As-salamu alaykum. I'm Imam Tom and welcome to Dogma Disrupted, a podcast that looks at the most pressing issues and ideologies that face us as Muslims today. For our first episode, we have a very special guest, the Editor-in-Chief of Yaqeen Institute, Dr. Awamir Anjum. Welcome. As-salamu alaykum. Thank you. As-salamu alaykum. So today we wanted to bring you in to talk about ethics. That's been the subject of a lot of the academic output that you've partaken into, and I think it's really significant to Yaqeen Institute's mission. So we're going to get into all of that inshallah. But first, I wanted to kind of lay the groundwork by having you explain to people what is ethics, and maybe more importantly, what's the place that ethics occupies in the modern world that we live in today? Okay, yeah. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Alhamdulillah wa-salaatu wa-salaam ala rasulillah. The word ethics or morality, they're used interchangeably, mean this idea of actions being right or wrong, good or bad. And we can talk about practical ethics, we can talk about theoretical ethics, which looks at where does the idea of good and bad come from, whereas more applied ethics, we look at the actual evaluation of whether something is right or wrong. Now, if you look at Islam, first and foremost, the idea of right and wrong is absolutely everywhere, right? So if you look through the Quran and all of Islam, the idea that certain things are good and other things are bad, right, that's absolutely essential. So you could say
all of Islam is ethics, all of Islam is this moral question of what is the right thing to do and in all respects. So therefore, in a strict sense, you can't really separate that this is Islamic ethics. It's almost like saying this is Islamic Islam, because all of Islam is about the right thing to do, the right way to live, the right way to respond to life itself. And the right way to respond to life is to recognize the one creator who is the bestower of life and form. And as such, there is this ethical impulse, the fundamental axiomatic idea that we must be thankful to the one who has given us everything, thanking the benefactor, shukr al-mun'im, as Muslim theologians have called it, or as the Quran calls it, is there anything more appropriate than responding to good with good, to express gratitude to the gifts that God has given us. But when we look specifically at the idea of ethics in Islam, you don't find any translation, any particular word. The word that comes closest to it is the word khuluq or akhlaq. But if you look at the tafsir of that word in the Quran, you know, when, for example, in Surah An-Nun, one of the very early surahs to be revealed to Rasulullah ﷺ, Allah ﷻ says to Prophet ﷺ,
إِنَّكَ لَعَلَى خُلُقٍ عَظِيمٍ You are upon a great khuluq, a magnificent khuluq, a magnificent character. The tafsir of that, the most immediate understanding of that was Islam itself, that God has given you a deen, a religion, a way of being, character, that is magnificent and great and wonderful, where Allah ﷻ is comforting the Prophet ﷺ as he's going about making his da'wah. So, Islam itself is ethics. Islam is the khuluq, the right way of being. However, as things proceeded in Islam, there are more specialized meanings that emerge. We have, when it comes to questions of obligations, obligations, the obligation that are given, obligations that are given by Allah ﷻ, you know, they take the form of fiqh or jurisprudence, as it's called. When the Qur'an says to pray or to fast or to, you know, give charity, all of those things are part of what God is saying is good and necessary, in fact, not just good, but it is an obligation upon you. And then that obligation that God gives us in the Qur'an is attached to both this worldly happiness, but more importantly, to its reflection in the eternal, real, true life, in the salvific afterlife. So, that's, if you will, the domain of fiqh, to know what is right, what is an obligation, what is merely recommended. So, in Islam, you don't merely have right and
wrong, but rather a much more worked out categorization of every action, whether it's, you know, these famous five categories, whether something is an obligation or merely recommended or neutral or disliked or prohibited. And early on, Muslim jurists came up with the agreement, really, that every human action that has a normative dimension, every human action to which we can say this ought to be done, this should be done, should not be done, has a divine answer, has a divine command attached to it, and is covered, in other words, as part of the Sharia. But then the question is, what is the role of khuluq? Is there something else that's remaining outside of it? And there, I think, there is another question that fiqh, or the question, the discipline of fiqh doesn't directly address, which is, you're supposed to tell the truth, you're supposed to be kind to others, you're supposed to love to pray to God, or rather, let me take that back, you're supposed to pray to God. But how do I make those things, truthfulness, prayerfulness, devotion, beloved to me, how can I make those things and make those things my habit so that I naturally do so, so that I enjoy doing so, so that I love doing so? Right? So, how I, you know, my emotions
also are in line with what God demands. So, it is that domain of ethical formation of the human being that is taken up in the discipline of akhlaq, or adab, or, you know, you have this genre alongside fiqh, or, in fact, in the disciplines of tazkiyah and tasawwuf, where the idea is, it's not to discover what is right and wrong, because that's been given by God, or what's not been given by God is discovered through ijtihāl, in interaction with divine texts, in interaction with rational understanding of the world. But rather, once I know that, how do I form myself in response to it, so that I actually love to tell the truth, so that I actually tell the truth when it's hard to tell the truth, right? Because it's easy to say, to tell the truth, it's easy to say, to pray, but we all know how hard it can be, for instance, to focus in your prayers. You can be, you can do your prayers correctly in every way, in terms of your external behavior. You made wudu, you're facing the qibla, you have the right time, you know how many cycles you're supposed to offer, so on. But your heart isn't there. You don't feel the presence of God. You don't feel the love for the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, who gave us his guidance. You don't feel the khushu'ah, the sense of humility, or the presence of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. How do you cultivate that? So, the disciplines of akhlaaq and tazkiyah
become involved in the creation of those selves through proper reminders, and proper sacrifices, and practices, and so on. Okay, that's extremely significant, and there's a lot to unpack there. I think I'll just, like, touch on a couple things. First of all, I want to restate, basically, the scheme that you just laid out. So, there's a difference between, on one hand, we have discovering what's ethically right and what's wrong, okay? And that's something that is much more closed off to human, sort of, interpretation, or human tampering, or human, sort of, input, let's say. But I want to come back to that, because there might be certain things that are open to negotiation and relative, or relatively relative, and then things that are absolutely fixed, right? So, I do want to get back to that. But there is this other aspect, which is, maybe we could say, the production, or the inculcation of a person that's going to spontaneously produce those virtues when they're called upon, in an ethical moment. Who's going to refuse the bribe? Who's going to walk away from the person flirting with them? Who's going to be able to do the right thing when no one is looking, right? So, this second thing that you're talking about, that has, sort of, like, we can say it's more open to practices that achieve results, let's just say. Which is kind of the opening, because a lot of people are confused by Tasawwuf, and they're confused by the idea of, well, I thought that Islam was complete the way it was. We have the Qur'an, we have the Sunnah, we have the understanding of the companions, and the Salaf. There's, as is commonly said, there's no goodness outside of what they brought. Right. So then, if you're going to say that, you know, five centuries later, there's Shaykh Fulan
