Dogma Disrupted
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Secularizing the Muslim Mind
What do we lose when Islam is privatized and reduced to a personal matter? Daniyah Hannini joins Imam Tom Facchine to explore the profound consequences of secularization as it reshapes the Muslim mind, redefines Islamic identity, and challenges traditional practices.
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. The secular paradigm forces the Muslim to adopt its own language, saying that something is morally wrong from the Islamic lens is morally wrong under a secular paradigm, right? It becomes really tricky territory to kind of navigate. We need to ask ourselves, what kind of impact is this having on the way that you and I as Muslims conceptualize our faith? As-salamu alaykum and welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today we're having another discussion on secularism. Whereas before we talked about the history of secularism and debunked some of the myths about secularism, today we're going to be looking at where it leaves us as Muslims today in the West. What are the pressures that we feel under the secular order? How does it affect the way that we relate to our faith and to Islam? And to break down this discussion, we've brought a very special guest with us today, Sister Dania Hanini, welcome very much to the program. Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. So we talked, just to give a very, very brief summary, you know, secularism sort of positions or postures as this clean separation between church and state, between religion and society, when in reality it's anything but, it's not a separation, it's rather a force that produces a new type of religion and a new type of society and has a bunch of different sort of values and preferences that come along with it. One of the sort of avenues of power that it exercises on all religions is a power that privatizes religion. So I was hoping that you could start us off by talking about what does the privatization of faith look like in general and for us as Muslims? Yeah, BarakAllahu fiqh. Bismillah, alhamdulillah, wa salatu wa salamu ala Rasulullah wa ala alihi wa sahbihi ajmain. I think this is a wonderful place to start our conversation because I think, Najla, as the conversation rolls out, much of the blowback that we see in the way that we as Muslims
conceptualize and practice our deen under a secular paradigm is because of this, one of the reasons, because of the stipulation of the privatization of faith itself. So what does privatization kind of rest on? There are a couple of assumptions. The first being that under secularism, the reality of stripping religion from the public sphere requires that religion itself is to be defined and or reconfigured rather by that new kind of stipulation. And what I mean by this is in order for religion to be separated from the public domain, it needs an active kind of, it needs to go through that active process of being redefined to fit neatly in that public sphere. And in this case, it's at the state's dispense as to what is acceptable religious practice and what is unacceptable religious practice. So in the case of you and I as Muslims, that should kind of set off some red flags, right? Does this or are the implications now that Islam is only to be privatized, only to be something very specific and unique to the individual experience? And in the process of doing so, is Islam stripped of its universal vision and application? And so generally speaking, when we talk about privatizing faith, what that necessitates is that, you know, all faiths kind of hold the same epistemic weight, right? And in the process of doing so, you have feeling Trump dogma and Trump principle, because again, it is something that's supposed to be deeply personal to the individual. So what you're saying is that in the secular order, there's no evaluative framework or evaluative language to arbitrate between different sort of rival moralities. If a Christian is saying, then we should turn the other cheek in this situation, and a Muslim is saying, no, rather it's tooth for a tooth,
then we don't have any language to even come to a conclusion as to which would be a more appropriate or which would be a better course of action. Is that fair? Absolutely, absolutely. What the secular model does is that it robs this idea of truth with a capital T, right? And that's kind of the trademark of like a postmodern world that we live in, right? And how this kind of or what this does is it actually just creates a buffet of choices for the individual consumer to choose and select what their kind of, what their flavor of spirituality slash religion looks like in today's context. And I think what's even more so of a blowback, you know, kind of along the same thread is in our communities, we see this impacting just the way in which we, you know, we talk about Islam, right? And what I mean by this is sometimes you'll find it normalized that Islam to me is, right? We can have certain political figures in power saying, you know, my Allah is a she and it's under a secular paradigm. It's totally valid. And so what this does is it offers a privatization of faith, offers this process of personalization of religion where you really do bypass the principles, the Islamic Aqidah in many ways, and it's just becomes a matter of picking and choosing. It's almost like sort of unmooring it or untethering it from the gravity that is both provided by believing that there is a, as you said, a truth with a capital T, like this is the reality of what it is. And it makes it into, well, my interpretation is just as equal as anybody else's interpretation. Fourteen hundred years of scholarship, I can throw it all away or I can delegitimize it by saying, well, they were mostly men or patriarchy or whatever. And really, and that's significant, you know, because one of the responses from the sort of Muslim progressive sphere
to the Navigating Differences document was exactly on this point. I forget the language that they use, but the title of the, in response to the Navigating Differences document, which was a document that attempted to reassert that epistemic weight and reassert sort of that this is what Islam is and this is what Islam says and you can either get on border or not. The response from sort of folks who have maybe internalized secularism sort of unwittingly was that, well, hey, we have just as much as right as you do to interpret Islam and we have just as much right to speak for Islam as you do, which you're saying and I'm also saying is actually very, very problematic and a very twisted way of looking at it. Absolutely. And the last thing that I'll just kind of add here is, you know, all of this takes place within the idea of conceptualizing Islam. But I think when it translates over to practice, you also find that it's becoming more and more popular in our local communities of, you know, Muslim youth saying, well, you know what? If I don't feel quote unquote benefits of certain Ibadat, is that a free pass for me to kind of drop what I'm doing? Right. And showing that shift of mindset of, you know, religion is supposed to, you know, satiate the individual fancy. Right. And so, again, when we talk about Islam as a complete way of life, a worldview and we talk about Islam as quite literally meaning submission. Right. This is a complete shift of perspective and practice. And by that same logic, then we could say, well, I feel more spiritual sort of connection by doing yoga or meditation than I do with Salah. And so I should then be entitled to basically do those things in place of or displacing what we know is actually authentic guidance from Allah, which is a very scary thing.
