things it's
very very unusual
in the modern world to meet people that
are really committed to mastery of
anything
and obviously the highest thing is to
master yourself
and that is very difficult
ahmed zarook said it's easier to move a
mountain with your fingernails than it
is to actually transform your
nature so it's but it is possible and
imam razadi
argued that anybody who claims that you
cannot change
nature is a liar and he said
you can you can take a dog and train a
dog
and he's saying what you can't
you can't take a human being that has
rational
nature and not transform it
you know you can take a dog that has you
know
all over the place and teach it to do
very relatively sophisticated tricks
and teach it to sit and what you can't
discipline the self
you can a dog you can discipline but
your own self
you can't teach it to stop don't do that
it's not good for you
you know this is incontinence which
is a beautiful word in in in the
19th century in america and it was a
moral term it wasn't a medical term
and and and continence is
is the idea of restraint self-restraint
incontinence
is ecracia or the lack of self-restraint
now it's been reduced to
incontinent to stool and urine this is
this is what's been reduced to people
that can't control their most basic
bodily functions
are called incontinent but in reality
you should be able to control your your
nature
and and this takes time it takes
practice and it takes skill
but the modern world wants to strip that
away so
certainly learning these skills are very
important
uh in in the in the modern world
logic has been reduced to what's called
material logic and we'll get into that
in the third
lecture uh we'll get into
material logic you have formal logic and
material logic material logic
one aspect of material logic is called
the fallacies which are called the
safsatta
or the mohawk are
fallacies of reasoning so it's the
content of your logic
and and we we uh
we're very susceptible to them
politicians are
use them all the time and we're very
susceptible because the mind is
susceptible to hasty generalizations
i mean i'll give an example if you look
on if you watched cnn
before coming to turkey you probably
would have cancelled your trip
because they made it appear that this
whole country was in revolution
and when when you got here in istanbul
you're there and it's it's very peaceful
and it's so ludicrous for people in new
york don't go to turkey you know it's a
dangerous place you know they're all
they're gone crazy
you know meanwhile there's people
getting mugged all over the place in
central park right i mean this
this is so much safer than being
in new york and but you know people are
afraid to come to turkey because they
watch the news
and the news is constantly using
fallacies
and sometimes it's just pure deceit
but you know i mean they said for
instance how many people heard that they
were going to tear down all the trees to
build a mall
how many people heard that okay that
look at that
that was a complete lie they weren't
going to tear down
they were actually going to remove some
trees around the edge of the park
to to restore the fort that had been
torn down
it was an ottoman military base and they
were going to make a museum
they weren't building a mall right so it
was this kind of oh this massive
you know this insane liberal capitalism
gone mad
turkeys on steroids they're going to
turn everything into malls
no they were going to preserve the trees
make a museum
and the so-called mall was actually
cafes
around the area for people to
enjoy the the place but
it's a very very uh
secular part of istanbul
and some of the people there the
majority of pubs in istanbul are in that
area
and because they put a 10 p.m
limit on sale of alcohol which is the
case in many states in america
right they have these laws i mean you
have many many cities in the united
states where you can't sell alcohol
after and then you have dry days it
wasn't that long ago before we had dry
states right so
this whole idea that you know oh that no
you can't do that
if if they see fit to uh if they
if if they're having problems with uh
with
um disorderly contact because of the
sale of alcohol
then that's part of what public order is
you have to succumb to the public order
but if you looked at it you know these
these were
these are tactics people can't think
clearly anymore
they showed a picture of a million and a
half people
and cnn said oh this was a protest
against the president no it was actually
a protest for the president
a demonstration for the president and
then cnn retracted that a little later
and said oh whoops we made a mistake
that was actually a pro
presidential you know so the people
opposed to it were a few hundred people
that they gave nine hours of
unprecedented
live coverage on cnn international i
mean where were they when iceland was in
rebellion against
the the uh the parliament because the
banks
they weren't going to pay the banks
where were they how many people got to
see all the greek
rebellions and the abuse that the greek
protesters took from
i mean you know you
need the tools of thinking in the modern
world because
you're up against a massive propaganda
machine and it's it's a propaganda
machine that
is is not so much a conspiracy but it's
just
they all think the same way they look at
things the same way
and so turkey because turkey is
a a a a country that has
a very very troubling um history for the
west
turkey was once the center of one of the
most powerful
dynasties in human history and had an
empire
that was unprecedented and lasted for
a very long time and there are people
that
there there's a little bit of
schizophrenia in the country they were
deeply traumatized
i mean imagine imagine in
in united states or in canada imagine