and I'lan, who developed this, sort of, weird, for example, of either statements, or particular, sort of, actions, or whatever, that this is something that's not what they brought, and therefore, it can't have goodness in it. So, what you're saying, in this scheme, is that we're talking about two different types of ethical concerns. We have discovering ethics, on the one hand. Okay, it's like, what is what right, and what is wrong. And then, we have the inculcation, or the cultivation, of the person who's going to act ethically. That's going to act according to the discovery of those ethics in the first, in the first category. And that first one is far more limited, right, when it comes to human input, etc., than the second one. So, would you, would you agree with that, that my, sort of, rendering of that, first of all, before I bring it back to the first thing? I would tweak it a little bit. So, the question is whether one, it's not whether one is far more limited than the other, because Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, and His Messenger, alayhi salatu wa salam, have, in fact, taught us not only what is right and wrong, but also how to respond to them. But, so, I wouldn't say one is more limited than the other, because even when it comes to our response to scripture, the intellectual response to scripture, the immediate response to obey, or to not obey, and if to obey, then how to implement that obedience, that requires constant intellectual effort, even creativity, in resolving problems that, you know, Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, says, well, go make da'wah. But it was, it's up to you to figure out how to approach other people in the right and proper way. You know, Allah says you have to be good. The Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, says the best of you are those who are best to their family, particularly their wives or their spouses. But how, what precisely is it that your
spouse loves that you do, let's say, about your wife? Whether, does she like flowers, does she like surprises, does she like, you know, that you take her out, does she like languages, right? Yeah, I want to get back to that, because let's, so let's sit there, since we got there. So, if we come to that first one, the discovery of what is ethical, okay? So, a lot of people, unfortunately, they have a crude conception of sort of that aspect of ethics. So, we're saying that it's not that it's completely limited and shut off. There are things that are non-negotiable, of course, and there are things that are negotiable. So, can we delineate or help people understand which of those things are not negotiable and which are negotiable, such as the ones you're getting at, al-maslaha al-mursala, right? Something that is Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, or the Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam, commands us but leaves unspecified how we are to fulfill that obligation. Then this is something that's known as, you know, the sort of burden of proof shifts to, well, we can do whatever it is that satisfies that command as long as it's not explicitly sort of prohibited. So, what are all of the sort of areas that are negotiable? You mentioned culture, right? What are sort of all the areas that are negotiable and what are the things that are non-negotiable when it comes to the discovery of what is and isn't ethical? Right. So, I think when you look at Islam and the Qur'an, you find that in almost every area of life, rather, I would say in everything that you do as a human being and as you encounter a normative question of whether you should do this or not, whether it's the right thing or wrong, you have divine guidance in some form, sometimes in summary form. So, whether it's
your relationship to your family or the question of eating or drinking or dressing, you know, what you wear or, you know, your sartorial choices, you could say even something that would be as modern as driving, right? But should you follow the speed limit, for instance? Does the Sharia have anything to say about you violating speed limits such that you're going 65 in a 25 zone? Are you doing something wrong? And if you, especially if you know the harm that you could cause by killing children, for instance, instead of playing around, do you have a Sharia responsibility? And, you know, any Faqih will tell you that, yes, of course, and it's not merely Maslah al-Mursalah here. It's something much bigger because avoiding harm and avoiding situations that lead to harm can be much more immediate, much more urgent than that. Actually, Maslah al-Ma'tabarah, right? It's actually something specifically mentioned in the Quran. So, it's fulfilling a Sharia principle or a Sharia goal, you could say. Right. And if you, in fact, if it is a rule or a hukum of the Hakim that is a legitimate Muslim ruler, then even if its rationale doesn't necessarily, you know, come as clearly as the example I gave, following that rule is like following Allah and his Messenger because obedience to, you know, a legitimate ruler can become part of our responsibility. In fact, it is part of Islamic Sharia as Islam does require, right, that we order our lives in a particular way as a community and not just as individuals. So, what I'm saying is that you find known
commandments and prohibitions in every field and then outside of that you have Maslah al-Mursalah or unspecified goods that we are supposed to pursue. But I want to say that, you know, if you look at the Quran, there are 200 mentions of just the general commandment to do good rather than saying do x, y, and z. So, of course, there are particular laws in the Quran, commandments in the Quran, right, both in Ibadah, worship, and say in commerce, and relationships, and so on and so forth. But there are 200 times when Allah ﷻ says الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ اِعْمَلُوا الصَّالِحًا Do good deeds. It is as if there is so much emphasis on you figuring out what is good and doing it. And this is constant in the Quran. It's almost, you know, it's part of the definition of the faithful, of the believer, is الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ And the عَمَل صَالِح, the righteous deed, is not specified to be specifically just the commandments, but عَمَل صَالِح in general. Allah says in the Quran, إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَأْمُرُ بِالْعَدْلِ وَالْإِحْسَانِ وَإِثَاءَ ذِي الْقُرْبَلَينَ عَنِ الْفَشَاءِ الْمُنْكَرِ So, إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَأْمُرُ بِالْعَدْلِ وَالْإِحْسَانِ Allah commands justice and to act charitably in general. This is a general commandment. And if you think about it, you know, it becomes therefore our responsibility under this umbrella to know what is justice, what is just, what is fair. There is a slight difference between two words that are used in the Quran for justice. قِسْطَ, which means fairness, which is fairly obvious, you give everybody equal, you know, it's clear what everybody... And عَدْل, which is much more involved understanding of the right thing to do in
particular situation as God has commanded it. And Allah commands us to act in a way that is just. And then do more. Ihsan is more than justice, right? To act charitably, to act in a way that is generally benevolent toward the world and all creation around us. So, that's what I want to say, you know, in response to your excellent question is that in every domain there are known parameters, if you will, as if, and I like to use the example of like a skeleton that Allah ﷻ has given us and then we are supposed to put flesh on it ourselves in every field. Excellent. No, that's a useful way to think about it. So, I think the second thing that I would like to get back to, by the way, I think an interesting addition is also the language that Allah ﷻ uses, الْأَمْرُ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ, right? The fact that Allah ﷻ uses, we translate it in English as the good, but actually there's something else being communicated there. It is known good, right? So, there's that degree of human sort of ascertaining what is the good in the first place. And then in Surah Al-A'raf, sort of a little bit more further in that direction, الْأَمْرُ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ, He actually says to command with what is sort of customary. So, it kind of is an indication that there is this, you know, between two extremes as usual, right? It's like we're not saying that ethics is relative and that, you know, everything is open season and negotiable. Obviously, that would be nonsensical, but it's also not the crude caricature that some people want to portray that, you know, everything is completely determined and deterministic, that there is a role to play for both human discovery of what is right and what's wrong, and also then there are
certain cultural sensitivities of time and place as to how those things are inflected, maybe we could say. Right, in fact, if you allow me, you mentioned Surah Al-A'raf, which is a Makkan Surah, and which declares something really important, almost the most concise statement about the law that has been revealed to Prophet Muhammad, the final Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam, when, in fact, addressing the people of the book, the followers of Moses and also Jesus, Allah says, which is, Allah says that the people who have been given Injeel and Tawra will find it in their own books about the imperative to obey this Messenger and Prophet, who is an Ummi, a Gentile, a non-Jew, who then, what is his mission, what does he do? Exactly as you said, he commands them to what they know to be good by their fitrah, by their nature, and prohibits them things that are strange to their nature, and lifts, takes away any burden from them. You know, or it's actually as well as part of the verse that I didn't say, that he makes licit for them all the things that are good, and illicit all the things that are in their