So that's interesting because that sort of addresses one segment of the population, which is sort of very much at war, whether they know it or not, very much at war with normative Islam, with that epistemic authority and weight that you're talking about. But there's also segments of the Muslim population that are sort of card carrying members. They self-understand as submitting as etc. And yet secular power also sort of shapes the way in which they relate to their own faith as like a large and vast tradition. Maybe it forces them to emphasize certain things over others or it causes them to be very aware or hyper aware of certain things over others. Could you give us some shed some light on this phenomenon? Yeah, absolutely. So I think you noted here a really important point. Secularism impacts people very differently. It is pervasive thought. So meaning every single one of us is going to taste or be touched by it at some in some shape or form. Right. Some a little bit more concretely than others or maybe a little bit more, you know, identifiable than others. But as far as the way in which secularism perhaps is a little bit more subtle or subtly influential, we see this emphasis on the following. Right. Even again, in our communities and the way that you and I perhaps envision Islam. You know, many times what we think about Islam fits neatly into this, you know, individualistic mode of practice. So what we'll find is, you know, the individual obligations like the fiqh of Salah and Zika, those are the things in the heart softeners. Those are the things that really get the spotlight in in our communities. And that typically is what kind of yields the greatest number of attendance or attendees for programs. Right. You find some of those more. I wouldn't want to call them deeper sciences,
but you find maybe within, you know, the Islamic sciences not getting as many people because perhaps they don't feel or the Muslim population doesn't feel that they're as relevant to study than the individual Ibadat and things that pertain to themselves. Right. And so when we talk about Islam being a comprehensive system that that asserts the fact that we're not kind of all living on an island ourselves, the social and the collective are very much part and parcel of our deen. Right. Well, so we could like concretize that or illustrate that by maybe. So what's very much on the radar of practicing Muslims in the West are things like Zikr and Salah. Obviously, we're not demeaning those things that we're taking away from their their significance and their relevance and their centrality. But to show that what's completely off the radar, for example, would be like how we as Muslims should be setting up our families or setting up our communities in a way that we have enough sort of collective gravity and collective power to, let's say, protect our kids in the public schools to make sure that they have the freedom to be able to pray in school or to get out of, you know, LGBT curriculum or things like that. Things that are sort of, again, as you said, they're not just working at the level of the individual, they're working at the community level. Like, who are your neighbors? Where are the Muslims living? Like, what are the sort of, you know, do we have like sort of a guild of like Muslim business owners? Right. Even coordination of Zakat, to be frank. Right. The coordination of Zakat is very, very sporadic. Is the Zakat from the suburbs getting to the inner city or is it going somewhere else? These are sort of, are these, is that a fair sort of representation of some of the issues maybe that we're de-emphasizing and that are off our radar because we're kind of funneled into this way of relating to Islam in a very hyper individualistic sort of way? Yeah, absolutely. I'd agree with that statement.
I think that also in the way in which our, you know, perhaps, again, just me having background with community work within, you know, the youth or youth work within the community, I will say it's like using them as case studies typically is my go to. But what I will say is if you were to ask them what Islam is to them, typically many, many would present it as just being a good person. Right. Which boils down to what individual ethics, i.e. Centering on the individual. But yeah, I definitely think that there is this in focusing on perhaps more of the Fardayeen and it's not necessarily this like intentional we're going to bypass focusing in on or having conversations on other types of Fardayeen. I think I think what it does is it just shows the aftermath, the byproduct of living in a secular world that really pushes religion to or pushes it to the private sphere so much so that some, you know, part of the religion, religion isn't even in our sphere anymore. And so, yeah, I definitely see it as a natural byproduct. This isn't to say, though, that Fard kifaya communal obligations are completely off the table. We do have funeral services that are, you know, arranged congregational prayer, elements of social and welfare programs. But it's not it's not a complete holistic. Something just occurred to me when you when you were speaking about that, that I had never considered before, but I think is extremely profound is that think about how often the question is asked, can I be a good person without religion? And the framing of that question is completely individualistic. Right. And puts us, honestly, on a weak terrain. And even though we respond and say, well, no, you can't define what it means to be good without Islam or without religion or, you know, what does it mean to be a person? The different ideas of being a person are different, depending if you believe in an afterlife or believe in a god or not.
But there's a whole there's another level to critique that is that why is that the question about merely being a good person as opposed to can we achieve a good society without Islam or can we achieve a good society without religion? That would be sort of a more sort of radical question to ask because it questions the the the centrality of merely being a good individual, which has a sort of secular logic at play. And I think, you know, to add on to that and at an even more fundamental level, what is good and who gets to decide good. And so I think these conversations are so important to be had, especially with our youth that are carrying secular liberal assumptions without realizing. SubhanAllah. Well said. So you talk that, OK, there are we're not saying that the farqifaya are completely abandoned. There are some that sort of are more acceptable to to practice and are more front and center than others. One of the farqifaya that draws or at least that occurs to me that sort of is impacted by the push of secular power to privatize is the idea of prohibiting what's evil. Al-Munkar is that, you know, a lot of times or too often in American society, we are pushed to merely sort of go along with the flow and assimilate and accept and not make any waves as opposed to trying to call out the evils in our society on terms that are recognizably Islamic terms with the assumption that we can contribute, that we actually have something to add and to offer to the society by intervening in that sort of way. Do you have any thoughts on on this sort of thing? Absolutely. So, you know, farqifaya having I think I think starting at, you know, maybe on a foundational level, we talk about communal obligations. Right. I think the first question is, well, like what defines our community?
