ou like for dinner dear now interestingly
enough according to Epstein in congruence theory that is necessary for a
democracy to thrive and survive why because what he says is that governments
will only work to the degree with which the system of government permeates the
social institutions of the society so if you have dictatorships you need
tutorial parents if you have dictatorships you need dictatorial doctors you go
to the doctor you're not going to have a conversation with them about what you
think the best approach to this problem is because you've googled it and read
all about it it's not going to happen in a lot of places in the world they're
gonna get upset about it and the same with the teachers I have a friend from
Isle Vale the country with charity but he was in a Muslim country and he told
me when he was a young boy the teacher was tying the pig is Haram and he raised
his grin and he said why is the pig Haram and he said that the teacher came up
to him and said put out your hand and he whacked him and he told me that he
learned never to ask a question from that day forward that is that makes
perfect sense according to Epstein for a society to have a dictatorship or a
tyrannical government you have to replicate that behavior in all the social
institutions so that the people in turn internalize these ways of being if you
want to see one of the most extraordinary talks you'll ever see I would watch
James Baldwin's debate with William Buckley at at the Oxford Union and one of
the things James Baldwin says is that very early on a black learns what it
means to be black in America but he says what also happens is that white people
learn what it means to be white in America that a lot of us are unaware of how
we internalize social systems that dictate to us ways of being and and what he
argues in that debate and why it's so powerful is that white people are as much
a victim of racism as black people are that he got the longest standing ovation
according to the BBC man that he'd ever seen at the Oxford Union after that
address so Epstein's argument is very relevant to our situation now in the
Muslim world which has social institutions that are unfortunately very
tyrannical people unfortunately associate that with Islam and think somehow
this is this must be Islam because they're all Muslims and all those
governments are horrible they tend to forget that for instance in West Africa
Senegal is a democratic government Senegal is actually an incredibly liberal
society with their religious conservative ISM they are a very wonderfully
functioning society just recently they refused a visa to the sheikh al Assad
from Egypt because the shekhar azad said gave a stamp of approval for the Sisi
coup and they said we're a democratic society and we don't want a religious
leader that sanctioned the coup because it threatens the security of our
government so there's an example of a Muslim state that's democratic that does
not function as a tyranny or a despotic state but people don't know about it
Malaysia is another example of an incredibly multicultural society that has
Islam as the constitutional religion despite the fact that it has Hindus it has
Buddhas it has Animus it has what are called the Orang Asli you know Arango
tongue in in Malay language means jungle man or Aung is man so orang asli are
the original people the Aboriginal people who live in the jungles they had
their animus there in Malaysia so this is a multicultural site or Turkey which
despite the tensions that are going on right now Turkey has been a Democratic
Society for a considerable amount of time Iran definitely has villi to fucky
and there are certain things in their constitution that would would I think
caused people here pause but lest we forget Iran today compared to the American
experience 200 years ago is an extremely progressive society and so I think one
of the things that we tend to do as Americans is project on the world our view
of the world when we were Christian we had a civilization a civilizing
enterprise of proselytize increased anity and in particular Protestant
Christianity around the world hence we have the American University and in
Beirut and the Protestants went around the Muslim world establishing these
centers now that we're a capitalistic society we go around with liberal
democracy as the idea that we want to convert everybody to this very often we
failed I think because of our ethnocentrism way of viewing the world some of
those ways might be wrong as far as we're concerned and some might be wrong
might be right or wrong but nonetheless they are the ways that they view the
world many women in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia do not want to be
liberated from the hijab now there are people in critical theory which would
say that's double consciousness what we need to do is liberate them from their
backward thinking again this is the type of patronizing attitude that a lot of
people in the West have about other people's we simply have to recreate the
world in our own in I was just in Japan and I was stunned at the incredible
deference that Japanese culture has to foreigners and to other people I was in
Tokyo walking around the city for five days I did not hear a horn honk once and
when I asked one of the Japanese don't people use horns here he said no it's
considered very rude man I wish we would learn something about that in San
Francisco right because I have I have what they call a Bazo vagal response for
the doctors in the room you know like I go through the roof if somebody honks