nature, and takes any burdens away from them. And what this means is that Shari'ah, or the divine law that has been given through the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, is not arbitrary, right, as you exactly suggested, that it's Ma'ruf, known to be good, known to be bad. And this precise question, this precise feature, a central feature of Islamic law, is really important in understanding Islamic ethics. This is why Islamic law and ethics are ultimately inseparable, except, you know, almost for analytical purposes we can separate them, but really they are the same thing, because Allah says all the things that the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, commands are good, and there is no extra burden that's been given, that's there just for testing. In other words, Allah has the full right to command us to do anything, but all the things that Allah has in fact commanded us are those that are good for us, and can be known to be good. And the ulama, of course, when you get into a little bit of theology... I was going to say, I was going to open that can of words between the asha'ira and the... Right, but even before you get into the ikhtilaf, or the disagreement about the nature of ethical value, all ulama would recognize that you have certain actions that are ta'budi, and certain actions, and outside of those ibadat, all actions in when we deal with human beings, we deal with each other, deal with society, politics, culture, so on, there the norms are
all rational. And then when you get to certain actions, such as do not eat pork, we don't necessarily, we cannot reason with everything. So, you know, so you do have cases where it may just be a test. So the ulama would say there are these three different kinds of ahkam that are given. One is just an exception, you'll find maybe one or two such things. And then ta'budi, where you can find the reason for it, but its form is fixed. And then the rest of the sharia, the vast majority of our life is things where its reason and its legislation are intimately intertwined with each other, so that when a jurist is looking at whether something is, you know, haram, or mubah, or something, they actually are looking at maqasid as well. What is the purpose that pertains to the human good? Yes. Yeah, and for the listeners who are looking for the Arabic term, that's mu'allala, something that has a ta'lil behind it, something that has a rationale. And it's sort of a separate epistemic question as to how accurately can we discern the rationale, and then once identified, to be able to apply it. But that's a really, really key point that you mentioned, because I'll always remember actually, you know, because maqasid sharia has gotten now, sort of, it's become a dirty word, or it's gotten a bad reputation, because some people have instrumentalized the language of maqasid to really reform the sharia, and obliterate it in a frank sense. So we have to be careful to not swing to the other extreme, and make it seem like this is all just set in stone in a way that Allah ﷻ did not intend. If you look, and it always amazed me,
if you look into the first four khalifat, the khalifat al-rashideen, right, you see the things that they changed from one khalifa to the next. So, you know, things that even were rulings at the time of the Prophet ﷺ. One of the famous examples is Uthman, right, at the time of the Prophet ﷺ, lost camels, you know, he was asked about lost camels, alayhi salatu wasalam, the Prophet ﷺ said, well, leave them go, because, you know, either the wolf's gonna get them, or their owner's gonna find it. But then the situation had changed to the point in Uthman's reign, where he changed that entirely, and he said, no, we're going to gather the lost camels, and we're going to sort of, you know, sort of serve the public interest in that sort of way. And nobody came and accused Uthman of going against the guidance of the Prophet ﷺ, or changing the shari'ah, or doing something like this, because the companions and the salaf understood that these sorts of rules and guidelines were mu'allala, they were tied to a rationale that gave that open space, that if the circumstance changed, so that that rule no longer served that rationale, then the rule therefore couldn't change as well. And there's very strict rules as to the process, as to how to ascertain that, and to apply that, and it's not open season. But, you know, we live in a time of polarization, and we live in a time where you've got people who want to, you know, they lean too far on one extreme, and want to make everything about maqasid, say, well, Islam is about justice, and then bring a very modern definition of what justice is, that completely flouts the shari'ah, and then say, well, we're going to now back project that onto Islam, and do away with everything that Allah ﷻ gave us, that contradicts our modern sense of justice. Well, that's very wrong. But we also can't get drawn into the opposite extreme, which is saying that absolutely everything has to be, you know, it's completely closed, it's a completely closed system, that there's no, there's absolutely no
sort of intellectual work, or rational work to be done when it comes to the application, or prioritization, or these sorts of things. So that's, that's extremely important, and I'm glad that you brought that up. If you don't have any further comments on that, I did want to get back to the idea of Sufism and Tasawwuf, because, so we talked about, sort of, we have the discovery of what is ethical on one hand, and that's sort of its own project, and you did a great job of sort of showing how it's probably not as fixed as some people might imagine it, you know, there are, there's definitely a role to play when it comes to maslaha, or when it comes to interpretation, or when it comes to figuring out, you know, does it serve the rationale that Allah ﷻ intended for it. And then there's the second concern, which is the sort of cultivation of a self, or the production of a human individual, that is going to be able to spontaneously, and hopefully with some regularity, act in an ethical way. And so this is sort of the, the area in which Sufism moves, right, and just like Maqasid, you know, Sufism gets a bad rap because of the sort of extreme streams or variations of it, but maybe you could talk a little bit about the, what is that area, that acceptable area of the sharia when it comes to developing the ethical self, and harnessing that ability to spontaneously produce ethical action, that renders the, at least the idea of Sufism, as something that's legitimate. Right, so let me first make a small comment about the Maqasid. As you correctly pointed out, it has been unmoored from principles and usul al-fiqh, unfortunately, whereas in classical fiqh, it was merely a tool to guide usul al-fiqh, where you could not reach, where it was not
determinative enough. In other words, if you couldn't figure out, there were more than one answers, and there was clearly one that led to improvement of Islamic principle or Islamic goals, and others weren't, but textually, you can arrive at any of those solutions, then the solution that led to the protection of these five categories were preferred. And so, you know, when you look at Shatibi, or even Ibn Ashur, who, in my view, was just as much of a giant as any medieval giant, or even though he died in 1930 only, and they were talking about a much more, a very principled enterprise that is attached to usul al-fiqh in the Quran and the Sunnah, and that recognizes that human beings can, there is no open season, as you say. But if you look at the maqasid itself, the very, what's the first maqsid, the first purpose of the sharia is hafidh al-din, and what you find often is that that discourse itself, if taken seriously and rigorously, rather than used as an excuse to get out of stuff, it says the first priority is the protection of deen over life, right? And so that's why there sometimes you sacrifice yourself to protect the deen, right? That's a most meritorious act in Islam, in fact, in any religion that takes itself seriously. We look at patriots, for example, we consider them the highest form of citizenship because they are giving their life for an ideal that is moral and ethical. So,
often when I talk to, you know, people who are doing maqsid in the way that you're recommending or you are critiquing, that most fundamental consideration is lost, right? So maqsid becomes life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, almost, whereas if they simply paid attention to what they are saying themselves, they will know that protection of deen, the truth, in which there is the maslaha of everything and for everyone, because God knows best, then you wouldn't have this problem. So it's, in my view, much of the problem is the application of the maqsid discourse under circumstances where the institutions, as well as epistemological conditions, such as the knowledge and so on, have suffered greatly. But going back to your question, as you said, there is the question, fiqh is about primarily about discovery of right and wrong, and then there is the question of embodiment or inculcation, and I have identified akhlaq as belonging to that category of embodiment, how to, in fact, make it a habit to do good things. Now, I would say akhlaq and tasawwuf are complementary. Now, even when I use the word tasawwuf, I am simply, I should say that I'm simply using a common understanding, not an academically or historically rigorous understanding, because tasawwuf, as a discourse, as a name, and the movement emerged in the third century of Hijra, ninth century, and it emerged as one of many tazkiyya movements in Islam.