Right. Under a secular paradigm, you have the nation state emphasize this idea of national identity. And that's that that is what first comes to mind when discussing this this concept. So when we talk about what we do within our specific context over here, you know, in the U.S. context, yes, things like congregational prayer and and funeral services, et cetera, are taken care of to a certain degree. But when we think about, you know, as Muslims having like more of an ummatic lens that our communities aren't just, you know, our local communities around us or our national communities around us, that actually we are part and parcel of part of the fabric of a broader collective. Farqifaya then necessitates that we think about our role in or our place in that broader ummah. And so when we think about the atrocities that are taking place right now in Jenin or, you know, Modi's BJP party, or we take a look at the Uyghur Muslims, that should make us uncomfortable. And it should put Farqifaya back on our radar. Right. About what are you and I have to do outside of individual kind of, you know, actions? What as as as a collective can and should we do to uplift the ummah? So that's the first thing that comes to mind. But I think that, you know, dialing it back and taking a look at, you know, the spheres of Farqifaya that we can perhaps navigate in our context today, you know, on our local context. I think that it is it is a very tricky kind of terrain to navigate and kind of going back to what you were saying about the language that we use to kind of check off or or make our kind of impact seen, heard, known and impactful.
It is it is really tricky because it does, you know, rest on liberal, secular, you know, sensitivities of language, of practice. And we see that in, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is the LGBTQ discourse. Right. Job security is on the line when it comes to certain elements of of commanding the good and forbidding the evil. And so kind of navigating these fears, it definitely proves to be tricky. Yeah, no, that's that's extremely important. And I think one thing that that it brings my attention to is how Farqifaya requires a certain amount of power building and requires a certain amount of activism and coordination. And so it might be off people's radar because that is work that maybe people are unfamiliar with or maybe they're not accustomed to doing. But you need to develop. We're not talking about doing anything illegal, but we're talking about building capacity within our society to have to have a role. Right. When you're talking about Palestine and we've seen how even the prevalence of social media and sharing through social media, images and videos, the the antagonism around sort of Al-Quds and and the places of worship. How even that within the last few years has started to influence the terms upon which the debate is being talked about and people's feelings towards it. Right. So we're not talking about anything other than building capacity. Right. It's like if we have a communal responsibility and we have an obligation to our brothers and sisters in Palestine or in China or in other places, then we have to reverse engineer it and be like, OK, like, what is it going to look like to shift the discourse or to actually create meaningful action from what we can do? And what are all the steps in between that we have to follow in order to build the capacity for that action? What types of organizations need to exist? What types of lobbying needs to exist?
What types of whatever it is. So that's, you know, that requires us to go back to the drawing board and think really carefully about, you know, what our duty is. And you, I think, said it very, very well is that this is what's required of us. Actually, this actually demonstrates our loyalty and our sincerity to our brothers and sisters in Islam. The second thing that you mentioned that I'd like to kind of riff off a little bit is, again, what you said was the the discourses that we use and how we assert ourselves. Right. So, you know, we talked on on the episode we did on human rights about how sometimes you might deploy a certain discourse because it's going to be legible. Right. It's going to be understood in a very immediate way. And people aren't ready really to like hear something deeper or something that's a more fundamental critique. But the the risk that we run by only deploying those discourses is that they start to do work on us and they start to actually displace the discourses and the values that we have from Islam. And I think a really, as you said, the LGBTQ sort of issue, especially in public schools, is a really is is very illustrative of this sort of thing we have in Montgomery County, Maryland, for example. You know, how are we going to push back? Well, OK, if the choice is initially to say, well, we want opt out and we want parental choice. Right. Like, OK, parental choice is something it might be an immediate stopgap sort of solution. But that's very, very different from saying this is wrong. This is immoral. This is anti-family. We're pro-family. You know, so the choices that we make in these sorts of in this chess match is really important. How do you see secular power funneling us into using certain discourses over others? And what's the work that that is doing on sort of our inside and how we relate to Islam?