the horn my kidneys just literally go through the roof so I really appreciated
the quietness and and everybody was so like I held a elevator for people on a
few occasions and they run and say so sorry to keep you waiting you know and
they're like bowing and I'm like wow that's first keeping the elevator door
open you know what happens when you do really something for them really
wonderful culture that I think has retained some of the beautiful things of
traditional society in and in many ways we in the West have lost many of these
things because of the negative aspects of tradition the Muslim world is still
profoundly Thea centric even secular Muslims use we have words like goodbye
which used to mean God be with you we we don't really have the type of words in
our culture that are informed from a religious perspective my father constantly
used God's speed whenever he would say goodbye because that was something that
was said when he was a young man in this country god speed you know go with God
the Arabs or the Muslims say Thea Manila go with God all right one of the
things that's really interesting about that you know we called this rocket the
Challenger Muslims would never do that I mean calling a rocket the Challenger
is for a Muslim insanity they write things like may God be with us you know
when you get on an airplane on all the airplanes it says like bismillah via man
ela alhamdulillah they put like God's name and asking for a safe journey not
like Challenger like who are you challenging because yeah so that the Muslim
world is profoundly Theo centric and for that reason Islam and I was happy to
see this in this week's Economist Islam still must be part of the solution for
any of the problems facing the Muslim world in no foreseeable future can Islam
be relegated in in the way that much of religion has been relegated in Europe
less so but nonetheless to a large extent in America also Islam is still
central to the Islamic ethos and for that reason my teacher sheikh abdullah bin
baya convened and this took five years to get to marrakech people think these
things just happen overnight it took five years it began with a meeting five
years ago in no Akshar about citizenship and the reason that he did this was he
was so troubled about the debates about jizya and jizya for those who don't know
about the Islamic tradition jizya is the idea that that we that in a Muslim
majority state or a state being ruled by Muslims non-muslims go under a status
what is known as them them them now or them matured and this is the grist of a
lot of Islamophobic material out there and there are many websites about
dhimmitude I actually saw a bumper sticker a few weeks ago in Santa Clara in
San Ramon that said on a kafir Wafaa hold on it said I'm a disbeliever in
Arabic I'm a disbeliever and proud which which is again a kind of in-your-face
statement about how people think that Muslims view the other it's interesting
one of the linguistic intriguing linguistic aspects of English and Arabic is
that in English we have other in brother but in Arabic you have brother in other
so in English we say brother and so you have other embedded in the word brother
but in Arabic you say aha which is other and the word brother is uh it's
embedded in the word other and and and I just think that's a very interesting
thing so we have to see the brother in other but we also have to recognize the
other in brother and this is something that a lot of people have a difficult
time doing so he had a series of meetings to talk about the problem of limited
which is in surah the ninth chapter it's one of the it's the last chapter
revealed in the Quran and it's the idea that those who disbelieve in God is
messenger that they have to pay a jizya and it says hello Jesus Ananya then
we'll home Saul you know until they pay a tribute with their hands and their
sake alone and there's a lot of debate about what that word means some say it
means humbled some say it means humiliated and you will find debates in our
books about this the shade what he did was he looked at our tradition and he
said that the first relationship that the Prophet had with the other in Medina
was ful enfranchisement and this was the Jewish community and this is called
Sipho to Medina in some ways it's the first written constitution even though
the Athenian even the Spartans they had constitutions but they were not written
and this is a case where the Prophet actually had a constitution written down
and in it the Jews are given full enfranchisement in the state to practice
their religion and to have mutual defense and they're entitled to their
religion they have their own religious courts and and fulfill their functions
and so it was a full enfranchisement they were not seen as less than the
Muslims in that state and most Muslims think that this was but Fred Donner
shows in his book on Islam Muhammad and the believers that actually there were
Jews on the Arabian Peninsula up until the 9th century historically documented
even his hawk who's the most famous biographer of the prophet's life says that
all mah expelled the Jews from Medina that did not have the contractual
agreement of the Medina and charter and so the Medina charter was maintained
even after the prophets death which means that it was not abrogated so what sh
abdullah bin baya argues in the marrakech declaration and in the essay that he
wrote to substantiate it as a jurist he argues that citizenship is an islamic
concept and that the prophet muhammad didn't franchise the jews and that this
should be the model for muslim states today the OIC acknowledged this now two
