# When Muslim Debates Become Destructive | Imam Tom Weekly

**Author:** Tom Facchine
**Published:** 2026-07-15
**YouTube:** https://youtu.be/yypIsa-5eJs
**URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/when-muslim-debates-become-destructive-imam-tom-weekly
**Topics:** General Psychology, Identity, Islamic Ethics, Politics & Practical Theology, Psychology & Mental Health

## Description
What is modern education actually designed to produce? In this Snapshot, Imam Tom Facchine argues that modern education is never neutral—it shapes how people think, what they value, and whom they trust. This episode explores the tension between education that cultivates moral independence and...

## Transcript
**[0:00]** How do you disagree with one another without destroying the ummah? A very pertinent and timely question. There's a couple of reflections I have on this, but one of the things that I want to start with is the idea of nasiha and accountability within Islam.

**[0:16]** And this is a very, very crucial point and one that, in my experience, much of the Muslim community is something we've strayed from a bit. We know the Prophet ﷺ said, "The deen is nasiha"—this path, this way, this religion, this truth is nasiha. The companions asked, "Nasiha li man, ya Rasulullah?"—this nasiha is to whom?

**[0:34]** And then he says, nasiha to Allah and to His Book and to the Prophets. He goes down the list until he reaches the rulers of the Muslims and the general masses of the Muslims. Now that's really interesting because if you're used to translating nasiha as "advice," it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

**[0:52]** How are you going to give advice to Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala? How are you going to give advice to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ? Well, that's a very important conundrum because it actually demonstrates that nasiha, the origin or the root of the word, actually has more to do with loyalty. One of the ayat in the Qur'an, Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, says:

**[1:08]** يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا تُوبُوا إِلَى اللَّهِ تَوْبَةً نَصُوحًا "O you who have believed, repent to Allah with a repentance that is nasuha"—which is sincere, which is loyal, which is true. When you're true to one another, you go beyond niceties and you go beyond telling people just what they want to hear.

**[1:27]** When you're true to one another, you go beyond niceties and you go beyond telling people just what they want to hear. If you were to see somebody driving down a road, and if they were to continue driving down that road, there are dangers on that road. Maybe the bridge is broken and has collapsed.

**[1:42]** You have a moral dilemma. The dilemma is: do you flag that person down and tell them and make them aware of that danger they're heading towards? Or do you kind of just say, "Oh, it's none of my business, I shouldn't intervene"? No, you have a moral obligation to warn that person about the danger that is very likely going to confront them soon.

**[1:57]** Well, if that's about someone's living or dying, then what about their afterlife? What about if you have something that someone believes that is just plain wrong? And it's not to be crude about it, but you know, you can have ihsan. It's not to say that you have to go and confront everybody and be that kind of nosy person in your business.

**[2:13]** But in the broad scheme of things, in the grand scheme of things, you have an obligation, if you're really loyal to that person, if you're true to that person, to let them know. To try to help them, to try to make them aware of what they're not seeing. And that's really, really important because everybody has to be accountable to that, both on the side of advising one another, because it is actually an indication of your sincerity.

**[2:32]** Whether you would actually go out of your way to advise someone versus if you have a lack of loyalty or a lack of sincerity to other people, then you would just be quiet and let them go destroy themselves. Now, when we say this, OK, well, how does this play into sectarianism and sectarianization?

**[2:47]** We really need to define this because unfortunately, I think a lot of people misunderstand sectarianism—a term that I use, which is sectarianization—that things can be further sectarianized in harmful ways. But we have to define the contours of that because some people treat sectarianism as simply identifying the boundaries between what this group believes and what that group believes.

**[3:08]** Other people identify sectarianism as critiquing or refuting another group's beliefs. This is all well and good. This is definitely all over Islamic tradition and the tradition of our scholars. It's not necessarily a sectarian move to tell someone that they're wrong or that you think that they're wrong.

**[3:28]** So then what is sectarianism and what is sectarianization? What is the process of actually making these differences worse? Because the opposite—and we have to say it—the opposite extreme is just to have this like suffocating, fake, polite thing where nobody talks about the differences and you downplay it.

**[3:45]** I don't know how that is really going to work in 2024 when everything's online and, you know, the Internet never forgets. So what is it really then? How can we both recognize the boundaries between us, but in a way that doesn't actually lead to what is problematic? I'm going to outline four things that are my personal opinions that I think are helpful, and they're in declining order of severity.

**[4:04]** So that means I'm going to start with the most severe one, which is like pure sectarianism, a blameworthy type of sectarianism. That's beyond just identifying people's differences and even disagreeing with them or refuting them. The first one is betrayal. Okay. Like actual betrayal.

**[4:20]** You are trying to harm another individual or another group of people. And especially if this happens by you actually going to go outside of the Muslim community to try to involve someone else or recruit someone else to come and punish or deal with that person from within the community.

**[4:39]** That is betrayal. And that is absolutely inexcusable. And historically speaking, it is the cause of the downfall of many Muslim societies. For example, Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. The famous last Muslim ruler of Spain was someone who was out of power.