That's a fantastic question. I'll say that if we were to go back to the LGBTQ issue and and take a look at how the Muslims have been, not necessarily how we've kind of been cornered to use secular, liberal language to, you know, be able to be heard and to be taken seriously and to kind of reach those those goals, they've all had to be done to a certain degree pragmatically, right, using secular, liberal language. Constitutional rights. Right. This goes against my conscience. So oftentimes what we see is the secular paradigm forces the Muslim to adopt its own language to justify religious behavior, practice and conception versus using our own our own religious language. Right. Saying that something is morally, you know, wrong from the Islamic lens is morally wrong under a secular paradigm. Right. So it becomes really tricky territory to kind of navigate. And I will say that with time, pragmatism might be, you know, might be the vehicle through which we check off, you know, short term wins. But as far as the long term goes, we have to ask ourselves that what does this do and what kind of impact is this having on the way that you and I as Muslims kind of conceptualize our faith? Are we doing things? Are we functioning via that that that roadmap of secular, liberal language? Or are we able to kind of tap into our own Islamic Aqidah, our own worldview and assert the ability to practice because of that worldview and not not having to kind of couch ourselves in secular, liberal language? Right. So when we take a look at even certain ibadat, the way that we justify or feel the need to even justify certain ibadat, we find that we kind of lean into our comfort zone of secular, liberal language that,
you know, if we were to take the example of like hijab, for example, right, that it's not just enough to say it's an obligation from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And it's not just an obligation in having a piece of cloth, but also the awrah that's covered, the definition of what that awrah is, what that hijab looks like to a certain degree. That's all outlined. But in secular, liberal language, what makes it comfy and almost justifiable to the masses is, well, no, it's liberation, it's empowerment, it's free choice. And so with time, what that does is it changes or impacts the Muslim psyche itself. Right. How we view our own being kind of going back to that first point that we made about how Islam is becoming, you know, at least in the Muslim mind is, you know, to a certain degree, a matter of a series of choices that you get to have a hand in making. And also taking away that, again, evaluative language or that evaluative grammar, because if it becomes simply a matter of choice, if I'm defending my hijab on the logic or the principle of choice, then I've asserted at the same time that another choice would be equally valid and equally praiseworthy. So to choose to not do it would be just the same as far as evaluating actions when that's actually eroding our faith and eroding what our faith stands for. Something doesn't become valuable merely because you choose it. Actually, it's valuable whether Allah subhana wa ta'ala approves of it or not. And that's an extremely important distinction that needs to be made. So what you're saying and what I'm saying, I think, is that we need to be careful. We almost need to operate at two different registers or at two different levels that we might have to deploy certain discourses and languages, etc., ideas in order to get those short term wins. But we have to, at the same time, be working to identify what are the obstacles that are in our way for sort of having our own language be read and registered within society, right? In order to call out something as immoral, as wrong, right?
What are the things that are standing in the way of that being forceful and that being taken seriously? And how do we kind of position and maneuver ourselves to get to the point where one day, because these things are all in flux, right? People act like it's just like, oh, there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, no, they're all in flux. So we can actually work to a point where one day that will mean something to larger society to say that this is wrong, this is immoral, this is against what the Creator wants, can actually be read and felt as something that's significant instead of just being sort of religious lunatics, how it will be read kind of currently. Absolutely. And I think just the reminder that, you know, to think long term, you know, functioning within the sphere of comfort, i.e. using secular liberal language to make those wins, I think to have those wins, I think what we have to constantly remind ourselves is, you know, over time, you lose your Islam and you lose yourself, right? And so that's the biggest loss that you can have in the name of trying to secure those Islamic rights, you long term might lose your Islam. And so it becomes, it's again, conversations that need to be had with people who are more familiar and more knowledgeable on this. What I will say is, I think it's an important and tricky kind of conversation that needs to be had because pragmatism, you know, most in most cases, I think pragmatism long term has some detrimental effects. Yeah, 100%. So the sort of balance, so we've talked about, okay, there's the balance between farqifah and farra'in, that's one of the sort of cracks or fissures or sort of downstream consequences of secular power on us. Another one is sort of the language and discourses and values that we use and we deploy when we're even advocating for Islamic stances and normative sort of Islamic practice.
Another thing that I know that both you and I are very passionate about is how the secular sort of, our knowledge has been secularized. And so even our understanding of what it means to have knowledge about Islam versus knowledge of anything else is something that is under a lot of reconfiguration due to secular power. Could you talk about how this affects us as Muslims? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that one of the ways that we can look at this is by taking a look at perhaps our Sunday school curriculums or Islamic school curriculums. You know, the Sunday school model obviously being very different than the Islamic school model, just because it is that one day a week, three hours with the hour and a half being, you know, pizza and playtime. So what I will say is that if we were to take a look at most of what these Islamic curriculums are for youth, right? And the reason why I think it's so important to focus in on the curriculums aimed at youth specifically is because this is typically formative years, right? How you're building that Islamic Aqidah and those curriculums in many ways are reflective of what, you know, we deem as important, you know, elements of deen to kind of pass along to the next generation. What I will say is, you know, the curriculum that oftentimes is presented by, you know, very well-intentioned people, very committed people to the, you know, to the community. I will say most of it deals with, you know, loosely strung individual ethics, right? You might have some, you know, abstract, you know, concepts on Allah subhana wa ta'ala and the Prophet ﷺ, little bits of seerah. A lot of emphasis placed on Aqidah because we don't want, you know, rowdy Muslim kids. And so what you find is really like this amalgamation of individual ethics kind of plated to our Muslim youth without the aspect of the contemporary.