points and I'll finish one the Ottomans already abolished jizya in the 1830s
under Sultan Abdul Majeed and they did it with the Shia Islam and with the
scholars at that time it was agreed upon that this was no longer an appropriate
relationship to have with minority communities in the Muslim state this is all
that Chef Abdullah is trying to do is basically substantiate within our own
tradition the normative practice of citizenship in the modern world it's the
one that most moat makes the most sense now people would say well why do you
have to go back 1400 years because Muslims believe that Islam is a revelation
and if you do not convince them from their revelation many of them will not
accept the UN Charter it's as simple as that they will say this is just the
words of the kuffar and we're not obliged to follow it Isis is a good example
now of people that are reviving medieval attitudes that and and in some ways I
take offense at calling it medieval because I've spent a good deal of my life
reading medieval writers and I'm always struck by how enlightened many of them
were when we talk about dead white men most of those dead white men were
actually spent a good deal of their lives in jail many of them were killed by
the state we tend to forget that the only good Indian is a dead Indian Malcolm
X gets a stamp after he's assassinated Martin Luther King gets the day after
he's assassinated that power structures tend to incorporate their dissidents
after they're dead because they're no longer a threat to the power structures anymore
so I have a defense for dead white men because I I think a lot of them had a
lot of interesting things to say and I don't think they were all white either
san agustin was from North Africa lest we forget so my point being is that if
you do not substantiate this in our tradition many of Muslims will simply not
accept it how do we change the scenario the only way that we can change the the
situation that we're in today is education and so it's not for nothing that
we're here in a great institution of Education and that we can civilly sit and
discuss things because our society is based on persuasion one of the things
that is threatened in our modern society is argument argument is not a negative
term in scholastic tradition argumentation is the basis by which we speak with
one another and attempt to convince one or the other of the merits of our
argument and what happens when you lose argumentation is prejudice takes over
and we simply are not willing to sit down and and with an interlocutor and
discuss things and be either convinced or convince them hence the need for
these traditional subjects like logic and rhetoric which taught people how to
argue persuasively and rationally and intelligently so now we have demagogues
emerging and these are harbingers of a frightening future if we allow these
things to be lost our early period despite whatever fault and I don't like to
project onto the past the sensibilities of the present they were of their time
they had the prejudices of their time not all of them but many of them but they
were also great men and women we should never forget some of the great women of
that time certainly John Adams wife was a brilliant woman Abigail and if you
read how she raised her her son John Quincy great and brilliant American president
now you recognize the incredible merit of that woman but it's it's just
important not to always project on to the past they were men of their time and
they had their faults but they also had things to tell us today and and I think
we ignore them with great danger and peril so having said that I'm I'll just
end with with with one thing is religious liberty incompatible with Islam the
only real answer to that is whose Islam I think for many people in the Muslim
community in the past and the present in some ways religious liberty as is
defined in the modern world is incompatible with their version of Islam the
Islam that I embrace which I believe is normative Islam I do not believe
religious liberty is incompatible with Islam and I think I could make a very
powerful argument I certainly think I could do it from the Quran and I'll leave
you with three verses the Quran says Arabic ah lamina Memphis articulo home
jamia had God wanted everyone would have believed in the world in other words
he gave you free will and then it says a vanta to criticalness I had the acuña
momineen are you going to coerce people into believing because all you do when
you coerce people into believing is create religion filled with hypocrites the
other verse in that was in Yunus verse 99 the other verses in baqara 2 56
second chapter 256 the Quran says let could I have a Dean at the billion orders
to minify there's no different there's no coercion in religion falsehood should
be in clear contra distinction to truth and then finally in chapter 18 the cap
it says famine Shia Fedya Fedya men woman Shia phallic for whoever wants to
believe in this that him believe and whoever wants to reject it let him reject
it most of us love chocolate I just bought some Japanese chocolate for my family
and people are usually happy with chocolate but nobody likes chocolate and when
it shoved down their throats thank you well thank you so much Sheikh Hamza I
think a lot of questions were raised in many cases questions about Muslims as
majorities in living in majority countries Muslim majority countries what I'd
like to do in our discussion is talk about Muslims as minorities in the context
of the United States and within the United States especially within the context
