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White Supremacy, Capitalism, Secularism: 3 Lenses Affecting Your Worldview | Focal Point | Imam Tom
Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine
White Supremacy, Capitalism, Secularism: 3 Lenses Affecting Your Worldview | Focal Point | Imam Tom
The words we use to understand the world shape what we see and what we overlook, and how we make sense of the problems around us. But what happens when the concepts we rely on fail to capture the reality of what we’re trying to understand?
In this Focal Point, Imam Tom Facchine examines how the language we use to describe oppression, identity, and social change influences how we understand and respond to them. From the limitations of concepts like genocide and Islamophobia to the frameworks we use to understand capitalism and secularism, he explores what these terms reveal, what they leave out, and how alternative concepts rooted in an Islamic intellectual tradition might offer a more complete understanding.
References & sources used in this episode: https://yqn.io/fp-quranic-imagery
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00What are the stories that we consider being the most important stories of our civilization and our upbringing?
00:10When you compare that, and I can't help but compare that to the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, who literally changed the world. Now, we're experiencing a surge in anti-Islamic rhetoric and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
00:20In Europe, this movie Citizen Vigilante was released and it's basically all but calling for people to attack Muslims in their homes.
00:28You know, the movement of Islam generated a civilization that, within a very, very short amount of time, stretched from today's Morocco to China. The way in which people were classified in the Balkans from the Ottoman times to today, and it shifts, and sometimes it shifts every five years, and that's really fascinating.
00:42Compared to how people were self-identifying if they were identifying with a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, or something else. And that makes the term genocide, uh, not an awkward fit, but it makes me wonder, is there a better term?
00:56We don't actually have a dedicated term for the targeting of a religious group. The concept of refugee is actually something that shapes and structures how Rohingya are treated.
01:08So it got me thinking about, what are the stories that we have in our lives, and what makes a story consequential? One of the most popular movies of the summer was The Odyssey, a film directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matt Damon.
01:21If you're familiar with the story, I didn't watch the movie by the way, but if you're familiar with the story, it's a Greek classic, supposedly ascribed to Homer. The Odyssey is considered one of the staples, one of the pillars of the Western canon, and even Western civilization itself.
01:34Which is kind of ironic, actually, if you think about it.
01:37It's filled with polytheism, and it's filled with infidelity, and adultery, and barbarity, and all sorts of things that people who consider themselves religious and peoples of faith would probably usually object to. There's also this problem of what's called the hero cult.
01:51And I went digging a little bit, and the idea of a hero has an interesting history. So, hero in Greek originally meant a person, or more than a person, who was the offspring of gods and men.
02:03Eventually, the term changed and became a word associated with basically any great man who died.
02:10And people would turn their shrines, their graveyards, into places of pilgrimage and visitation, and would ask the occupant of the grave for protection or for help in some sort of way. We call that shirk, by the way.
02:21So, it's really interesting to me that these types of hero cults evolved, and they too are considered an essential part of the Western canon and Western civilization. This whole thing got me thinking about words and names. What do we call things?
02:35Hero, as we said, has a history and a genealogy. And even though today no one means the original sense of the word, at least not to my knowledge when they use it, it still might carry some baggage with it.
02:47That's not trying to argue that it's wrong to use the term hero, but it does get you thinking, are there other possibilities? Are there other words or other concepts that more, let's say, comfortably fit within our worldview and our religion? It also got me thinking about stories as well.
03:01What are the stories that we consider being the most important stories of our civilization and our upbringing? If you review the synopsis of the Odyssey, I don't know about you, but for me, it's like he goes through this 10-year journey. He fights monsters and all his crew is dead.
03:15And then he ends up sailing off into the sunset with his wife. Now, keep in mind, whether or not modern adaptations wrestle with those consequences, the question remains, which stories are truly consequential? And what kind of world does it leave behind?
03:28When you compare that, and I can't help but compare that to the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, who literally changed the world. Muhammad is the most popular name in the world, and it's not close.
03:37The movement of Islam generated a civilization that within a very, very short amount of time stretched from today's Morocco to China. The way that people farmed, the way that people worshipped, the language they spoke, it had a tremendous amount of consequence and influence.
03:51You know, this summer, I spent some time in Bosnia, and one of the things that I was talking with local academics about was the erasure of Islam and Muslims from the Balkans. And this is not something that started in the 1990s.