obama announces we have decided
that starting tomorrow all of english
will be written
in the pinyin chinese script because we
realize that china
is a rising power and we want to prepare
our young people
early so that they'll be able to read
chinese
so tomorrow all the textbooks are going
to be published in chinese script
it's still english don't worry you're
not going to be saying nihoma you'll
still say how are you
but it's going to be written like the
chinese write their script
i mean imagine the trauma that that
would cause in a nation
and that's what was done here they went
from their arabic ottoman script
to a latin-based script overnight
and then imagine the trauma to the kurds
of prohibiting them from speaking their
language this is what happened to the
native americans
they were prohibited to speak their
native languages in the united st
to speak their native languages on the
reservations
right imagine that and here
for the first time now they've
they're they're allowing them to teach
their language to teach
this is what they've done so this
so-called fascist turkish government
that's being presented to western people
is is removing a lot of the the
the darkness that had descended upon the
people from before
but people are very worried you know
there's people that are secular and they
think oh these are the muslims taking
over
well they're muslim people but they're
committed to a secular state
right and and and the idea that islam
and secularity are mutually exclusive is
false because the vast majority of
islamic history
had relatively secular states they
they weren't really islamic states the
whole
concept of an islamic state is a fantasy
in in the in the minds of a lot of the
modern islamists
but if you actually study
muslim history that you will find yes
islam was the state religion
but the states functioned
just like a secular state functions
because religion actually has very
little to do
with the running of a state
building roads has nothing to do with
what meth have you follow
you know oh that's a hanafi road no
that's a medhab
right the madhhab is means road in
arabic but medhep is a school
is a metaphor taken from the real method
which is a road no a road is you can
build it from
stone you can build it from asphalt you
can build it from concrete
and that's just what you want is honesty
you want vetting you want transparency
those
are secular ideals as well right
a post office is not an islamic concept
right the you don't need we need islamic
stamps
yeah you can have put okay put the head
of like muslims
on their coins okay in america they have
kind of laid
allah that's
right all right that's okay america's a
secular state it still has to
not allah right so that's okay you can
have
god we trust it's not you can be secular
and still
trusting god it's okay right
municipalities are not you know the the
water doesn't
i need a hanafi you know they call it
hanafiya in arabic
i need a hanafi hanafiya this is a
maliki hanafiya
no you don't need you just need a
hanafia you just need a
a water right tap that works
and that's municipalities and all you
want is some honest guy in there if he's
a secularist who's honest
fine if he's a muslim who's honest fine
as long as the water gets there
it's been purified it's not going to
make you sick right
seriously think about it the vast
majority of government just does not
relate to religion it just relates to
common decency
and that's why you can live in i mean if
muslims
were were literally taken from like 8th
century
uh syria or palestine and dropped into
norway
they would think that you know it was
like the caliphate of omar ibn abdul
aziz
like there's so much social justice they
would be amazed
at how much social justice are in these
scandinavian countries
they're secular countries so this whole
idea
no you have to have had punishment
you know this this is what so islam is
reduced to there's
four agreed upon had punishments 13
there's debates about you know sir even
apostasy laws all these things they're
all debated
there's nothing fixed in stone and then
the the prophet saw i sent him he said
avoid implementing penal punishments as
much as you're able to
maybe no we want to cut and let's get
these hands cut off
you know i mean if you had if you
implemented had punishment for theft
you you couldn't shake hands anymore
you wouldn't be able to shake hands
everybody'd be like you know
nice to meet you right from from the
from the president all the way down to
the street sweeper man we would am i
making this up
[Music]
so you know anyway that's a very long
answer to a very short question
so oh know
would you recommend a book for beginners
to read on logic well that's what we're
doing it's a beginning book on logic
miriam joseph's book is very good for
and and it helps if if english is your
first language
it definitely helps to study logic in
in english before you do it in arabic my
own personal experience
i read it in arabic it was very
difficult for me initially
and after i studied it in english i
studied it several years ago
using aristotle's text with my father
and and
after that it it when i went back to the
arabic it was just very
much easier to do so and there's there's
good but it's important to note that
this is
traditional logic it's not symbolic
logic which is very different symbolic
logic is a type of uh
mathematical logic
that um it's useful for certain things
um but for reasoning
uh in terms of language
it's not very it's not useful at all
because of
certain problems that it has
associated with it all right so
alhamdulillah
i just want to also for the people that
are online just welcome you
uh for um
being part of this and everybody we i
really hope inshallah you have a
wonderful experience your time