There were other movements, say, for example, in Khorasan, the Malamatiyya movement, you know, in Baghdad, you had the Sufis, and elsewhere, and before even the Sufis, you had, you know, Baka'un, Masak, and other traditions, Qurra. These were all names for particular traditions that were local to various places that were trying to do what we are calling this general embodiment, or let me call it tazkiyya as a more general word for it, because that's a Qur'anic word, tazkiyya, purification, right? But Sufism, because it was in Baghdad, and Baghdad was the center of the world at the time, it gave its name to the entire phenomenon of tazkiyya in Islam. So, in other words, it's kind of like Kleenex. When you say, bring me Kleenex, it's a particular brand, but, you know, you know what I mean. So, let me talk about tazkiyya in general. Tazkiyya and akhlaq are complementary. Both are about embodiment, but akhlaq pertains in the way it has evolved in Islamic history. Akhlaq is about a relationship between human beings and between human beings and God's creation, whereas tazkiyya is applied to the relationship between the self and Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, the creator of the self. But even this boundary is not maintained. So, for example, some of the more famous definitions of tazkiyya and of tasawwuf, you'll find that these scholars will say tasawwuf is nothing but akhlaq, and the more you have akhlaq, the better you are in terms of tazkiyya, so that many ulema considered or practitioners of tasawwuf considered
tasawwuf to be concerned primarily with akhlaq, both with respect to God's creation and God. So, this is something about terminology so that we get the terminology straight. When I use the word tasawwuf and tazkiyya sometimes interchangeably, I'm kind of doing what people do with Kleenex. Even though, and the reason it's important to know, is that some of the main authorities that are referred to in the discourse of tasawwuf never used the word tasawwuf, or they used it almost negatively, but they became incorporated as great masters of tasawwuf. For example, Abu Talib al-Makki, in his Qut al-Qulub, which is the model for Ihyaw al-Madin of Imam al-Ghazali. Imam al-Ghazali effectively was inspired to write his book because of this wonderful, insightful book, Qut al-Qulub, Nourishment of the Hearts, by Abu Talib al-Makki, who does not refer to tasawwuf except a couple of times, and both times as people who are making arbitrary claims, but later he becomes known as, you know, the great Sufi. So, my point is that we should keep this in mind historically, that tasawwuf is a particular tazkiyya movement of Baghdadi brand that emerges in the third century, and then it has its critics, and those critics are sometimes the best of its authorities. And so much so that some of the great Sufis famously said that tasawwuf is now a name without a reality. At the time of Rasul Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, it was a reality without a name. So, we should not get bogged down, I believe, with a particular evaluation of tasawwuf
unless we specify which specific branch of tasawwuf we are talking about, and so on. Of course, there are certain things historically that became very popular when established in the domain of tasawwuf. Much of that was actually quite later, late medieval developments. Early tasawwuf was very different. Early tasawwuf in the third, fourth, fifth centuries was much more intellectual, one might even say elitist, not tariqas, and the emphasis on, particularly the emphasis on the shrines, for example, which in later tasawwuf becomes quite significant, is not there in early tasawwuf. So, early tasawwuf is much more about this, one might say in modern terms, the psychology of the relationship with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and with the creation of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. Now, in that process, tasawwuf, or practitioners of this tazkiyah, some of which get called tasawwuf, or Sufis later, discover insights about what we do when we are talking about Allah and when we are, you know, relating to other human beings. Al-Muhasibi, for example, a contemporary of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, rahimahum Allah, was known for this kind of insight of self-evaluation and self-critique, and muhasaba, as it's called. So much so that his name came to be Al-Muhasibi. But sometimes those insights were useful and good, and they really reflected some of the shortcuts that people were taking, and sometimes they were overdone. To give you one example,
just so that we understand that even within the area of tasawwuf, sharia is still the master, right? It's God's command. Al-Muhasibi, rahimahum Allah, for example, wrote a book, ri'ayat, or consideration of one's inner states when praying. And when people read that book, it was so strict and was so insightful, but perhaps overly critical, that the ulama say that the masjid, the masajid of Baghdad became empty when people read that book, because people lost hope in their ability to actually worship Allah. They thought they were just worshiping themselves, you know, they're all distracted, their prayers are not worth it, people lost hope. And the ulama then critiqued Imam Al-Muhasibi, that, you know, there is a proper way of doing it, and that one should understand the nafs, human nafs, with its imperfections, and so on, and so forth. My point is simply to say that just because something is in the domain of tazkiyah, or tasawwuf, doesn't mean that it is above critique by the considerations of the sharia. Yes, no, that's a really essential point. And just to, I think, just shine that light on the area that legitimate tasawwuf or tazkiyah occupies within the sharia is kind of getting to things that we mentioned earlier about, yes, like observing insights that adhere to the sharia, and then basically trying to collect those insights and maybe benefit others by them.
Like that in and of itself, right, because in fact you have to deal with the phenomenon in and of itself before you deal with the iterations, right, if somebody wants to talk about, you know, Sufism or tasawwuf, you don't immediately go to the most extreme shrine-worshiping sort of example, right, you have to deal with the idea of it, right, and the idea of it, I think, to elucidate to the audience, that's the idea of it. And the idea of it is sound, that you can observe things about, well, when do human beings tend to show off, and what can we do to stop ourselves from showing off, like when I'm giving charity. Even these days we have lots of things on social media, people militating against, you know, being too, you know, spectacle-oriented when it comes to giving and charity, they don't want, you shouldn't be recording yourself or going live necessarily, this sort of showmanship that can get into it. We do this work already, where we're noticing things about our internal states that are from the Sharia, and we're holding ourselves accountable to them, and we're sharing them with others, so that we can sort of benefit from the collective observance and wisdom of other people. So that's kind of, I think, just to elucidate to the audience, that's the legitimate grounds upon which it stands. Absolutely, and if I may just elaborate on what you said, because I think it is a question that I get asked, if the Suf did not emerge, something else would have, it would have been called something different. Why? Because the imperative to love Allah, to worship Allah, and to worship Allah as if you see Him, right? Just take that commandment that's so central, it's in Hadith Jibreel, to worship Allah as if you see Him.
Well, should Muslims not sit together and talk about what does it mean? You know, I feel as if I worship Allah as if I see Him, I feel that presence under certain circumstances, but not other circumstances. Like when I'm over full with food, I don't feel that way, it's harder. Or when I, you know, when for instance, I feel like when I'm in front of other people, I don't feel that way, etc, etc, etc, right? These are insights that are just, you know, inevitably Muslims as they're going to practice Islam, they're going to collect it, and the better they deal with those insights, the better their practice is going to be. I should also say that not all of those traditions that looked into these questions, again, are known as Tasawwuf. Before Tasawwuf, the ulama were discussing those things. There's a discipline of Zuhd, for example. There were books written under the name of Zuhd, which suggest and inculcate in human beings, prepare in human beings a certain attitude toward the world. Similarly, you had other traditions like Malamithia that I mentioned, and the Hikmah tradition, and so on. So all of these traditions, you know, they are various disciplines that are, so long as they're trying to do this Tazkiyah that is Shari'i, the ulama generally embraced it. And when they overstepped their boundaries, the ulama provided critiques for it. Yes, that's excellent. Even at the level of insight, right? Because somebody could say, well, I feel like I'm closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala when I'm doing X prohibited action, and that's where we have the Shari'ah to be the guardrails, basically, of those sorts of insights.
Excellent. I'd like to go back to something that we said earlier and use it as a launchpad to a different vein of conversation. We talked about, you know, you eloquently stated about how Islam is ethics. There really is no sort of separation. Now, that is somewhat counterintuitive to the modern disposition, especially in the English language, because of historical shifts that have happened. So let's talk about what do ethics for most people represent today? What is the place of ethics in modern society? And how is it different from the place of ethics, if we can even talk about it in that language, when it comes to Islam? Yeah, so it's a great question. Really wonderful. And I'll answer it in two veins. First, what has happened, right, in the modern period. And then secondly, whether we should use this discourse on ethics in an Islamic context. So, first, with the rise of secularism, the question of good and evil have become purely rational since, right, the Enlightenment and the Kantian, if you will, ethics. And ever since, people think that reason is sufficient to determine what is right and what is wrong. And not only what is right and wrong, but our attitude toward right and wrong. So, for example, there are various theories of how we should look at this idea of right and wrong. For example, for Kant, we must look at those things as duty, something that we must not enjoy. In fact, the more we enjoy good, the more questionable it becomes.
Because enjoyment and habitus and our habit and inclination have nothing at all to do with this universal imperative. Whereas when you look at Greek ethics, Aristotle and so on, the idea there was to inculcate habits so that we love, we like to do certain things that are good and enjoyable. So that we have very different notions of ethics, all outside of Islam, but we could look at them as Muslims and engage with those questions, you know, without feeling that we're doing something wrong or extra Islamic, so long as we understand the Sharia. And in this vein, I have, you know, in the articles that I've published at Yaqeen, the last two articles, I have tried to say that Islam looks at these various traditions and has an alternative. The Islamic way of looking at ethics is looking through the model of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. That's why I call it prophetic ethics. It's a prophet. It's a model. It's not merely the idea of some universal truths with which, you know, your person is not involved, as Kant would say, or some habits and character formation or virtue ethics, as it's called. But it's something different, something, a third category, in which prophets, not just Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, but all prophets are the role models. And why are they the role models? Because they embody the first commandment of life, of existence. La ilaha illallah. And Muhammadur Rasulullah, the first, second part historically, you know, of course, as ours, but any messenger, believing that messenger, submitting to that messenger, that becomes the first and foremost imperative.
If you asked, if you sat down with Ibrahim Alayhi Salaam or Musa Alayhi Salaam or Isa Alayhi Salaam and asked them, you know, this is your religion, this is your ethics, they would simply not know what you're talking about. It would be impossible because God is telling them what is good, right? And in that sense, the separation of religion from ethics is quintessentially secular. What I mean to say is that that's what secularism is. It's not one of the things that secularism proposes, but rather secularism is this radical move that says you can be good without God. And I have to interject there. It makes possible the question that is on so many people's minds. What about so and so? They were a good person, but they didn't have a religion or they rejected God or etc, etc. And what you're saying implies that that question only becomes possible to even ask after secularism has done its work, right? Is that that question is literally nonsensical contradiction in terms if we go before secularism or from a truly Islamic frame? Absolutely. One thing that I should say is that this does not mean that people who are not exposed to Islam, they're not good. They cannot be good. Not at all. In fact, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam would recognize people's good traits among non-Muslims as well. In fact, he would say that people are like, you know, Ma'adin, they're like oars that are good before Islam are good in Islam. In other words, Islam is a normative frame that builds on the character that exists. And so this is not to say that good cannot exist outside, but rather.
