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How Your Victim Mindset is Destroying You | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine
Why the Islamic Calendar Matters | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine

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SeriesHistoryPolitics & Practical Theology

Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine

How Your Victim Mindset is Destroying You | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine

Tom Facchine

Tom Facchine

How do you respond to trauma? Do you let it consume you and strip you of your power?

We all experience painful events. It’s resilience that restores your dignity, not dwelling in victimhood. The perfect example? Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. He faced unimaginable hardship, but turned his pain into purpose.

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00Islam teaches resilience, not self-pity. This is one of the casualties of our victim culture, culture war, and the left-right antagonism, and also with the proliferation of therapy culture.
00:16There's a sweetness to being a victim in certain audiences, in certain company. That to be perceived as oppressed or to be perceived as a victim of something gives you street cred.
00:26It gives even a type of social currency, and that can actually mess with your intentions. Allah actually says explicitly in Surah An-Nisa, "Are they seeking dignity from elsewhere? For all dignity belongs to Allah."
00:37All dignity belongs to Allah. You're not gonna get dignity from anybody else on the face of this earth. You're not going to get dignity by being somebody else's oppressed minority or somebody else's victim case.
00:51Dignity comes from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and you find a lot of difference when it comes to how we tend to behave these days versus how the Companions behaved and how the early Muslims behaved.
01:00With a modern therapeutic eye, we would say they experienced a lot of trauma. Absolutely. Both psychological, physical, tons of hardships.
01:09Even the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). You look at being raised as an orphan and having his caregivers pass away one at a time. Being ostracized from his clan and tribe and his homeland. Things that we would call today traumatic.
01:22And yet we don't see the same leaning into that as we do today. We see a different type of resilience and response.
01:29One that's not suppression, by the way. We don't want to run to the other extreme or the other caricature of just boomer generation robots that just don't talk about their feelings.
01:38That's not what we're saying. But certainly the way that the early Muslims responded was through dignity and strength and redemption. Redemption of themselves but also redemption of those around them.
01:50It wasn't falling prey to a grievance culture where we're constantly just indirectly benefiting from being a victim. One of the Hanbali scholars, he talked about how people can show off in anything.
02:02And certainly if you've ever heard of the oppression Olympics, people can show off in anything. How oppressed you are or how messed up your life is or whatever. You might remember back in university or in high school you used to complain about how much work you had to do.
02:15And somebody else sort of one-ups you and then you try to one-up them about how little sleep you got, how little food you've eaten. People can show off in anything. So we have to be careful not to fall into this funnel of being pleased or content with being a victim.
02:29Even if we are victimized. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has a purpose to the things that we suffer. And the purpose to the things that we suffer is supposed to bring us transformation.
02:40It's supposed to bring us to another place and another reality where we're actually closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. We're actually more dedicated to our principles and our values.
02:48We're actually more willing to sacrifice in His cause and suffer things in His cause because we have been shown something of reality. We have been shown something of Allah's control.
02:59So we have to understand that as Muslims we rely upon Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for everything. And we trust that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has a plan for us. There's this idea of wayfaring.
03:12And perhaps that's one of the things missing from victim culture or grievance culture is that there's no wayfaring. Where are we going? Where are we headed? Where's our redemption? Where's our triumph?
03:22If we are Yusuf (عليه السلام), to give a Quranic example, we might be in the well now. We might be in prison now. But how do we get to the end?
03:32How do we make Allah's hope for us, which is better than our hope for ourselves to be honest, how do we make that happen? And what do we have to do to get there?

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