in turkey there they've been incredibly
hospitable it's a beautiful people
they're good people
um and they're all types
of people there's and the whole spectrum
is here in turkey but they're still very
decent people whether they're
secularists or committed to islam
i think you'll by and large find a very
very
a lot of just human decency that's been
my experience
i've been in turkey now several times
and spent
you know periods close to a month
a couple of those times and that's been
my experience with the people
from the top all the way down
to you know the simple people
um and they and it's a great tradition
they have a great tradition here
and and they're also i think one of the
things that i really like about turkey
is
um they still have an aesthetic sense
that a lot of muslim countries have lost
so they
they tend to really beauty is still very
much part
of their culture and they have beautiful
parks they have beautiful
a lot of beautiful architecture still um
istanbul is arguably i think the most
beautiful city
aesthetically outside of
medina because i'm not going to say
anything is more beautiful
than medina i mean now medina is the
mosque
uh alone and it's a very beautiful
mosque
it's the most beautiful mosque in the
world and um
so but after medina i would definitely
say
i mean i was in istanbul and i said to
this
turkish man he told me he'd studied in
san francisco i said oh that's uh that's
our is
that's our istanbul and he's like
i said you know the bay it's got water
and
hills and he just went no
no no it's uh
and also make dua for the organizers
they've worked really hard
dr aisha and her team really sincere
group of people
worked very hard to make all this happen
so inshallah may allah make it a blessed
time for you a time of learning and
opening
and my advice to you is you know don't
turn on the tv
uh try to avoid you know
just unplug
for a little while you know you're all
plugged in
it's good to unplug for a while and
and just try to focus on your studies as
much as possible
we didn't plan having a mall next to us
so my advice don't go into the mall
dr yang is coming tonight so we we
traditionally we always had an exercise
component in the rela and then
joseph uh who used to do
the do you remember joseph he in new
mexico and things he used to do the
tai chi and the kung fu
and he died so after that
we just didn't do it but we'd always had
that component because i
you know i think it's very important for
people muslims tend to neglect their
bodies a lot
and uh traditional societies there was a
lot of exercise just
being in a traditional society walking
and uh
horseback riding and archery and uh
wrestling
all the prophet sam was a very active uh
all the way through his whole life he
was physically very active
he did had no fat on him so allah did
he he was described as having a very
flat stomach
even when he was 63 years of age he was
very muscular he's sinewy and very
strong
and uh omar binarb once saw a man who
was overweight
in mecca and he said that would be
better if it was on somebody else
right so in other words your extra
caloric intake
you know might be better if you give
that to somebody else now don't
judge anybody because some people have
uh you never know about people so if you
see people that are overweight
you know just don't be judgmental about
them or arrogant or anything because
some people they really
they don't eat a lot and in fact imam
banani says that some of the olia
are tried with fat like allah makes them
fat even though they don't eat anything
and and i've seen that with some people
you know that
so you know don't don't make any
judgments about people about that and i
don't want people to feel bad
or anything like that but it's good just
to do exercise
you can be women should you know
traditionally they were
you know had good weight
and and so there's no blemish in a woman
who's got
weight on her it's actually healthier
for a woman to have fat
uh you know really so
this these skinny women end up losing
their
their periods they can't have children
and you know this happens like they do
too much exercise
and they actually um
end up losing their femininity and
becoming a different there's new hybrid
species out there that's
androgynous so but it's good inshallah i
hope people
enjoy it he's he's a qigong master
and qigong is not a religious uh
exercise it there is relation to the
taoist tradition
and to shaolin temples and things like
that so so there are there is
association but it's
it's a it's the exercise that went with
martial arts in china
and it's very very uh
invigorating for people that do it on a
regular basis and practice it but he's
going to be working with you so you can
pretty much
learn how to do it during the time and
it's good to learn it from somebody
there's a lot online and things like
that
but according to the new york times the
longest living
human being ever was a qigong teacher in
china
they ascertained he claimed to be 235
years of age
but they did ascertain that he was at
least 170
and and he taught qigong to the imperial
troops and the new york times sent a
team over
to find out about him in 1932 i think so
that was actually
um and ate goji berries and
drank green tea and gensang
so i mean i don't know if anybody really
wants to
stick around here for 175 years but
but the time we're here we should try to
be as healthy as possible you know
because
it's it'll help you yeah
my mom was at the grocery store and you
know how they have those all those funny
national enquirer and all those and she
was my mom's 94
this year and she was there was another
old lady in the line
and she looked at my mother and then she
looked at the magazines and she said
aren't you glad we're on our way out
set up my nickel