Allama Tawfiq translated many books from Arabic to English, by the way. He came back to New York, the mosque of Islamic Brotherhood. Imam Talib is now the imam of that majlis. He was a student of Allama Tawfiq. And Imam Talib said something beautiful, powerful. He said, connecting with black leaders is not the same as connecting with black communities. Just because you bring Imam Siraj to your event, doesn't suddenly make you as a community anti-racist. When Imam Siraj is brought to your event, he raises millions of dollars for your organization. When the inner city mazid in your community can't pay the electricity bill, and you're not doing anything in the inner city of your community, you're not building relationships with the community, you're building relationships with faces and leaders. And we have to go beyond that. And so when we talk about the historic black American community and fetishize Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, what about the current community that exists today?
And what are we doing to build relationships with the community, not just of African American Muslims, wherever they may be, but with the black community as a whole? So we have to move beyond just building relationships with leaders and symbolic gestures. We've got to move beyond that, inshaAllah ta'ala. We have to really be willing to take ourselves to task. And that's going to require all of us. I love our diversity. I think our diversity is our strength, by the way. As an American Muslim community, mashallah, there's no faith community like ours. We're confused with our food. We're confused with our dress. You get people, I mean, around the shoe racks. It's just a thing to be amazed at. It truly is beautiful. SubhanAllah, we're the most diverse faith community in the country. It's a source of pride. Wa'atasimu bihablillahi jami'an wa la tafarraqu Wadhkuru ni'matallahi alaykum idh kuntum a'daan fa'allafa bayna qulubikum faasbahtum binimatihi ikhwanah What brought us all together is the rope of Allah, that we care about this deen. What keeps us coming to the masjid and getting uncomfortable sometimes and negotiating our own identities, our own cultures, and trying to figure it out and come together is that we have a common cause and a common purpose. And subhanAllah, I think back to the Meccan days, and I'm like, what would have got Omar radiyallahu anhu to hang out with Abdullah bin Mas'ud radiyallahu anhu or Abdurrahman bin Auf to hang out with Bilal bin Rabah? That stuff is amazing, but it was this common purpose. So let's also take a moment to celebrate how amazing it is when you look around the room at any masjid, and sometimes we don't get it until someone visits our community, like, wow, the diversity was crazy. Alhamdulillah, I love my Muslim community, and we have a strength, but with that strength, that just means we have to work a little bit harder inshaAllah ta'ala to listen to one another,
to create meaningful bonds with one another inside our community. We have to just listen a little bit more. Let people educate us about their experiences, about their history. Respect the gray hairs that came before you. I don't have any, but... Respect those gray hairs in Islam. SubhanAllah, this is my last story. I was in Detroit, and I went to the Masjid Wadi Muhammad, which was the first, it was the Nation of Islam, temple number one. Malcolm ministered there for some time, and there was just this sweet sister, she must have been 90-something years old, making bean pies for Juma'ah, that met Malcolm, met, you know, knew Imam Warifuddin Muhammad. Like, she interacted with that history, and she's just, you would pass by her in the Masjid, and you would just think, huh? There is history there, and there is history as well with the Muslims that came here in the 60s and the 70s. We need to respect that history inshaAllah, honor it, sit and talk and learn and listen. May Allah bring our hearts together, make us more able to purge the poisons that exist within our community, within our society. Within our world. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala make us sincere in our pursuit for His pleasure, and our pursuit of brotherhood and sisterhood, and our pursuit of justice that is pleasing to Him. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala forgive us when we hurt someone else, intentionally or unintentionally, a Muslim or someone else. May Allah forgive us when we use words or actions or body language, or a sense of disregard that does not honor the sacrifices of people that came before us, and people that exist amongst us. May Allah forgive us. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala guide us to actions in a path that is most pleasing to Him. Allahumma ameen. JazakumAllahu khayran.
BarakAllahu khayran.
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