04:02It's actually something that goes back to post-Ottoman times, as soon as the Ottomans lost control of the Balkans. And that got me thinking about the term genocide and the merits and demerits, the descriptive power, but also the limitations of that term as well.
04:15So I went digging, and the term genocide was actually developed by a Jewish-Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin. The definition is an intentional act to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
04:29It includes acts such as killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions to destroy a group.
04:38It also includes cultural destruction, so anything that's aimed at or intended to destroy the cultural or social structures of a group is considered genocide as well. Lemkin's definition influenced the genocide convention adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
04:52And I think what's interesting, or one of the things that I noticed or find myself noticing about the definition of genocide is that it focuses on intent.
04:59So you need to be able to prove the intent of the perpetrator to destroy the group, not just to harm individuals, but to actually want to destroy the entire group or part of it.
05:09The inclusion of religion is interesting, because religion doesn't seem to be exactly the same type of thing as the other categories that are involved.
05:19And remember, it's talking about ethnicity, or race, or national group, and then religious group. And sure enough, the term that was used to coin the practice or the idea, the legal category, derives from gen.
05:33So gen is an old root going back to the Proto-Indo-European root that has to do with birth.
05:40Even though later in Latin it became more generalized to genus, which can mean just like a category, but the origin has to do with birth. Think generate, gestation, genes. It all has to do with something that's inherited.
05:53Something that you don't actually choose, which makes it very interesting and stands in tension to the inclusion of religion, which does have some hereditary aspects.
06:03There are, you know, most people probably follow the religions of their parents, but it's not quite an inherited thing. It is something that people choose. I myself know that firsthand.
06:14And so the question that occurred to me is, does the term genocide really fit the Bosnian context? Now, of course, the answer is yes, because there's the intent to wipe out a whole group of people and the violence is there. But there is a difficulty with the term itself.
06:28Genetically and linguistically, the people of the Balkans are extremely, extremely similar. Almost, if not identical. And that's going to upset a lot of people, because the differences in the region have been politicized.
06:42Even the Dayton Accords, actually, consecrated and formalized the Bosniak identity as an ethnic identity, or some people would say an ethno-religious identity.
06:53But the Serbs and the Croats and the Bosnians genetically are extremely similar, linguistically are extremely similar. And so it stretches this idea of genocide and the inclusion of religion to a limit.
07:06Now, there's a thread that we have to dedicate to a future episode we can't handle now, which is actually, I did another round of digging for the way in which people were classified in the Balkans from the Ottoman times to today.
07:19And it shifts, and sometimes it shifts every five years, and that's really fascinating. Compared to how people were self-identifying if they were identifying with a nation or an ethnicity or a religion or something else. Unfortunately, we have to pause that and come back to it in another episode.
07:32But no one could disagree that the greatest difference between the people of the Balkans is their religion.
07:40Not something that is inherited, not something that is genetic, but it's something that is, technically speaking, chosen, your religion.
07:49And that makes the term genocide not an awkward fit, but it makes me wonder, is there a better term? Is there something that we could come up with ourselves?
07:59It just occurred to me that we don't actually have a dedicated term for the targeting of a religious group, the attempt to eradicate or kill a religious group specifically. Now, this might seem like a theoretical exercise, but it actually has real-world consequences.
08:13If we go to a different situation, we talk about the Rohingya refugees, for example, in Malaysia and Indonesia. The concept of refugee is actually something that shapes and structures how Rohingya are treated.
08:26I know people on the ground in that part of the world who work very closely with the Rohingya refugees there.
08:31And they are telling me that families have been evicted from their homes and that learning centers have been forced to close and that children have been targets of intimidation.
08:41Online, we see false narratives and AI-generated misinformation spreading across social media, portraying the Rohingya as undeserving of compassion or ungrateful.
08:50There were even cases of people celebrating in the comments when boats carrying Rohingya refugees capsized at sea, drowning hundreds.
08:57In person, people have started noticing banners and notices calling for the Rohingya to be removed from neighborhoods that they've appeared in different parts of the country.
09:05And even some religious scholars have fallen prey to the anti-immigrant narratives or anti-refugee narratives, characterizing the Rohingya as unruly and ungrateful and in need of discipline.
09:17Now, my question here, relating it back to the case of Bosnia and to way back to the Odyssey, is the fact that they're classified as refugees part of the problem here. The refugee is an object of pity and sometimes the source of threat.