All good that exists even outside of Islam, right? People who don't know about Islam, they must wrestle with the question of life, of where life came from. And maybe their answer was flawed, but they were sincere vis-a-vis that answer. And if that were the case, or at least if they were sincere vis-a-vis asking that question, right, they should be. And as soon as they hear that there is a prophet, there is one God, that's something. So, you know, in their fitrah, in their nature, it must resonate. And they must, they have this, then this duty to respond to something that, you know, now I have to look into the message, the final message that God has sent me. And if they're not doing so, then it's possible that they were never sincere in asking that question, that they weren't truly ethical, that their ethics may simply be utilitarian or self-serving or maybe socially oriented and so on. So, in that sense, the idea is not that, you know, you cannot be good outside of Islam, but rather we believe that people have goodness. That's precisely why people are coming to Islam. People recognize Islam, even though they don't grow up as Muslims. And, in fact, I believe, you know, I know that people have very deep and sometimes very, very fundamental critiques of Western society. I take a more what I might call a moderate position because I believe that in so far as people are experiencing life, even under false paradigms, their fitrah is bursting forth, their nature and their desire for God is bursting forth, even in these interactions.
So, they are looking for what is good. And therefore, and sometimes you find articulations of that, you know, you read fiction, you find people are looking for truth, what is good, right? And they find Islam sometimes by looking at the way somebody is praying, the way somebody is wearing hijab or the way somebody is treating their parents, you know, and sometimes the simplicity and the beauty, the truth of the aqidah, basic principle of Islam itself. And that's why I think that it's really important to recognize the goodness that exists while also being fully confident in saying that ethics needs Islam, that you cannot really have the idea of ethics outside of God who created the world by rejecting that God or by neglecting the guidance from that God. It is incoherent. It's like rejecting the fundamental commandment. You could still be good and ethical in the way that a band of thieves could be very good at stealing, right? In our society, you could say that people are very good ethical thieves. They share, you know, they're very good at their skill. They share their loot very well. But by the standards of the society, they are thieves. They are taking people's property. And by both by religious and conventional standards, they're doing something really wrong. In the same way, we can identify wonderful skills of a society or a collection of human beings anywhere, families, societies that have so many good qualities. But insofar as they have abandoned the fundamental task for which life is created, they are still responsible.
Masha'Allah. Extremely well-worded. It's almost like criminal neglect. You know, the legal term is kind of what I come back to. You know, everybody has a duty to sort of wrestle with these questions, especially the fundamental gratitude. I think that's really very easy for lots of people to understand. You have to wrestle with that. And if you abandon that quest, you know, it's very different from trying to grapple with it and getting it wrong, right? To abandon the quest to try to find out how to be grateful is in itself a very fundamentally sort of unethical thing. Yes. I can get to the second part of the question, but I want your reflections if you have any others first. No, no, I'm ready for your part, too. So the second part, remember, I said that I'll talk about whether we need ethics or the talk about ethics or this discipline of ethics now. And I believe that we need it in the same way that we need disciplines about tazkiyah, meaning for practical purposes. And the reason for that is that fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence, as it has become established and institutionalized and often routinized practice, you find that people take fiqh and box it in a certain category. And they don't draw out the full implications of what it means to obey Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala.
And so the ethical discourse that focuses on, you know, how to pray properly or how to relate to other human beings properly and how to cultivate those habits is still important. In fact, one might even say it's necessary to develop now in the modern world because just as the jurists are going back to the texts and the traditions, the madahim, and in doing so, they are somewhat limited in the way they operate precisely because it's a very rigorous method. To give you an example, I'll give you first a basic example. The question of prayer, a faqih, a member of my usoolul fiqh teacher who was an Azhari, he would tell me that I know everything about usoolul fiqh, he read every book, you know, he's thought in terms of usool, but he said when it comes to khushu'ah, when it comes to, you know, questions of love and emotion, don't ask him because he doesn't know anything. He wasn't at all saying that this, they aren't important. He was, in fact, they're saying, he was saying they are important, but you have to seek out somebody else who has developed that, who knows enough that they can direct and help others in those, in that domain. So this kind of, you know, specialty does develop.
And so there is one specific reason or objections that people often make, which is that, you know, somebody can be pious in the fiqh sense, so they're doing the right things, they're trying to avoid haram, but they are not good, that they're not good persons. Is it possible? Well, you could answer that question by saying, well, no, it's not impossible, they're not doing the fiqh right. Or you could answer the following by saying, yes, they're doing the externalities of fiqh correctly, but there are certain parts that are missing that are, you know, better discussed in and grown out in this other discourse. And I think that that's really still very important. And so people, Islamic, you know, these days you find people emphasizing ethics or akhlaq, whether it's on in the domain of fiqh and hadith, and pointing out this, their frustration with legalistic Islam. And I think that we should not dismiss their concerns, even though conceptually, you could answer them by saying that, just as Allah SWT has commanded praying five times a day, Allah has commanded, in fact, even more so, praying with khushu'ah, praying with presence. And Allah has commanded doing adl and ihsan. But that person may come back to you and say, well, tell me which manual of fiqh will I learn that stuff in? And you wouldn't find it there. Similarly, take the example of marriage.
The fiqh discussions of marriage are infamously dry because they are concerned with the questions of when marriages are breaking down, when marriages are not breaking down, when they're working according to Islam's imperatives and according to urf and everybody is happy. Nobody mentions, you know, mahr. Give me, this is my dowry, right? Dowry is mentioned, or at least the akhlaq part of the dowry would be mentioned or things like that when things are not going well. So you need an ethics, an akhlaq of marriage, of marital life, marital behavior, mu'amala, that cannot be found in the conditions on what the husband owes, what the wife owes. But those conditions, that knowledge is very important. That's the structure, right? If it's not there, if the husband fails to do his part and the wife fails to do her part, then being nice, being kind, being loving is not going to be enough. Those things are going to break down. And so both are necessary, but I think that we can, we don't need to dismiss the modern concerns with akhlaq. But we should still say that sometimes a modern concern with ethics comes without proper knowledge of what Islamic ethics was, because it comes with almost a condemnation of fiqh as legalistic as if law is bad, like almost a Christian attitude toward law that is very much part of our modern world, which is really created by an ex-Christian, formerly Christian civilization.
So we're left with its remnants and signposts everywhere. And often people who consider themselves free thinkers or freedom, and I'm a Muslim who intellectual, they are simply washed up copies. Of some Christian thinker of 18th, 19th century, thinking that they are saying something new. And that's because they don't know their tradition very well. They don't know that they are simply repeating some, some Protestant critique of Catholicism or vice versa, some Catholic critique of Protestantism, thinking that somehow they came up with it. It's fascinating. I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at my forthcoming paper on perennialism, but I go into just that. So I'm excited if you haven't yet to give me some feedback on that. That's one of the things that is discussed in that paper. It's extremely, I don't think that can be overstated when it comes to living in North America, the Anglosphere, how much is in the ether when it comes to reactions to Christianity and Christian structures and Christian concepts. We're still very much drowning in the wake of Europe and Euro America's reaction to Christianity. And it colors so much of how even now we as Muslims are reacting to our faith. And that's a that's a huge can of worms. But perhaps for for a separate, a separate conversation, I wanted to, if you'll permit me to get into some particular. There's two things on my mind, and it segues sort of to the last thing that I'd like to discuss today, which has to do with ethical knowledge. I think one of the ways in which ethics has been divorced from modern society in a way that it wasn't traditionally in Islam
and also in other traditions is the concept of of ethical knowledge. We have the paradigmatic hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, which is actually a dua, which is, اللهم علمنا ما ينفعنا وانفعنا بما علمتنا وزيدنا علما which is absolutely just, it just floors me when you think about the wisdom that is packed into this short dua because we're asking Allah ﷻ to teach us beneficial knowledge, which is an implicit recognition that there is knowledge which does not benefit. There's inherently non-beneficial knowledge. And then, وانفعنا بما علمتنا and then allow us to benefit from even the beneficial knowledge. So that means that even if you take beneficial knowledge, there is an ethical way to interact with it, and there is an unethical way to interact with it. And then after those two concerns are sorted out, then we ask for quantity. So we don't put quantity at the front of the equation and say, well, let's just accumulate knowledge, which in our modern context, it feels like that's really what a lot of folks are doing. The sort of frantic and directionless accumulation of information and knowledge without a concern for the quality and the direction of knowledge. So I get peppered with questions all the time about particular cases, whether it comes to testing things on animals, or the use of pesticides, or GMOs, even things like we have chemical and atomic weapons, and then very pertinent to recent developments is AI. You get the sense living in 2023 in North America that it's just a ball rolling down the hill, right? Recently, there was a couple of tech folks that came together and signed some sort of thing asking for the stuff on AI to be halted, or at least temporarily.