of what we're seeing politically howdy can you reflect it could you reflect on
the place for Muslims here in the United States as a minority community well
first of all we have to remember that Muslims have been here from the start
there's substantial historical evidence that's proven that at certain periods
about one-fifth of the of the slaves that were brought here were Muslims we
have handwritten piron's from slaves we know we have Arabic letters from slaves
Suleiman bin I knew of is a good example of that prince after him is another
example of that that the film was made I think you were involved in that yeah
with Mike Wolfe that's right right unity Productions so we also have the early
example of a white convert to Islam is George Bethune English who got his
master's degree which was the highest degree at the time at Harvard at Harvard
believe it or not Harvard was teaching Arabic alongside Hebrew and if you get
the first edition facsimile version you can buy it of Noah Webster's 1828
dictionary hence we get the word Webster's dictionary but that was the first
american dictionary he wanted to prove that English was from Arabic and I mean
from Hebrew but he ended up feeling that there were actually more Semitic roots
in Arabic that rule related to English so the the book is filled with Arabic typography
and so he's got earth our baby Babu's cave calf he shows all these Arabic words
and and and so they were teaching Arabic in the United States and in the in the
18th and 19th century so Muslims have been here and they're here and you know
notwithstanding some major events where you would have incarceration like what
happened to the Japanese which has never been constitutionally declared
unconstitutional it has to go to the Supreme Court so that's never happened you
know and FEMA does have interment camps for a national emergency or something
like that so I would hate you know god forbid if there was some kind of nuclear
dirty bomb or something like that who knows you know I don't know so it's a
it's very troubling prospect but I think Muslims are here in large numbers it's
a highly educated as you know community and and there's also a lot of really
hard-working decent Muslims that are here like many other communities one of
the things about the United States is historically most communities have have
been forced to duke it out other than the the anglo-saxon peoples that came
here the Irish community if you study their history the Irish community fought
hard there's a very interesting book when the Irish became white which is about
Irish Catholics people think Kennedy was the first virus president was actually
Andrew Jackson but he was all stir Irish Protestant so they weren't really
considered Irish but the Irish Catholics had a very hard time in this country
but what they did was they duked it out on the streets they created world-class
teaching institutions and and and now you know one out of every four Americans
has some kind of Irish roots and Saint Patrick's Day is the biggest parade in
New York and Boston so good things happen if people work hard enough and are
willing to kind of take the blows in regards to the question of religious
liberty and religious freedom there's a intra Muslim debate that's taking place
about the extent to which religious freedoms and liberties should be granted
especially when it comes to for instance attacking Islam and we see sort of the
violence that erupts when cartoons are drawn her in the image of the Prophet
and and and there's this in in troublesome debate about that what are your
thoughts well I mean I would say first of all that the the the idea of
vigilante justice is totally prohibited in the Islamic religion no Muslim is
allowed to take extrajudicial action in in any situation so there are blasphemy
laws in Islam just like there were there still are blasphemy laws in some
European countries so it's not like these things have completely gone away they
just don't implement them anymore I mean the last person to be killed for
blasphemy was in Scotland you know in the late 17th century so it wasn't like
Europe didn't have these things also the Muslim tradition is a pre-modern
tradition and so it has many of the sensibilities of the pre-modern world view
in in in in today's current situation I think Muslims first of all need to get
used to to being offended the Quran has many about being offended was potala
may applaud and be patient about what they say that's my live you know Otsuka
time a company community no co-ed then kathira you're gonna hear from the
people that were given the book before you meaning the jews and the christians
and the policy is much odious or noxious statements and it says to be patient
and not don't get angry and and so there's a lot of things about just not
getting angry the Prophet once heard somebody call him with m-mom which means
it's the opposite of Mohammed it means blameworthy because Mohammed means
praiseworthy and he said isn't it interesting how God has removed there my name
from their tongues when they want to curse me and he said they're talking about
something you name with them them and my name is Mohammed you know in other
words they're not talking about me and so those cartoon anybody that says those
cartoons were the Prophet Mohammed as far as I'm concerned is not a Muslim you
know as a beautiful Magritte has a beautiful picture and it's it says this is
not a pipe and it shows a picture of a pipe because we forget that the image is
not the thing and so if you make an image of something it's it's not that thing
that those crucifixes it's not Jesus on the cross you know and so any image