09:30Especially, there's a well-established playbook of scapegoating refugees and recent migrants for economic and social issues. What if there was another way to think about them? What if there was a way to think about them that maybe was along the lines of the Muhajirun and the Ansar?
09:44Or let's do the opposite thought experiment. Let's imagine if, in Medina, they viewed the Meccans that were coming to them that accepted Islam as refugees. Would there have been a point where they said, hey, you guys gotta go home?
09:57If we were to understand the Rohingya as Muhajirun, as people who have fled their lands due to oppression and due to their pretty much just wanting to worship Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala,
10:06then the responsibilities of the people on the ground in Malaysia, Indonesia, other places in the Ummah change.
10:13It goes from a reluctant host to a group of people for whom their opportunity to draw closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is incorporating these people into their land. Yes, indefinitely.
10:26Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala praises the Ansar in the Qur'an as people who preferred the Muhajirun over themselves even when they themselves were in need.
10:34That is a model and an ideal to follow and it's something that we have to be careful because it's not really there in the refugee-host relationship. Another thing I was doing this summer was reading Salman Sayyid's book, Recalling the Caliphate.
10:46And that also got me thinking about the terms and categories that we use when Muslims or Islam itself is targeted. Now, we're experiencing a surge in anti-Islamic rhetoric and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
11:00In Europe, this movie Citizen Vigilante was released and it's basically all but calling for people to attack Muslims in their homes.
11:08Taking the law into their own hands, or really extrajudicial killings, is something that it's kind of suggesting in a very obvious way.
11:18About a month after the filming of this episode, we will get on our side of the pond Infidel, the movie from The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro.
11:28In which apparently, yes, the greatest threat to the West is not the takeover from Zionists or, I don't know, anything else. But it's the Muslims who, I guess, want to exploit the freedoms of the country.
11:41And I think, I forget the quote from the movie, but it was like the wombs, I don't know, something about having a lot of babies and exploiting the freedoms of the country.
11:49So, it got me thinking about when these things happen, which are old, old tropes that are drummed up to distract people from their real enemies and the people who are really trying to take things from them. But how do we understand it within our community as Muslims?
12:02And I started thinking about the different frameworks that we have to understand such things. And it was also, I paired this with a good article on Umatics by Mostaf Igal.
12:11It seems to me that there are three main imaginaries that we have to talk about these sorts of things or the dynamics that oppose our community. One of them is white supremacy. White supremacy, of course, is a very real thing.
12:23It deals with the construction of whiteness as a master race as opposed to someone being Bavarian and someone being German or this or other ethnicities even before the nation state. It's the amalgamation of certain groups of people into this construct of whiteness.
12:38It is the allocation of certain rights and privileges to those people and the denial of others creating a dynamic in which people seek adjacency to whiteness and compete to be included in whiteness.
12:48Basically, to get their daily bread and to not be targeted or securitized or penalized or criminalized. That's a real force that works on the Muslim community; Muslims are certainly racialized, even in the history of the Balkans.
12:59In order to justify the massacres that the Serbs were committing against the Bosnian Muslims, they would call them Turks or they would call them Dahis. Dahis refers to the Ottoman tax collectors. They try to racialize them in order to make them seem other.
13:11The Rohingya as well, they're called people who are foreigners or Bangladeshis or something else. They're constructed as a racial other and that dehumanizes them and attempts to explain why it's okay to treat them unequally.
13:25And that's also something, unfortunately, that we deal with in our communities: white supremacy, racism, and colorism within our mosques and Islamic schools. Something scholars like Ruqayyah Yaqub have documented, especially in Islamic schools. I refer you to her work.
13:38She's done a lot of really important work on that. That's the first imaginary. We have white supremacy and nobody is saying that white supremacy isn't an extremely important lens.
13:48The question that we're asking in this little segment of this episode is, are there things that escape that analysis? And I would say, yes, there are things that escape that analysis that we need other lenses in order to capture. So let's go to the second one.
14:00The second main one is neoliberalism or capitalism. It's more of a material analysis.
14:05It focuses on the unbound wealth extraction and profit accumulation through various techniques from colonization to maximizing rents via commodification and privatization.
14:15If you haven't yet heard this term, go down a rabbit hole on surveillance capitalism. So a lot of grocery stores now are playing with the prices that they charge different people.
14:26They're actually going to use an algorithm to profile you and stereotype you to try to maximize the amount that you're willing to pay.