But you don't get the sense that it's really going to do much. You really kind of get the sense that we're kind of animated by the spirit of, if it can be done, it should be done. And I want to ask your take on, first of all, how can Islamic ethics, or Islam in general, if that is redundant, solve this issue, perhaps? And what would all of these sorts of phenomena look like? Is there a case to be made in Islam for testing things on animals, or is that something that's categorically unethical? The same thing with AI, the same thing with atomic weapons. How do we make sense of these things within a truly Islamic frame? Yeah, so this is, I mean, the question that you asked is, I would say, really, really profound. And I will split it into two questions. I don't think I can answer those questions with any kind of satisfaction, but at least I can say that two questions are on my mind. One is the question of what we ought to do, and in light of what is driving this, let's say, late modern capitalist civilization. And then there is the question of, a more fundamental question of, why has Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la given human beings capacities that are so self-destructive? In other words, why has God given us the rope, enough rope to hang ourselves with? I mean, that itself is a metaphysical question, right? But we know, you know, to respond to or to reflect on the second question first, we know that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has done that.
That Allah has placed a tree in Adam's heaven that he's not supposed to eat from. But also, it is part of the qadr of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la that he will eat from it. And then he'll have to find a way to repent, that curiosity will get the cat. This is the nature of human beings. So, on the second question, I would simply say that that's part of Allah's power and mystery, and that's infinite, that's beyond our understanding. Why is a nuclear bomb possible? As somebody who studied physics since my childhood, I've always asked this question. Why is it that it was possible to create a weapon that is so fundamentally, so deeply destructive, indiscriminate? But the same is true of, one could ask, you know, if one reduces the question, to why is it possible to make weapons if Allah had not revealed, sent down iron, which was really the revolution in the world that made possible far greater strength, and therefore the creation of armies and creation of weapons and swords, and things that are much harder than earlier, the kind of metals one finds in earlier history, in earlier human history, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has something to say about that in Surah Al-Hadeed. وَأَنزَلْنَا الْحَدِيدَ Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has created, sent down hadeed, and iron age came out of that.
So it is Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la as if Allah is referring to this, at least that's how I see it as a historian, that Allah is referring to the dawn of iron age when weapons of far greater reach are possible, and then why does Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la send down hadeed, iron? Because to test us, who will obey Allah, and who will be on Allah's side, and who will not. And Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la softened iron for Dawood Alayhi Salam, gave him the capacity to use it. So it seems to me that wrestling with this terrible might that is self-destructive is very much part of the imperative that God has given us. And this is always a disruptive phenomenon, meaning that you can never come up with a peaceful, loving system that is pious and righteous and expect that somebody will not discover that might that will end that system, and then you'll have to struggle again. That's just the nature of how Allah has created this world. It is not supposed to be perfect here. But I don't know these reflections. They're neither here nor there, nevertheless. But to your first question, I would say these modern technologies, AI, for example, they are very much driven by a civilization that has the intellectual and spiritual maturity of a two-year-old with a machine gun. And I don't think that we should necessarily blame the machine guns.
As I said in my first reflection, I do wonder why it is possible to create machine guns. Nevertheless, the real question becomes, can we grow up? And can we take this enormous power from the hands of the two-year-old? And that, I think, is what we ought to be thinking about as human beings and as Muslims. That's the idea that can order the world in a way that is more properly deeply Islamic so that we can at least negotiate with the two-year-old with a machine gun. Because that's what the Western civilization is today. When I think about Islam's potential as a force in North America and in Europe, the one word that I keep coming back to is redemption. I think that there's a lot of lessons, and lessons doesn't get at it, really, at the structural sort of quality of what Islam has to teach the world. And I almost feel sometimes as if Islam is the world's last hope. Yes, we know in some sense that it's a doomed endeavor, in the ultimate sense that the Day of Judgment has to happen. We know all these sorts of horrible things are going to happen, yes. But we also have the Hadith that says that if you have the sapling in your hand, the Day of Judgment is being established, then you plant the sapling. And so it feels like if there's any sort of force that is still intact somewhat in the world that has not lost its dedication, its structural dedication to ethics, it would be Islam that is willing to rein in the pursuit of knowledge under a regime of ethical principles and be able to shut the door or to not eat from the tree. If anybody's going to be able to instruct humanity how to not eat from the tree in the garden,
then it would be Islam and the Muslims. Or at least, I guess I'm less optimistic than you are. I think that Islam is there to teach us how to make tawbah, because somebody is going to eat from the tree. Right. Try to find a way back. No, no, that's interesting. I need to think about that more. But it does take us to sort of where I wanted to end this conversation, which has to do with the production of knowledge, and specifically what we're doing at Yaqeen Institute. Now, you are the editor-in-chief, and how long have you been in your role with Yaqeen Institute? Oh, it's been about a year and a half. Okay, so not very long. So tell us, okay, give us a sense as to what is the process in place currently, if, you know, I'm writing a paper right now, okay, that a paper has to go on, the journey that a paper has to traverse in order to get published with Yaqeen Institute as it stands now. So let me, I guess, let me say something about coming in to Yaqeen, a vision that I had of what Yaqeen can do. When I came in, I was already very much enamored by the wonderful people, the leadership, which, and it was already run as perhaps the best Muslim organization that I've been part of, and I've been part of a few. And very much the spirit of Yaqeen and the deeply Islamic culture and these deeply Islamic concerns were inspiring for me. And that's what won me over. And I decided to set aside some of my other academic endeavors at the time and join Yaqeen as editor-in-chief.
Now, my vision for Yaqeen was to produce beautiful defense, and that is beautiful. You know, being at home with a modern human being and the problems of modern human beings. Not, not exaggerating. Being at home with a modern human being and the problems of modern human beings. Not, not accepting them, but this being at home with guiding people rather than, you know, either talking down to people or alienating them from Islam. Talking to them in a way that is beautiful, grounded. And those things are difficult to fine-tune, to get everything right. So how does the process work? We, in fact, more recently, one of the things that I want to do, inshallah, going forward is invite people to Yaqeen's kitchen. How stuff is cooked. And inshallah, going forward, we may be publishing something about that. How do we come up with topics? So basically, a bunch of researchers from different fields, some Islamic studies, some, you know, social sciences, imams, or the ma traditionally trained. So you get together in a room and say, well, what are the most urgent problems that are facing the Muslim community? How have things changed since last year? And what do we need to focus on this year? Once we have a framework of what are the topics that we feel need to be covered, and we feel that on the basis of more rigorous data-based work than any other Muslim or Da'wah organization I know of, it's still a feeling.