**[4:54]** He wanted to get back in power and he allied himself with Ferdinand and Isabella in order to go against his other Muslim city-states or emirates, or whatever you want to call them, in order to get his position back and to fight against them.

**[5:10]** Well, of course, we know how that story ends—that Isabella and Ferdinand went against every single one until they were able to kick out all the Muslims from Spain. And they did it in a very, very gruesome and horrible way. That type of betrayal is never okay. It's never okay to go outside and to say, "Yeah, well, we've got this problem."

**[5:28]** You know, there has to be an internal thing and an external thing. There has to be an external wall. If you have a house, there are walls inside of the house. There are even floors. So there's the first floor and there's the basement and there's the attic. And every room is separated by interior walls. Not everything is heaped into one room and that's okay.

**[5:43]** But the thickest wall of the house has to be the wall on the outside, the exterior wall, the wall that separates what's in the house from what's outside of the house. Let's just push that metaphor a little bit further. Imagine if someone spends all their time trying to patch up some of the interior walls, but there's a big old hole in the exterior wall.

**[6:00]** Now you've got bugs getting in. You've got critters getting in. You've got rain or whatever the elements are getting in. It's going to ruin the house. We have to make sure that that exterior wall is super solid, that we should not be going outside. And that could be done in a very dramatic way. We're talking about governments. We're talking about violence and war in the sense that I highlighted earlier.

**[6:18]** Or it could be for validation. Unfortunately, and this has happened in Muslim history, now that we're after 9/11, in the discourse of the global war on terror. And you're going to go and try to portray your ideological adversaries, your internal adversaries, as extremists.

**[6:36]** And we're not talking about people that are actually extremist or hurting people. We're talking about just people that you disagree with. That is betrayal. That is a horrible betrayal. And it is sectarianism. And it is a sectarianization of difference. And we should reject that. The second practice, or one rung down on the ladder from that, is dehumanization.

**[6:53]** We should not dehumanize one another. We should never use, for example, animalistic or zoological language to describe one another. "Oh, these people are just like pigs, or these people are just like donkeys," or they're just like, you know. That is something that is very problematic because it can lead to violence.

**[7:10]** It can lead to escalation. And it's a needless escalation. You can have disagreements, and you can have strong disagreements, vehement disagreements with other people. But you should never go to the point of actually dehumanizing them because dehumanizing them increases the likelihood that you're actually going to attack them or come to bear on them in some way that is outside of what is acceptable.

**[7:32]** The third rung on the ladder, so a step down from that, is needless escalation. And needless escalation looks like where you have a general issue, and you ramp it up, or you kind of wrench it into making this point against this other group.

**[7:48]** If you're writing every 10 articles or every 10 videos you do, if 7 or 8 of them are just harping on your internal Muslim ideological adversary, that's probably an unhealthy occupation. You're probably a little bit fixated. Now, when it comes to even some of the books in the tradition, we should look critically at some of these because sometimes we find examples of either a needless escalation.

**[8:10]** For example, if there are fiqh manuals out there in the tradition, it will say that, "Oh, the prayer behind such and such a person is not valid." In certain circumstances, in certain instances, that is a needless escalation of really what is a difference even between two fiqh schools, even between two madhabs.

**[8:27]** Now you've heightened the stakes of that disagreement to the point where now you're forcing people to be apart. That is needless, and it's problematic. And the same thing with fixation. There are some people that, unfortunately, when they study aqidah, many people today think that aqidah is just about refutations because there are traditions or there are movements that have made aqidah so polemical.

**[8:48]** That people don't realize that there's actually something that is constructive about aqidah. There are things that you need to believe and understand that don't have to do with what X group is saying or what B group is saying or whatever. You should learn something that is constructive. And again, to be extremely clear, this does not mean that it's never appropriate to refute.

**[9:08]** It is. There is a time and a place for refutations. And it's not, according to my humble opinion, a matter of sectarianism to do so. And it's not a matter of sectarianism to draw those boundaries and to say, "Hey, you guys believe this and we think it's wrong," and to try to combat that ideologically with ideas, with texts, with logic, with reason, etc.

**[9:27]** But to harp on it in the way that this is the only thing that you talk about is problematic. That pushes things to the arena of sowing division and exacerbating division. Division that doesn't have to exist. So it's kind of about calibrating in disagreeing, and even, yes, within a house there can be several rooms.

**[9:48]** It doesn't mean that you have to be with everybody all the time. And depending on which types of groups you're talking about, maybe there are certain situations where you're not even, if we're going to use the house metaphor, you're not even on the same floor. Maybe you're up in the attic and they're in the basement, but you're still in the same house.

**[10:03]** It doesn't mean that you have to meet in the hallway with one another. You can be separate. That's not a problem. But when it is needlessly escalated, when it is continuously and obsessively harped on, and especially when it teeters into dehumanization and betrayal, this is blameworthy sectarianism that everybody needs to be very, very careful of.