14:32So they actually gathered a bunch of people in the same room and had them like order groceries online through Instacart, like the same items at the same place at the same time from the same store. And people were charged different prices.
14:43So people are really freaking out about, and they rightfully should, this reality of surveillance capitalism. And where does it stop? What if we get to a point where grocery stores are now going to figure you out by the time you get to the register? You're checking out.
14:57Maybe they erase all the prices from the aisles, and then they just actually ring you up your own personal price when you check out. Scary, right?
15:04But this is an idea to show you how far they're willing to go to pursue profits and wealth extraction, which is part of a.
15:12Capitalist or materialist analysis. It even affects the non-profit sphere, which is very important and something that should be discussed.
15:20Speakers' fees, people charging in the charity sector, or asking for honorariums that are either egregious, obscene amounts, or even a percentage of the funds raised.
15:29Even the branding. You're bombarded with these emotionally manipulative images and videos of children and whatever, and it kind of creates a situation in which
15:38you're not supposed to ask questions about the charity and, well, how are you getting the stuff there, and what's your overhead, and are you being fair, and these types of things.
15:46So even in the non-profit sphere, there are real, real reasons to be concerned about capitalism and have that lens of analysis because it does account for a lot of stuff that's going on.
15:59However, just like white supremacy, it doesn't account for everything; there are other things that escape that type of lens. So that brings us to the third lens. You could call it nationalism, you could call it secularism, they're codependent, secular nationalism, something like that.
16:13And as we've detailed in other episodes, this has to do with the changing of the definition of religion so that it is made personal, private, and manageable.
16:21It's also the instilling of like a William Defoe-like paranoia that results in the securitization of diversity and dissent.
16:29Anything can be justified according to the national security interest. That's, I think, a consequence of the secular nation-state.
16:37And within our own communities, this looks like cranking out huffaz, people who have memorized the Qur'an, who don't practice it, who don't understand it, who don't even have any idea what they're reciting.
16:49You could make an argument that this existed before the nation-state, but I would say that the logic of secularism has accelerated this phenomenon,
16:55that we are churning out people who have the outward veneer, the personal, private expression of faith, being a memorizer of the Qur'an,
17:05without actually the social or public dimension of it, which is making the Qur'an instantiated, bringing it to life in our actions and in our communities.
17:15Now again, to reiterate, the purpose of going through these three lenses is not to demonstrate or to say that they are useless.
17:22Absolutely not. In fact, all of them are essential, and they capture very, very important dynamics of how we understand the world and what's going on for Muslims and within our own communities.
17:31However, again, we'll ask the question, do these analytical categories leave out anything? Do they cover absolutely everything, or is there something that escapes them?
17:42It occurs to me that Islam is a truth-first venture, as opposed to an identity-first venture.
17:52And one of the things that I noticed in a lot of the previous lenses and categories and phenomenon that we explored is that they're based in identity rather than truth.
18:02As Allah ﷻ says in the Qur'an in many different parts, He sets up these two things, and the truth always wins out over identity. وَقَالُوا كُونُوا هُودًا أَوْ نَصَارَىٰ تَهْتَدُوا قُلْ بَلْ مِلَّةَ إِبْرَاهِيمَ حَنِيفًا وَمَا كَانَ مِنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ
18:16Allah says that He's actually, in this ayah, blaming the Jews and the Christians for saying that you have to become Jews or Christians in order to be guided.
18:27The Jews are saying you have to become a Jew, Christians are saying you have to become a Christian in order to be guided. And the response that Allah gives is, قُلْ بَلْ مِلَّةَ إِبْرَاهِيمَ حَنِيفًا
18:37That we are on the millah or the religious community of Ibrahim, Abraham, may peace and blessings be upon him, and he was not of those who worshipped idols.
18:47Allah also says, وَقُلْ جَاءَ الْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا That it has to do like a much more comfortable fit within Islam, and I would say the Islamic world view is about truth.
19:00Either you're on the side of truth or you're not, regardless of what your identity is.
19:04In fact, some scholars have read Surah Al-Baqarah as a long-running commentary on how Bani Israel attempted to convert their contractual obligation with Allah.
19:17Which is based on following the truth into an identity where God's chosen people were saved. So, the fact that Islam is a truth-first enterprise, and that it's not strictly identitarian.
19:31That's not to say that identity doesn't matter. We should all strive to inculcate an Islamic identity. However, the identity that you bring to the table is subordinate to your identity as a believer, you could say.