that's made especially if it's a caricature it's certainly not our prophet as
now they do with our prophet and then Wilson's have to ask themselves have you
contributed to the drawing itself has your behavior contributed to the person
to the perception of this religion so when Muslims do heinous things
unfortunately the Islam gets blamed and with Christianity that's not the case
because we're in a society where Christians are fully enfranchised I know some
people would debate the war on Christianity and on Christmas and things like
that but Christians are enfranchised so when one Christian does a crazy thing
all the Christians aren't blamed for it but unfortunately we're not in a
situation where Muslims are fully in franchise din this country so when one
Muslim does a crazy thing Islam is blamed for it I mean a lot of these people
clearly have mental illness and in a man that the plane into the IRS building
after writing a serious political screed you know he was just considered a
crazy white guy but if his name was Mohammed that would have been a terrorist
act it's as simple as that so you know the Arab said your preposition works and
mine doesn't you know like you have different grammatical rules that night
Santa Clara University as you know is the oldest institution of higher learning
in California it's grounded in the Jesuit tradition of educating citizens and
leaders of conscience and compassion to build a more just and more humane world
can you reflect on your mission at Zaytuna College especially within the
context and rooted in Islam what are your hopes in achieving in embarking on
this I mean I would say that the Catholic and the Islamic traditions share a
lot of things the central thing that they share is a profound dedication to
education but but another thing they share is a profound dedication to the the
the instrumental arts and and I buy art here I mean power the ability to do
something historically that is from instrumental arts and both art traditions
were the language arts and the number arts the the qualitative and quantitative
reasoning and so in the language arts it was grammar logic and rhetoric there's
a wonderful fresco by Botticelli of a student being led into the other six
liberal arts by grammar and and it's personified as a beautiful woman and
overlooking them as Prudential or wisdom and and one of the things that we
don't realize is that that language is incredibly complicated when we speak I
mean I was in a hotel recently and and we asked for somebody who asked asked me
what I wanted I said an omelet with everything except the the meat and so the
omelet came with everything with nothing but the meat and the reason was is the
person's English was limited and and the concept of an exception using accept
is actually a complicated concept language like had they said no meat it's very
clear but to say except meat will confuse somebody who's not a native speaker
sometimes if they don't know the language so we we don't realize how
complicated languages and historically on Christian doctrine by st. Augustine
st. Augusta argues that you have to learn the liberal arts in order to read
scripture one of the crises in the Muslim world is that the liberal arts are no
longer taught and so people are reading scripture without the liberal arts if you
don't know what a conditional sentence is you should not be reading Scripture
other than as a devotional practice but if you think that you can derive
knowledge or wisdom from it you're going to get in serious trouble and there
are many things in the Quran that are highly nuanced in in the Islamic
tradition the last book that you read in our scholastic tradition is a
two-volume work and I showed Graham wood this book who studied Arabic at
Harvard who wrote the article for the Atlantic it's a two-volume work just on
the particles and prepositions in in Arabic and how difficult they are there
are several just in Arabic in the Quran has several possibilities there's
something called phobia which is the causative there's you know there's a fad
that is related to it happens after time has transpired it's it's a conjunctive
that happens after time has transpired so every sentence in the Quran in in the
Catholic tradition they used to study the sentences which were the sentences
they studied this in in in seminaries for sometimes for 10 years this is a book
of sentences because there's so much sophistication in great writing especially
inspired writing by great theologians and so we've lost a lot of this and and
our complex compound sentences are diminishing in our writing you can see this
very clearly in modern writing we're losing the sophistication of language many
of our students are incapable of reading Melville I sometimes wonder if David
Foster Wallace really left the world just because of a kind of despair because
he he's a you know he's a very sophisticated writer that sometimes writes
sentences that last for a age and and he was teaching students English
literature and he said he would always begin with a crash course on grammar
because the students couldn't read and one of the things that I have done is
just give students the first sentence to the Declaration of Independence and
I've done this in several classes not just at say tuna but at other places and
out of 50 students on average three or four actually get the main Clause of
that sentence because they're unable to identify the difference between a
subordinate and a main clause we've had a war on grammar for about 50 years
it's literally been a war on grammar and grammar matters you know let's eat