But we look at the data, we collect data about what people are asking questions about, what people are struggling with, people write to us, and so on. We have, of course, I believe we are the only organization where we have a data department which surveys and looks at what Muslims are thinking. So that's an important part of our method. And going forward, inshallah, that's going to play a greater role. We really want to know, in a more systematic way, what is it that Muslims and different kinds of Muslims are wrestling with? Because sometimes when you go on social media, depending on the friends that you have made, you are in a bubble, and you think that that's what everybody's worried about. We don't know that your Facebook or Twitter or what have you, it is targeting you so that you will make more clicks based on the clicks that you have made. It has you figured out, and you think that you have the world figured out. So we want to break that. And this means sometimes people are offended because they think that we should be covering only what's in their bubble. But that said, let's say we have our topics laid out. For instance, this last year, one of the fundamental topics that came up was the integrity of family and community in the wake of both extremism from the left and the right in American culture. And going deeper into Islamic traditional resources to offer guidance that makes sense, that inspires, that's beautiful, that's compelling, that's sagacious. Once we have those topics figured out, we can put out a call.
We are also monitoring, we are receiving sometimes out-of-the-blue submissions, but more often it's through networking. We will reach out to certain people, like in one case, for example, we reached out to you to write the paper about perennialism, for instance, because you know someone who knows someone, and we said, you know what, your mom, Tom, we saw this YouTube, we saw his lecture, his writing, he has the qualifications, let's get him on board. So that's sort of how it works, these three mechanisms. We may produce something internally, or to reach out based on our needs, or just receive submissions from outside. But we are quite demanding, and that's something that sometimes people have complained of, and we're working to make that process more and more streamlined. We recognize that our review, it goes through multiple review processes. I edit an academic journal, and I publish in academic journals, I can say with confidence that our review process is far more rigorous, far more rigorous than any academic journal. Academic journals just tend to reject, whereas we tend to work with authors, and that's what it makes, because we are invested in not only publishing good stuff, but we are invested in authors. So we want to work with authors, and hope that they can come back to us now that they have learned how to write for us. So in our, speaking of the kitchen, what are the three main ingredients that we look for when we are baking our cake?
First is academic rigor, knowledge of the subject matter, expertise. Second is the value alignment. We're looking for people who are committed to Islam, who have yaqeen. We believe, faqidu shayla yaqeeh, if you don't have it, you cannot give it. And that's one of the changes that I have encouraged at yaqeen, that people ought to be able to speak as Muslims in a way that's beautiful, and rigorous, and broad. Nevertheless, it's passionately Muslim. People should be comfortable declaring their commitment, their commitment to Allah, and the Messenger, and the Book of Allah, and to Islamic tradition. So value alignment. The third thing is that even most people who may have value alignment, or have academic rigor, but they may not have the tone right. Right? So in their heart, they want to address some misunderstandings about Islam that are out there. They have the expertise, but they don't know how to talk to Muslims. And often, that's something that we work on quite a bit. So these are the three ingredients that have to go into a yaqeen paper. Academic expertise, value alignment, and then the proper tone to be able to speak to the masses. Because we are basically saying, we're demanding quite a bit. We're demanding good research, and often we require familiarity with research published.
Research on the subject matter in Arabic, and in English, when we can get that, and sometimes other languages. In the West, that is non-Muslim academic, as well as Islamic academic. So we require quite a bit, depending on the nature of the subject matter. Value alignment, right? People should feel comfortable with declaring themselves to be Muslims. And that's something that I have been also encouraging academics, Muslim academics, that you have to contribute to Islam, to Islamic tradition, deliberately, rather than writing in the same way that people are writing before. Your advisors who are non-Muslims, they were writing as outsiders, and you sort of take on their style, or the style of people that you like, and you become basically their copies. And I'm saying, even to academics not writing for yaqeen as Muslims, you have to write as Muslims, become part of Islamic discursive tradition. The third thing, as I said, is you have to be able to effectively give a khutbah based on research. You have to be able to talk to broad Muslims who are looking for faith. They have doubts. They certainly have doubts. They have questions. But they also share iman and yaqeen. So those cover, and you mentioned a really, I'm going to kind of, I think, end on the idea of the changes that you have made, and what you've seen before and after. But before that, you mentioned the actual process of review and peer review. How many eyes have to see it? Who's involved? Like, give us just a little bit more clarity on, who are the people that are giving the A-OK or the green light to a particular paper before it gets published?
So you could say there are three levels of review. The first one is editorial review. I and my editorial team, Dr. Julio, we and any department heads, if it falls in one of the departments, take a quick look at it. Usually I'm the first one. And then based on the subject matter, we do a quick editorial review. We decide whether it can move forward or not. If it can move forward, then it is sent to blind reviewers. It's a double blind process. So the reviewers don't know who the author is, and the author doesn't know who the reviewers were. And that takes, of course, quite a bit of time, because finding qualified reviewers takes time, and then they have their own limitations of time and whatnot. And then there is a process of, we have ulama on our team who will look at the Islamic content, will look at the Hadith references, Quranic references, the translations, and they will, depending on the expertise, they will do a check, an orthodoxy check, if you will. So these are the three processes, three layers of review that any paper goes through. And then sometimes one could say there is a fourth layer, which is less review but more rewriting, where we may find, for example, that the content is wonderful, but the writing doesn't flow. So we have a ghost writing phase, where we have, alhamdulillah, very competent authors, writers,
who will take your, you know, depending on how much work you need, and they will rephrase, sometimes they will rearrange, try to keep your voice as much as possible and the knowledge. So those are the four layers of review and correction that any article goes through. I see. Very good. And so, okay, so to go back, you know, you mentioned that you've made changes, okay, and there have been, I think, other changes probably outside of you from before you joined the Yaqeen team and after. Could you give us a sense, what was Yaqeen as an organization doing before your arrival? How did it understand itself? What was its mission? And how has that changed since you joined? And how has you joining been a deliberate part of that change? Okay, so Yaqeen was born in the era of insane Islamophobic attacks, where Muslims felt that there wasn't anything they could refer to. There were questions. People were leaving Islam. People were attacking Islam. Our children were being attacked on questions such as, well, you know, attack of the Prophet's character, Sharia and, you know, Islam is barbaric and so on and so forth. And you would see attacks by, you know, really multiple, multi-million dollar organizations that were doing just that. And this became very popular, very common and politicized in 2016 onward.
So that's when Yaqeen is born to get to basically the academics and very few academics who were writing clearly as Muslims and who have the wherewithal, who have the academic rigor to bring truth, bring scholarship from Islamic tradition as well as, you know, modern Western academic scholarship and modern Western scholarly, you know, objections as well as discovery of Islamic tradition has been quite remarkable. It's something maybe we could talk about at a different time, but that cannot be ignored. Often you find, for example, that if you go to a traditionally trained scholar on any given issue, if they don't know Western objections, they don't know intellectual history that's been produced, they will have no idea how to respond and their response will look grosophomoric because they don't know that this problem, the answer that they're giving has already been challenged and perhaps sometimes debunked and sometimes merely, you know, spun in such a way that people will confuse people. So if they do not know intellectual history, right, they will be at a disadvantage. If they do not know, say, a theory, empirical theories in psychology, for instance, if they don't know what even earlier Muslim scholars themselves said about a given problem, they will say, you know, X is the position of Islam on this issue. And it's always been the same. And a non-Muslim undergraduate will say, oh, really? Well, look at this. All you have to Google this position, say like five luminaries of your own madhhab have said something different.