19:43And a believer is expected to follow the truth no matter where it is. We have the example of Musa Alayhi Salaam, who is called to join into a fight on the side of his clansmen, only to regret it and find that his clansman was in the wrong.
19:57We also have the example of Bilqis, the queen of Sheba, who makes a comment about how going to war is problematic and has all these types of negative consequences.
20:08And Allah SWT affirms that statement by saying, and that is true. That is what happens, that is what they do.
20:15So, it's not as simple as saying, well this is your identity and this is my identity and therefore all oppression or all evil or all wrongdoing is about one identity versus another.
20:27One identity being in a supreme or privileged situation and other identities being oppressed under it.
20:34That explains quite a lot, but perhaps not everything; there is something to do with the truth rather than just identities. And we're going to stretch our imaginations on that in just a second.
20:45But first, there are also some skills that Allah SWT covers in the Qur'an. We'll point to three of them and how they're relevant to this exercise. One of them is the idea of tasawwur, that you have to have conceptualization of what's going on.
20:59What was the nature of the oppression that Musa Alayhi Salaam was under? What was the nature of the rejection of the Quraysh to the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? If you characterize it in one way, you could end up with incorrect conclusions about what Islam was up to.
21:12The second is tadabbur, about reflection. Actually looking into the world and seeing what's going on and also making reflection on Allah's revelation in the Qur'an, His words.
21:22To understand maybe how to respond, in addition to having the proper conception. And the last has to do with takhayul, and that's imagining the future.
21:29And so my whole point in this is that by thinking through names, words, terms, categories, we're actually engaging all these three at once.
21:38And we're actually trying to look towards the future to understand where we're headed.
21:44Maybe there are better terms and categories that we could come up with that better entrench, assert, or disseminate our worldview. Maybe they fit our community better.
21:58So I conducted an experiment. I wanted to know if we could come up with our own terms and categories that would capture an Islamic worldview, an Islamic epistemology more completely than the other terms and categories that are common and currently used, some of which we have mentioned.
22:12And I had certain criteria. So criteria one is that it has to have theological clarity. It has to actually describe what is going on. If it's truth versus falsehood, if it's guidance versus misguidance.
22:26The second criterion was that it had to be in a traditionally ummatic language stretching from West Africa to Indonesia. So I ran this through AI just to see what it came up with.
22:39We went through Hausa and Wolof and Somali and Arabic and Persian and Ottoman Turkish and Urdu and Turkish, Bosnian, Malayalam and Bahasa. We went through, like I said, all these languages and see what you can find.
22:52The third condition was that it had to be concise. Okay, I didn't want strings of five words or ten syllable words or things like that. I wanted it to be very, very short and concise.
23:00And the last condition, the fourth condition is a little bit selfish, but this is an English-language channel, is that it had to be fairly easy to pronounce on the English tongue. So here are some highlights of some concepts and ideas.
23:13And the whole purpose here is to get the juices flowing and to help co-create this thing. And I'm going to ask you for your contributions in the comments at the end.
23:20So I think the jewel that came through this exercise is actually a Persian term to capture the war against the truth.
23:30Because again, normally when people are being opposed, it is only legible in terms of their identities. We have genocide, we have this aside and that aside, and it has to do with one identity versus the other.
23:43But it actually doesn't capture people's attempt to eliminate the truth itself. Which is something that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala talks about in the Qur'an extensively. So Persian has a term apparently, haqsateezi.
23:55Haqsateezi, that war against the truth. As something that is easy on the tongue, it's concise to say, and it captures this idea that's not based on identity, but it's rather based in the truth. It's open-ended.
24:08Anybody can be for or against the truth. And those who are at war against the truth are guilty of haqsateezi. The second, it's no secret that I'm not a huge fan of the term Islamophobia.
24:16Islamophobia pathologizes and medicalizes any opposition to Islam, which is kind of like a cheap shortcut.
24:24We need a better term and concept to describe people who are bigoted or, I don't know, they act in bad faith. Even the idea of hate speech, it's not my favorite because it's a double-edged sword.
24:37If we're going to say that people who disagree with Islam or are critical of Islam or Muslims are engaged in hate speech, then they could just very easily do the same thing to us. Even Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, in the Qur'an, when He criticizes the theology of the Jews and Christians, is that hate speech? No, it's absolutely not.
24:51So I'm very hesitant to go down that road. Is there a better term for Islamophobia? We're going Persian again with islamsateezi. Islamsateezi.