grandma without that pause we could become cannibals right so commas are a
matter of life and death will open we had some questions that were written down
we can take some more as well if you had them please put them on the on the
cards someone asked please continue to express your thoughts on how Isis
revives or leverages medieval Muslim traditions and behaviors well I mean first
of all they they do not they aren't they are a real reflection of modernity
they're not they're much closer to kind of Maoist or or radical Marxist
tradition a lot of people are unaware of how profoundly impacted Marxist
thought has I mean even in our colleges and universities in the United States
critical theory which I mean we can trace it right back to Karl Marx and Karl
Marx who has undeniably some brilliant criticisms about capitalist society but
overall the end justifies the means is a Marxist concept it's not a religious
concept and so the idea somehow that you can just enslave people the Prophet
said that there's three people that he will be an advocate against on the day
of judgment and one of them was men by Horan you know that the one who sells a
free person you know and an alma wrote I would have been a toss about taking
people as slaves in Egypt he said Metis stabbed it to them and what it did to
Mahatma Harada when did you what right do you have to enslave people that their
mothers gave birth to them and freedom you know they're free people and so this
idea slavery is anonymity Islamic tradition there is undeniably a component in
historical Islam of indentured servitude which was largely a way of
reintegrating war victims and refugees into a society we have in our Islamic
law the ability of anybody who's in indentured servitude to get money from the
public funds to be freed if they so desire and so this idea of modern chattel
slavery has nothing to do with Islam at all and so what these people are doing
is not medieval in Dark Ages it is it is a gross distortion and I'm not going
to deny that within I've spent enough time in pre-modern books to know that
there's some really weird stuff in pre-modern tradition but I could take the
Jewish religion numbers 31 if you go into the the city kill every every male
even the little ones you know kill the the girls who have known intimately men
and take the girls who have not known men intimately for yourselves right which
was concubinage so that that's in that's in the Bible there's things that are
in in our pre-modern text but you you'll find in the Islamic Scripture you will
not find there's nowhere where there's racism and I would argue that the
Prophet Muhammad is the first human being in human history to declare the
Equality of human beings I have never found anybody prior to the Prophet
Mohammed where he said there's no preference of a white over a black or a black
over a white except in piety and I've never seen that articulated in any other
and the Quran clearly says we made you peoples and tribes to know one another
not to hate one another and even though that's an interpretation it's it is a
sound interpretation so I really feel that Isis in no way represents normative
medieval Islam there is a strain of radical Islam even in the pre-modern
tradition that gets pretty ugly the idea that women who were taken as
concubines could be coerced into Islam why did they want to coerce them because
they couldn't have sexual relations if they weren't Muslim so you'll find the
full kaha talking about these things but those things are relics of the past
and they should not be revived in in in in the modern world somebody asks it's
been said that Muslims and blacks are people that have been oppressed here in
the United States historically and Muslims are the target today do you think
there are currently any initiatives in which these two communities or two
groups work together now first of all I would say anybody that can make a
statement like that knows nothing about black history in this country the
Muslims have in no way any comparison to what the african-american people went
through or the Native Americans or even the Chinese Americans so you know I
just or Japanese Americans I mean I could go on but you know we're doing
relatively well let's face it you know I mean you know so you get some rude
remarks you know welcome to America you know I mean I'm sorry like I mean we've
got a front runner out there who just is as rude as can be and everybody loves
them so you know Americans like rude people sometimes I guess I don't know but
I mean I just think it's an odious comparison personally I really do what's
down the road I don't know like I'm troubled definitely by the rhetoric but I
think there's still an incredible number of very decent Americans that are
troubled by what's happening and I'm also very wary of polls because you know I
just my own experience I've been the bra I've had the brunt of of anti-muslim
thing but it's a good thing also to experience prejudice sometimes you know
because it gives you empathy I mean one of the things the Bible says is do not
vex the stranger or oppress him for you two were strangers in the land of Egypt
so it's sometimes to inculcate empathy we need to go through what other people
go through to be more appreciative one of the things that the immigrant
community failed to do is to really help the african-american Muslim community
that was I think an egregious shortsightedness ethically and pragmatically
Here's a question to you: personally could you share the story of your
own personal decision to convert to Islam for me?