So you cannot avoid that, right? It's usually, you know, a lazy Facebook post or whatever, YouTube, you can do that. But if you are trying to elevate level Islam, Islamic discourse to the level where it can last outside of social media cycles, you have to take truth and method seriously. So that's one of the things that Yaqeen tried to do. And however, Yaqeen was produced, again, as I said, in a time of rabid Islamophobia. And I don't like the word Islamophobia. Nevertheless, everybody knows what it means now. But it produced too much too quickly and with less concern for quality control. Then its leadership realized it should have been the case before. So that's where I was brought in. People felt that too much was published. It was not of all the same quality. Some was really, really wonderful, transformative. Some was not so much. And also the other thing that people realized is that alhamdulillah, because of the success, and that's a challenge of any organization when it succeeds, it has to figure out what else to do now. A number of younger du'at organizations grew up that were doing brilliantly what Yaqeen started doing and provided sometimes one could say the foundations of doing. But so in other words, there were now defense of Islam or attempts at defending Islam available in almost,
in the area of interfaith dialogue, in the area of science and atheism and all of those things. So those were the two things that were going on when I was brought in. One, figure out quality control. And second, as the organization itself is thinking about evolving its goal into something bigger, something deeper. It grew too quickly. It was too successful in a very short period of time. And therefore, there was a deep rethinking needed. So those are the two things that I have been concerned with. And one of the things that we decided immediately as I came in was to radically slow down publications and focus on figuring out the process, figuring out quality methods, figuring out the direction. Alhamdulillah, I think we are at a stage where we have done that. Our publications last year and a half have been markedly more of a higher quality, I believe, and lower pace. We have, as we have tried to figure out the proper methods and authors. One final thing I will say is that Yaqeen has moved toward an understanding, particularly through this COVID era. It grew so fast, so quickly. And people are looking at Yaqeen not only to answer doubts that are being created by outsiders,
but rather people are coming to Yaqeen to find their basic guidance on Islam on every issue. And this means a much bigger responsibility than just writing rebuttals. And that has led us to expand our focus, our research, our survey of understanding Muslims. All of those things have had to adjust from what it was before, which is Yaqeen against external attacks, to now Yaqeen in our daily life. In other words, we've gone from being antidote to daily nutrition as well. Yeah, that's very fascinating. So there's a lot of change. So it's a dynamic organization, and that's been my experience as well. I guess just two follow-ups. What were the parts of the current sort of review process that are in place now that weren't part of it earlier on? Before you were orthodoxy checks, were they a thing? Are they something that's sort of a recent sort of addition? Like what wasn't there, right, that maybe people at a certain point, the leadership decides, like, you know what, we really need this extra layer in order to achieve the results that you're mentioning? Yeah, I think that like in any young organization, as processes are not in place, even though informally they are there, but they're not institutionalized. So, for example, if somebody really important writes an article, you want to get it out there because there's a burning question.
You want somebody important to address it, and you don't ask yourself the question necessarily, you know, would it work in a blind review, for instance? An argument that is passionately felt by an important person may not be a good argument, to give you an example. Similarly, sometimes my understanding is that the blind review process, there's some kind of orthodoxy check already there because those who are involved were religiously educated to begin with. They were experts both in the academy and in traditional education, but there wasn't necessarily a tone. So, there is a way in which academics talk, which is basically laid out. The way you teach in a graduate seminar, whether you're teaching Muslims or non-Muslims, you don't say, oh, I'm concerned about how this is going to affect you. In fact, you present material that will challenge you, right? So, you almost have the habit as an academic to highlighting what will challenge your framework, what's a little bit shocking, and that's part of academic rigor. That's part of academic integrity, I would say, that you've got to lay it out. You've got to say everything, especially if you're talking to graduate students, people who know where to get the right answer and so on.
That's not how a majority of readers can read anymore for two reasons. One, there are people who will consume it without regard, whether it's antidote, medicine, or nutrition, and there are people who will find what you are doing offensive for one reason or another. Whether those reasons are good or bad, we can set that aside. And so, they're going to assign absolutely the worst interpretations that are available to what you're doing. And this, to some degree, this is a fitna that exists in any Muslim community. In the most righteous Muslim communities, misunderstanding could emerge among good people, among the Sahaba, for example. So, as the scope grows, so does the pressure to speak to a broader audience and to do more. That wasn't there before. At that point, when you're the only voice, when you're trying to defend, when you feel that the Muslim community is under attack, Islam is under attack, you're going to think differently than when you feel, well, now we have those things covered, and now we need to construct and build for the next generation. You have to put different kind of thought and more thought into it.
Right. Would you say that early on, maybe Yaqeen's understanding of itself and its strategy was to give a platform for multiple positions and multiple voices on an issue without as much regard for trying to clarify what someone should come away believing? Would you say that that's accurate? That is correct. That is one major transformation, because as people realize that, or as the organization realizes, that people are coming to us not for an academic opinion, a way to resolve a problem, or a response to a doubt that exists out there, but to know what is the Islamic position on this issue. Yes, go ahead. Sorry. That is what created a lot of thinking. How can we do this? Because this isn't a debate or an apologetic endeavor only, but rather it is a much more constructive and much more deliberate. And I think the recent additions, yourself included and myself included, are sort of testament to kind of, we have a mandate, I think, right? Sort of the organization's change in direction. I mean, I visited sort of, I went to Dallas and took part in the organization's sort of meeting in November, and then I started working full time in March 1st. And I definitely felt like I was brought in to do a very sort of similar thing that you were brought in to do, which is sort of achieve this change from going from maybe distinguishing it from an academic journal, right? Because an academic journal, that's what you do. You lay out all the opinions. As you said, the professor mentality is to complicate things, not to necessarily clarify things.
It's the challenge and not necessarily sort of let the person walk away with certainty. And figure out that where we're going as an organization, we really want to be doing the latter. We have to clarify it. We have to instill certainty. We have to express a singular voice on these sorts of issues. So that brings me to just the very, very last sort of, I think, question. And then, you know, this has gone on for a good time, and we could probably have it go on all day, but we do have to wrap up. Which is, you know, I've already in my short time had to go back and relook at older works and older papers that were published before these sorts of checks or before this sort of refinement of mission and strategy was sort of done. So what's sort of the strategy there? Do we have a criteria or a process in place if something was published previously? You know, what is the level that, you know, of deviation from that mission that warrants a mere edit versus an update versus a complete retraction? Like, how is that process unfolding? Yeah, so I should say that before I joined as editor-in-chief, I worked for about a year, you know, on a voluntary basis as part of editorial review board, whose purpose was precisely to constitute a group of experts within the organization, some without or some more marginally connected to have different voices.
To respond to any objections or critiques or requests for correction or removal of articles because people felt they were offensive or wrong or non-representative and so on. And we came up with this process. Which is basically when something, when an article is recommended for additional review after publication, then we go through it and make a recommendation based on blind review again. But that blind review is done with the new criteria in mind. And the new review process, I should say, is just much more detailed and robust. So we used to just send people, you know, review this. Now we have very specific questions. We request our reviewers to look at those. And those people who have reviewed our stuff over and over understand much better what we are looking for. So the review process is much more robust. So as it goes through the more robust process, then new recommendations are made. And those could be remove an article or could be keep it or could be keep it for the record in case somebody searches but no longer circulated. Those are different recommendations. I see. And so this work is still ongoing, right? Yes. So it's, if you will, a permanent function. Anyone can, you know, object, offer us feedback, offer us correction.
And so long as we find it persuasive and in good faith, we will act on it. We will send it back to the editorial review board and look at whether the, you know, if an article is merely, you know, not quite up to our writing standards or not quite up to our standards. Not quite up to our tone. That's one thing. But if it is something that we feel that as an organization, as an institution, we either cannot stand behind it and or it has some benefit, but its harm outweighs its benefit. That's how we pose the question for our reviewers. Do you think that the harm outweighs the benefit or not? So it may be that you see one of the things that you realize in the intellectual world, you can go and look at the works written by the greatest ulema of Islam. And you will find stuff that other people disagreed with and that the large majority of Muslims came to disagree with. But those, you know, every month has its areas like skeletons, let's say, that other madahib sometimes make fun of, other times they think that that's scandalous. Similarly, every scholar, every individual scholar has said some things that they either would have retracted or changed their positions. Anybody who does history of Islam or studies properly knows this stuff.
And so it is not our intention to say that in every article, everything that anybody happens to disagree with, we're going to remove. Rather, there is going to be an assessment of benefits and harms. Right. And so I think that we have a lot to look forward to. And that's part of the reason that I, you know, believed in the vision going forward to join forces. And I'm obviously honored to work with yourself as long as, in addition to everybody else, and really look forward to see what the future holds and what we can produce. But Dr. Oima, I really thank you for your exhaustive treatment and your careful rendition of all these issues. Always a pleasure to have a conversation. And hopefully, inshallah, we'll have another one soon. Thank you.