25:00So if you're fighting Islam, it's not that you're phobic, it's not that you're afraid, it's not that you're whatever, but no, you've decided to fight Islam. It's good because it distinguishes between someone who actually is questioning, even if they're ignorant,
25:13because there are people who come that have all sorts of crazy notions about Islam. That's okay. We can welcome that. But someone who actually has made the intention to fight it, that needs its own term and distinction.
25:26Secularism is a really tricky one. And one that I wanted to replace because it has this connotation of like a neutral, safe space that everybody can participate in, which is just not the reality.
25:37It conceals the reality of the power that's behind shaping public space and discourse. And so, again, Persian with a win here. Deen Zodai. Deen Zodai. And I hope I'm trying to learn Persian, guys.
25:50But bear with me as I get my pronunciation up to speed. Deen Zodai has to do with deen scrubbing. Literally cleansing. It's like ethnic cleansing, but doing that for the deen. Literally removing, and this is what I like about it, it's removing the deen from its proper place.
26:04Because the proper place of the deen is in the public sphere. It is in the public square. It is in guiding morality and public morals. And it is in shaping policy and these types of things.
26:15And so to remove religion from that sphere is actually a scrubbing in a negative connotation. Next up, this is an easy one, terrorism. Terrorism is one of the most incoherent legal categorizations.
26:28It is very subjective. It is extremely ambiguous. It is selectively applied. And it basically just gives carte blanche to any government that wants to take people outside of the protection of the law. You can just call them a terrorist, then you can do whatever you want to them.
26:41So there's no meaningful way to distinguish between valid complaints, valid dissent. Even things that before 9/11 used to be called like separatism, right? Now everything gets lumped into terrorism and it's really just a policy tool.
26:55So how do we come up with a better term? In Arabic and in the Qur'an, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala calls something hirabah. Because hirabah has a lot of the practices that the average person might associate with terrorism.
27:06Such as highway robbery and banditry and terrorizing civilians in an unjust way. But it removes the kind of ideological component, right?
27:16It removes the idea of, oh, it's somehow like just an organic outcome of what you believe. And so if you believe in this, then you're going to end up being a terrorist because you're a radical or you're a fundamentalist or you're an extremist.
27:27It removes all that conversation about what your beliefs are and it focuses on the practices. If you're guilty of hirabah, you've done a certain thing to terrorize a population that didn't deserve it. Development. Development is a very loaded term.
27:38It basically puts everybody on the same timeline and trajectory that this is what development looks like.
27:45First you go from feudal society and then you go to capitalism and then you end up with a financial, late capitalist society. A better term, I think, is umran. Again from Arabic, big in the traditional literature.
27:58It has to do more with development but not in a way that crams everybody on a single scale and a single frame. It has to do with longevity, umr, and it also has to do with establishing.
28:10But it leaves aside maybe some of the more negative connotations. The last three. We have reform.
28:16Reform has a connotation of basically just doing whatever you want with a deen and making it into something that is, let's say, going too far. We can replace that with tajdeed. Tajdeed is already like renewal. It's already in circulation.
28:30People talk about it quite a bit. Replacing religion with deen. This is actually a reclamation because the original sense of the word religion had to do with your duty to God.
28:40So people, again, hundreds of years ago, you could say this is good religion and this is bad religion. Because you could either be taking care of your duty to God or you could not be taking care of your duty to God.
28:52The word deen, which is related to dayn, which has to do with an obligation or a debt, still carries this connotation. Whereas the term religion has lost it. Religion now just means kind of like it's optional. It's like your identity. It's like your culture.
29:07It's like, do you like vanilla or chocolate? What's your religion? This, that, or the third. So deen is a superior term and I advocate replacing one with the other. And the last one, which we already covered, which is replacing the idea of a refugee with the muhajir and the ansar.
29:21The whole point of this exercise and this entire episode is that we can't necessarily succeed or thrive when we are living inside of someone else's worldview.
29:31And when the categories and the terms and the ways that we even think about our own situation and our own history are determined by somebody else that doesn't share our beliefs and doesn't share our values.
29:44So we have a responsibility to start participating in the creation of our own world. And that starts with ideas and that starts with concepts. So I want people to hit the comment section hard in this one.
29:58I want your ideas about what are some concepts or terminology that you would replace and why would you replace it and what would you replace it with. That's all for now. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.