You know I my mother raised me even though my great-grandfather built
the Greek Orthodox Church that's on Valencia and there's a plaque with his name
on it and I was actually baptized Greek Orthodox I went to Catholic schools my
father was Irish Catholic and but my mother did tell me that religion is
largely arbitrary you tend to have the religion that you were born into and so
don't think just because you were born into this religion it's the only truth
out there so she kind of raised us with that idea and she took us to various
religious communities I went to a mosque when I was 12 years old at in Redwood
City she took us to a mosque to experience you know a mosque I actually did
wudu and prayed with the congregation so she took me to synagogue she took us
to a Hindu temple so I read the Quran when I was 17 and after reading several
different scriptures and the Quran was the one that really resonated with me
because one of the things I really liked about the Quran was I got all the
prophets that I grew up with and and you know I I definitely I think the the
atonement story I never fully got you know and but I have incredible respect
for Christian tradition I have spent a lot of time in Catholic theology I'm
kind of an armchair Catholic theologian I would say I've read a lot of Aquinas
Agustin and Joseph Pieper is one of my favorite writers I you know I always
think the Catholics are just so bad at marketing because they they really do
have an incredible tradition and in terms of ethics there they are the most
advanced religious ethical tradition I think on the planet right now I really
believe that they're just so ahead of all the other religions in really deeply
dealing from a philosophical perspective a lot of the things that were
confronted with because people are there's a lot of shallow thinking out there
about what's going on and and we're looking at transhumanism which is
profoundly troubling CS Lewis who was really kind of a closeted Catholic CS
Lewis wrote a very very prescient book called the abolition of man which is a
very troubling book and I would add to that book a book by the big noob
residence key called between two ages and we're moving into a new phase I don't
know if people notice but a law firm just hired the first AI lawyer so it's
happening and it's happening at a very rapid pace and we're not really thinking
about the ethical implications of eliminating diseases this was called eugenics
in the Hitlerian project we had a eugenics movement in the 1920s where they in
this country they sterilized a lot of poor people and African Americans so it's
you know it's I think we really need Ephesus and we need ethicists that can
think metaphysically and philosophically and right now the Catholic tradition
is is one of the few that I really feel is deeply rooted in a sound of
philosophical tradition to be able to grapple with these things and in the way
that they need to be grappled with you had touched on this in your talk can you
provide some examples in history where Muslim majority countries did in fact
practice religious liberty Muslims were historically way ahead and I'll just
give you an example this is a recent book that just came out it's called when
Christians first met Muslims a sourcebook of the earliest Syriac writings on
Islam this is a very important book by Michael Phillip Penn the reason it's
important is because most Western Orientalism looked at Byzantine sources and
people forget that the Muslims defeated the Byzantines so most of those sources
were polemical and so they would attack the Muslims and say horrible things
about the Muslims in the same way that we said horrible things about the Huns
during World War one when they weren't like the Nazis and certainly the Iraqis
in Kuwait we know what they said about throwing the babies out of the and then
we found out that was a PR firm that coached that daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to say that that it never happened the Iraqis didn't pull any babies
out but this is polemic you know in war the first casualty is the truth they
say and so in reading this book I was struck by how the Syriac most that
Christians loved the Muslims because they were liberated under them because
they were oppressed under the Byzantines and so they were saying how wonderful
the Muslims were and how incredible and also Fred Donner who is a world-class
historian it showed in Muhammad and the believers that there's no historical
evidence that Muslims destroyed any churches in in the conquest he said there's
no historical evidence and one of the things we have in assault is called if
sis haben Marcus which is is a it's a very sophisticated backward approach to a
current situation so traditionally look at precedent and how it affects the