Oftentimes missing that really important component of connecting those little dots of ethics and principle to this broader framework, this frame of reference, i.e. the Islamic Aqidah in our worldview. And so what you find is that, you know, you have, you know, kids, you know, that are graduated from these Islamic schools from pre-K. Sometimes they start them at like pre-K too. I don't know how it works. But they start them before kindergarten a couple of years and then some of them stick through until senior year of high school. But they still have that very individualized mode of Islamic understanding. And that's not necessarily, you know, reflective on, you know, the efforts, so to speak, but more so on just the curriculum and perhaps, again, the tricky territory that we're navigating in this secular world. Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, everybody, it's the aunties that teach the Sunday school are legendary. Everybody knows that they're the legends of the community. They put in the most work. But what we're calling for is some high-level strategy and some high-level thinking. We want all those efforts and that sincerity to be put to the best use possible. And there are certain structural elements. There are certain sort of curriculum decisions. There are some sort of instruction or pedagogical decisions that are being made that are actually making us waste a bunch of time. And there's like so you lined out like some multiple different strata upon which it's happening. One of them is the even idea of just sort of like a patchwork, you know, Sunday school where we only have three hours. As you said, it's not really even three hours. And this is somehow supposed to compete with the, you know, eight hours a day or whatever it is, five days a week sort of assembly line of public education. And now what they're getting in even the elementary schools is sort of programming that they're being fed. It's just not enough, first of all.
Even structurally, like that amount of hours is not a sufficient amount of hours to undo sort of the erosion of their dean that's happening in the normal week. But that's even assuming that those three hours are like super impactful and super like, you know, with great curriculum and excellent execution. And that's also not happening, right? So we have a lot of different issues. And both you and I, you know, are in Islamic education for youth. So we're kind of on the ground level of this. We've both seen how Islamic studies is really treated as kind of a waste bin category. And so what in sort of more classical curricula are, you know, separate subjects and separate sort of things, like fiqh and hadith and tafsir and, you know, luqa and all these sort of different things. We just kind of throw them all together as Islamic studies. And then to add insult to injury, we demonstrate through our priorities and through our choices that this is not really a very important subject at all. I remember when I think I spoke at ICNA last year about this. I took a schedule from one of the prominent Islamic schools. So it was, you know, five days a week school in the Chicago area. And they had Islamic studies switching off every other day with physical education. Whereas the subjects that did not take a break were math and science and all the sorts of things that, you know, maybe we're communicating to our youth that there's a certain prioritization that's going on. That what is considered valuable knowledge and not so valuable knowledge is sort of we can talk a good game, right? We can kind of say all the right things. But when it comes to how we're setting up these institutions, it often communicates these valuations and these priorities that are going on beneath the surface. Yeah, absolutely.
I think the end goal really should be to present Islam as present, as operative, as relevant to lived experience. And I think that oftentimes, unfortunately, our youth are shortchanged. And then we question why they have a lack of yaqeen, right? We question why Mohammed wants to be called Mo in public school, for example. Right. And then on top of that, there is that disjointed reality where we tell them, you, you, you know, youth, Islam is important. Islam is important because we don't want them to lose themselves. Oftentimes from immigrant background, families coming to the states, not wanting their kids to be lost. But at the same time, confusing that child by placing emphasis more so on, you know, quote, unquote, academic study. And I do take you know, I do find it problematic to even separate that like secular knowledge versus Islamic knowledge, for example. But I will say that oftentimes there is just a push to say, you know, have your basic. I read that in check, you know, and you should be good to go. But you still have to be that doctor, lawyer, engineer. Right. And so, again, there is that like deep divide. If a child says that they are serious about studying some studies. And I know here in our community, there was a mother expressing dissatisfaction with her son basically saying he didn't want to go to college because he wanted to go study Islam. And for her, her worry was, well, how is he going to, quote, unquote, be successful? Right. Right. Right. We're hyper fixated on the material. And we don't realize that, you know, even if we were to take a look, just as a side note, a lot of the way that universities are set up internationally in the Muslim world is those in high school that earned the lowest of the lowest scores. The only thing on the table for you in your future career path is Sharia studies.
And I think that is so telling and so detrimental to like the trajectory we're on as an Ummah, like it's baffling. And so when you have Muslim youth that take interest in Islam and and are eager and hungry for knowledge, oftentimes they're they're kind of that cap is put on on on their on their eagerness and their excitement. Totally. And then we complain when we have religious scholarship that's disengaged or doesn't have sort of, you know, whether it's critical thinking and sometimes that problem is that term is misused rather. But we complain about the quality of our religious discourse in the West and we look at who are we putting forth to study it and engage in it and and sort of make it translatable and relatable to the masses. And we only have ourselves to blame. The career aspirations for our youth is a huge issue. And I'm glad that you brought it up. You know, it's something that I usually refer to as the Holy Trinity in the Muslim community is that doctor, lawyer, engineer. And that's simply not a realistic or a sustainable path forward. If we want to have people who are, you know, where are the talk about curriculum? OK, we're mentioning these things about Islamic schools or about weekend schools. If you want to like how many Muslim homeschoolers that I know that they rely on Christian curriculum because there is no valid sort of or sort of workable Islamic curriculum for them to use when it comes to specific subjects like English or science or things like that. Right. You turn around and like, well, we have these ideas. We want Islam to be presented and unify, like Islamic science and Islamic math and do this work or kind of restitching together, you know, the secular and the religious or re-sacralizing or re-sanctifying knowledge. But then you turn around and it's like, who's going to do the work? Who's going to write the curriculum? Who's going to who's got the Ph.D. in education administration or and very few, honestly, like extremely few when it comes to the Muslim community in the West.
So we kind of, again, are standing in our own way. We're good when it comes to that. We have doctors, mashallah. We have lots of people in those fields. And the Prophet ﷺ warned us about hubb al-dunya. He warned us about loving the world too much. And exactly what you said, I had the same experience. How many people, when they learn that their child has a passion for studying Islam, their reaction is not one of joy, but one of sort of despair. That just tells you everything that you need to know about where we're at as a community and how much that we've kind of clamped down on prioritizing the dunya over the afterlife. And no one's calling for, you know, sometimes they say, yeah, imam, you know, but, you know, we can't all just study, you know, the religion and we have to take care of the dunya. And my response to that is always, well, if the day comes where I see all of our teenagers just like spending all day in the masjid and they refuse to go out and, you know, do whatever. Then, okay, I'll bring them back to the middle and I'll tell them about the importance of going and seeking their livelihood, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not the extreme that we're at right now. We're at the opposite extreme. And so we need to find the balance where we've got sort of all of our bases covered. There's a lot of ways. There's a lot of ways. And we could probably have even an entire independent discussion about how this sort of valuation, this materialistic valuation has sort of changed the way that we relate to things. But one thing that's significant is how our sort of the materialistic values that we have, even as even the practicing Muslims, even the people who understand themselves as practicing obedient Muslims, is in sort of it affects our own tradition and how we relate to it. Right. So we have the so-called Islamic Golden Age, right, which if you and I say Golden Age, we're probably talking about the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the time of the Khalifa al-Rashidin. But most people, when they talk about the Islamic Golden Age, they're talking about Bayt al-Hikmah, they're talking about the Abbasid period, the poetry, and then this and that and the third.
There are serious ways in which we've been indoctrinated to value the material and material success over the spiritual success. And I'm hoping maybe you can just give a little bit more comment about that. Yeah, absolutely. So it is always interesting that, you know, its term does like the Golden Age of Islam because it completely contradicts the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad when he talks about the best generations. And he isn't referring to the Ummayads and Abbasids. So, you know, when we talk about how we even like the metric of success for the Muslim life, yeah, it has nothing to do with the material. You know, yes, we all have to check off certain goals and play a role in this world. But when we think about submission and we think about impact and we think about holding on to our identity and the proliferation of Islamic knowledge and the strengthening of communities, that is our measure of success. If we're able to kind of not be a part of the Pew Research Study of like being one of the, excuse me, I'm just going to take a sip of water. I'm going to restart that if that's okay. That's fine. I'm just, yeah, I'm a little bit under the weather still. Yeah, I'll carry you. I mean, yeah, so if we talk about the golden age of Islam and we say that it completely contradicts the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, where, you know, the best of generations are clearly outlined, right? He's not talking about this specific moment in time. It's not a reference to the Ummayads and Abbasids. You know, it's this emphasis that we have kind of shifted in perspective to say our metric of success equals, you know, materialistic wins.
And from the Muslim perspective, you can be, you know, if you've got from, you know, strong commitment to your deen, submission to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, strong communities that have yaqeen, right? Where we don't have the fear of belonging to, and inshallah we reach that day where we don't belong to that Pew Research Study, one of the one in four who lose their religion and belongs to that category of nuns, right? In the American context, those are wins, right? That is success. And so I don't think that the metric for success is to say, wow, 95% of our community or our youth are, you know, have X, Y, and Z careers and we've won, right? I think that if a clear measure of success is to say, well, does that Ahmad, does that Fatima, does that Aisha, are they committed to the truth? And do they know it as being truth and want to spread that truth and stay committed to it forever? And do they feel that they can actually make impact on the world around them via their Islamic lens and what the deen has to offer versus just simply money, right? So there's some food for thought there. And I know it's not as simple as say, you know, everybody kind of take on the role of jumping into Islamic studies. I think Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la has diversified this ummah and our talents and our strengths. And it's really just a matter of us identifying, doing that intrinsic work, identifying what our strengths are and tapping into them so we can make impact in this world that inshallah will be a source of reward in the hereafter. Very well said. And I really love the fact that you brought up that one of the goals and one of the sort of consequences of getting out of our own way and sort of realigning. Ourselves with this balance that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la wants for us and our perspective and our attitude and our disposition is that we're actually going to be able to uplift those around us.
We're actually going to be able to contribute to society and we as Muslims believe that Islam has the answers for everything. So if our society is struggling with particular sort of issues, then we're actually sort of depriving those around us by holding back or by getting lost in the dunya or sort of valuating ourselves and our children in just materialistic terms. When we should believe axiomatically that Islam can and will, if we let it sort of solve whatever is facing us. And that ironically is probably what's going to get us more respect from other people who aren't Muslims rather than just trying to blend in and be like everybody else. So I want to take this really, really seriously, this idea that Islam will solve society's issues if we let it. And so I want to get your thoughts as to what are some of the most pressing issues that in North America or the United States in particular that we're facing? And how can Islam sort of provide an alternative if we kind of get out of the way and do the work to sort of show that to people and to demonstrate it? Yeah, it's a huge question, and I think that it's a multi-layered question. We're going to talk about one of the, you know, problems. I think that, you know, are we talking about problems in the crises of faith? Right. The fact that you have generations of individuals who feel like they can actually live without purpose. Right. That's a huge problem that obviously Islam has, has, has the capacity and is the answer to. And then on the flip side, we can see that, you know, the real issues that exist around us, whether they be environmental issues, whether they be, you know, the breaking down of the, you know, traditional family and social structure and the fabric that all rests on.