pret the the present the so how the path but there's also a way that jurists in
Islam look at the present and how it informs us of the past the fact that these
great churches existed in Iraq for fourteen hundred years and the Christians
perceive the Muslims in those places is proof that the Muslims always honored
those so the destruction of these churches is completely alien to the Islamic
tradition the Muslims did not forget their religion for 1,400 years and then
this enlightened group called I see suddenly realized here's the true Islam
that we're going to implement it's just complete nonsense so these great
churches that have been destroyed this is one of the greatest crimes in our
history and and unfortunately they are a sect of people that claim to be
Muslims and it's going to be a blemish on our history just like the the the
burning of the church of the sepulchre was a blemish on the fought them it's
when they burned it down and 70 years later caused the Crusades but less people
forget Muslims immediately rebuilt that church and recently shed Mohammed paid
for the renovation of the of one of the great churches in Jerusalem so the
Muslims you know they they honored the Christians and I have a two hundred
years ago I have a book by Solly in Egypt where he says it's sad to hear so
many Muslims saying I wish I was a Christian because the perks that the
Christians got the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey were called The Omen favela you
know before the Armenian crises they were one of the most honored groups in the
ottoman tradition and the same is true with the Jews that Sabbath was a what we
would call a prime minister today under the ROM and a second so Christians and
Jews and even Buddhists of our Meccans were from a Buddhist shrine keepers the
the great Buddhist traditions of Central Asia so the Muslims you know they had
multicultural multi-ethnic civilizations this whole idea that were the first
multi-ethnic civilization history is it's just stupidity you know it's it's
just a hallmark of our ignorance and and they're undeniably I would argue that
America is probably the most progressive civilization in human history in terms
of legislating non-discriminatory law. I
think that would be a fair thing to say.
But for the Muslims for pre-modern records nobody compares to the
Muslims. And I say that objectively as a
student of the history of that of that civilization I don't think any society
and Toynbee and others would would also I think you know make that point as
well in terms of the context of what we see today both within many Muslim
countries as well as the tensions that exist in the United States in the the
amount of Islamophobia that continues to exist in this country and in many ways
is is getting worse what are your thoughts about this context and are you
hopeful for the future I think Islam phobia is is a problem globally I think
it's a problem in Muslim countries there's there's a lot of fear that the
rulers have of kind of awakening that comes from Islam because Islam has a
profound justice based element in its tradition but as far as I'm concerned I
think you know overall the Muslims are doing relatively well in this country I think
we have dropped the ball I think we dropped it over after 9/11 I made arguments
for pre-empting this study you were in that meeting we had 15 16 years ago yeah
where I made these arguments about having a getting you know a national
organization and to start dealing with the anti-muslim rhetoric that's going to
emerge in the coming years that's right and nobody listened to me at that time
so you know Cassandra was cursed with you know seeing the future but not being
listened to so it's kind of a bummer but that's the way things so in terms of
what I see I see if if Donald Trump gets elected I think it could could be very
problematic for the Muslims I think if Hillary gets elected Huma Abedin might
end up being the chief of staff at some point so I I wouldn't say I'm hopeful I
know enough about history to know how bad it can get but our religion is a
religion of optimism were challenged to be optimistic and so I'm probably an
optimist trapped in a pessimist body so let's hope for the best and expect the
worst and Shella we as you know we're taping this on c-span and so her time is
quite fixed and so I'll stop there please join me in thanking Sheikh Hamza she
hums on behalf of Santa Clara University we just want to extend our deep
gratitude for your presence with us and your thoughtful engagement and
reflection and entering into dialogue with our community and thank you for Reid
for your facilitation and also to all of you for coming today to participate
and for your thoughtful engagement please join me in thinking once more our
guests thank you