You know, one would argue that these issues that are, you know, so prevalent and so clear and so damaging are at the societal level, are at the political level. And I think that in many ways they're caused by nations. Right. And so this this this this I think this this conversation is is much larger than simply, you know, you know, we have environmental issues. Well, how does Islam's view of the environment and animal rights? You know, what are those those those those kind of principles that are in place that you and I as individuals can kind of enact, you know, in the most uplifted of ways? But I think that if we're going to talk about solutions through and through these issues are caused on a large scale political level. And I think that there needs to be, you know, serious conversation on, you know, Islam as like a self determined entity in these spheres. Right. Where we're not playing by other people's rules, where we aren't having to count ourselves in secular liberal language, where we are able to take a look at ourselves as a comprehensive system that can really replace the ills of society with with, you know, using our principles in hand, not kind of doing that pastiche patchwork. And so I take a look at this conversation and think it's it's it's such a deep conversation that needs to be had. And part of the word, I guess, like a nice shout out to to to Maddox with Dr. Arwayman and his and his team. It's such an important endeavor. I mean, all this kind of data give them success upon success. But, you know, reestablishing that automatic view, reestablishing that vision of Islam as a self determined entity. It's important. Now, if we're going to talk about the issues that surround us, that we can kind of take individual steps towards perhaps alleviating or placing a bandaid on. Yeah, we can take a look at those principles in isolation, I would argue. Right.
So, for example, if we were to take a look at, you know, secular activism and in response to in regards to the environment versus Islamic activism might be talking about consumption. Right. So I might I might take a look at that and say, well, you know what, you know, maybe less consumption versus careful consumption, for example. Right. Being an irresponsible consumer as per the, you know, the secular model versus taking a look at the creation of all this kind of data as a moral obligation that's on me. Right. So those are those are, you know, within our individual capacity. But I think we're talking about complete shift and change in in structure that takes a new structure because clearly industrial nations, you know, have create and will continue to create the most destruction. And I know that has a fantastic quote where he says capitalism, industrialism and the resultant destruction of natural habitat are not the work of nature. They are the effects of so-called progress. So in the case of changing kind of the dynamics that are around us, you know, I think it's going to take more than just alleviating, quote, unquote, via individual efforts, because that would be as ironic as it sounds, a secular kind of, you know, walk. But and it isn't to say that that has no place and that we shouldn't be trying within our own capacity because Allah will ask each and every one of us, you know, about what we do within our realm of responsibility. But I think if we talk about truly creating lasting change, we have to be honest in saying that these are political economic structures that need to be, you know, and broader, longer, deeper conversations with qualified individuals need to be had on how we can kind of carefully and creatively maneuver these within our Islamic principles.
Yeah, so that's wonderful. So just to put some meat on the bones there. So we're distinguishing between sort of like, oh, I'm going to use a metal water bottle instead of a plastic water bottle, which is sort of an individual choice versus like, you know, one of the most polluted lakes in the state is up here right next to Syracuse. It was just an hour drive from us. There was a time period where legally they were just dumping like toxic sludge into the lake to the point where they killed all the living species in the lake. And now it's still like a radioactive mess and nobody can swim in it. And, you know, the cleanup is going to take decades, if not centuries. Right. So looking at why is there even a legal possibility for that thing in the first place? That's another level. And then even a further level beyond that is sort of, well, what's our attitude towards nature in the first place? Are we sort of operating under the assumption that, you know, the world is our oyster and nature is just mute and brute and dumb and we get to manipulate it and conquer it in the way that we like, which is sort of an enlightenment sort of orientation towards relating to it? Or is this a sacred trust? Are we given sort of a position of power and influence to intervene as an amanah from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la that we're going to be responsible for every single thing, every single tree that could be cut down, we might be responsible for. There's the hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam that for the alim, that every single creature asks forgiveness for the alim, hatta al hitan fil bahar, right? Even the fish in the sea, because it's understood that somebody who's properly grounded or properly oriented morally, they're not going to do those things. Like those actions, and this is sort of the point of Halak and others, that those actions are off the table. They're not even part of the conversation because that person's entire sense of what their purpose is in life and their sort of situatedness, like who they are, is supposed to completely categorically make those decisions impossible.
They know that they're going to burn in hellfire basically, or be punished in some sort of way if they were to do those sorts of things. So that's sort of like, I always sort of laugh at how the secular sort of environmentalist movement hamstrings itself and it almost gets in its own way, much like the Muslim community does. Because for example, to pitch the idea as a problem of climate change, now you've sort of, basically you've tied it to a result, which is the change, and now you've made basically the locus of debate, is it changing or not? Now everybody who's against this, I know it's not really changing, or they're saying, well, it's changing, but this change is not human made, or it's a natural change as part of this larger cycle. You've lost the plot already. You've lost the argument by even getting into the weeds with this type of argument in the first place. Whereas Muslims, we're not so consequentialist or utilitarian. We're not going to pitch the issue as just, well, if the climate is changing, that's when we step in and act. No, we're supposed to do the right thing from the beginning, whether it has a negative consequence in the dunya or not. Like the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, if you have a sapling in your hand and the day of the judgment is established, you plant the sapling. This has nothing to do with the consequences, or if the climate's changing or not changing, if the globe is warming or not warming, do the right thing, no matter what. And I think that's one of the, especially with the environment that Islam sort of stands to teach the world, right, is that you do the right thing no matter what. And we don't just reduce it to this sort of materialistic or secularist logic where we're waiting now to say, oh, well, now we have to prove scientifically whether it's really changing or not. And then they're going to accuse our scientists of fudging the numbers. And maybe we're tempted to fudge the numbers because we really want to prove to people that it's changing. It misses the whole point.
There's other areas that I'd like to see your ideas upon. One of the things, in addition to the environment, I think that is a colossal challenge for everybody, and Muslims included, is the social and familial fracturing that's going on. Families are sick and weak, right? The extended family has been almost broken by sort of the capitalist two-income household and all this sort of stuff. And it has tangible effects on children and how they're raised, and it has tangible effects for when it comes to even people's religiosity, like what do they have available time to dedicate to? How can Islam save the day when it comes to the family and to our social bonds? Yeah, absolutely. Again, huge conversation. Probably could even be its own segment. But what I will say just, I guess, to touch on that is, again, elements of establishing the fact, I guess, if we just dial it back a little bit, that each of us do not live on our own island. When Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, even if we were to go back to the two categories of farda'een and fard kifaya, the fact that Islam creates that differentiation between individual obligations and communal obligations is an acknowledgement, it's an assertion, that you belong to, or the world and your lived experience and your role in it goes way beyond the self. Actually, it's a series of rights on you and your rights on others. And so when we talk about the fabric or the social fabric of society and familial bonds, obviously, we've got the siddur al-rahim.
Again, you've got this emphasis on community that even goes beyond just blood relations. Emphasis on neighborly attachments and tons of hadith on that. But what I will say is it's this emphasis that you are not a lonesome ranger on your own, that you actually have an obligation to create that cohesiveness in society and to play a role. And so when we talk about, you know, kind of in today's context of people relocating because of jobs, right, and everyone kind of being on an island on their own, then yes, you do have that natural blowback of not having support when it comes to raising the next generation of Muslim kids. You don't have the support or perhaps the resources to do your own kind of individualistic or individualized study, I should say, of Islam because you don't really have time, right? You're so focused on keeping your little world intact that, you know, you yourself don't have that space to thrive in your own sphere, so to speak. So, you know, there's wisdom in having, you know, if we were to take a look at like the Islamic tradition, which encourages, again, those strong bonds and that support and that upliftment, you know, within that broader category of community, there's wisdom in that. Yeah. So we're talking about like, you know, what are we prioritizing and how are we making our decisions? And I think what we're trying to shed a light on is that it's considered acceptable to society to move to the other side of the country for a job if it's a promotion or to move away from your parents or to move away from your siblings.
But it has consequences, and we're trying to say that, you know, the family structure in Islam is a normative thing. It's not just accidental. It's not just a matter of history. That's what they were doing at the time is that, you know, when we see sort of what some people would characterize as inequality when it comes to mirath, right, like inheritance, that there's an understanding there about how a family should operate. There's an understanding about how the relationships within a family should be, you know, have a certain proximity and have a certain amount of interdependence and that there's actually, ironically, more freedom and happiness and leisure and, you know, just better results in general if we have a certain proximity or thickness to the bonds of our family. And whenever we let those bonds fray or let those bonds erode, then that actually is putting us on very vulnerable terrain when it comes to even our material, you know, world, but especially our spiritual world. So we're really asking people to kind of, you know, instead of just getting sucked into what everybody else is doing, the rat race, you have a house that you can barely afford the, you know, the payments for and you're in the nice suburb with the good school district and, you know, whatever sort of the decisions that you've made, you know, what would it look like to be more intentional about this thing? What would it look like to follow the advice of one of my mashayikh in Medina to have the Muslims all live together, right, next to each other in a neighborhood with a masjid, with different sort of institutions that we're talking about two completely different ways of life and, honestly, ways of life that are going to yield much better results, not just in the dunya, but also hopefully in the afterlife. As you said, these are enormous topics and each one of them deserves sort of separate treatment and maybe one day, inshallah, we'll get to do that. But we're coming up upon an hour here and I think that it might be most appropriate to put this conversation to bed.
Do you have any final thoughts or comments that you'd like to share? Yeah, I think one thing that I'll say or rather the last thing that I'll say is these conversations are so important to be had. And I think that when we talk about isms, whether it be secularism, liberalism or otherwise, I think that awareness needs to be had that, you know, pervasive thought impacts us sometimes, you know, in subtle ways that requires deep thought and requires us to kind of take a step back and peel back the layers of specificity on how to kind of tackle and maneuver this. You know, for those of us that are here and living under secular societies, you know, I think, you know, it's imperative that we acknowledge the elephant in the room that no one is safe, right? You have to, it puts it on or should put that on our radar. Every Muslim needs to be thinking about this and every Muslim needs to be thinking about creative ways on how we can maneuver and navigate this in a careful way where we don't lose our deen and that we are taking steps forward within our capacity as an individual. And then again, again, as a collective. So Allah gives us, you know, give us the strength and tawfiq to do it. Ameen, excellent. Thank you so much, Dania Hanini for being on the program today. We look forward to many more conversations inshallah ta'ala. Subhanaka Allahumma wa bihamdika sharafan la ilaha illa anta. Astaghfirullah wa atubu ilaik. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah.
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