He said only God can punish with fire. That hadith is also sound. But the narrator of that hadith, whose name is Ikrimah, was in a group that was against Ali. So even though the hadith has soundness, it has a problem. So ISIS takes that hadith and burns this Jordanian [captured air force pilot], claiming that they have an authoritative source to do this. The media ignores us. There are books written on this. So the Islamists have painted the scholars as lackeys and basically supporters of tyranny and as these traditionalists that just want to calm everybody down.
Unfortunately, there is a war going on, a war of ideas, and the traditionalists have been losing it. What did you make of that at the time? He wrote that in , I think. We have a huge armaments industry, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned this country about.
I think they need bogeymen to scare people into having half their taxes going to military budgets. I think humiliation has a lot to do with the violent reactions. In the African American community, I learned this from personal experience. They have something called stepping on toes. You will sometimes get a violent reaction if you do it, even inadvertently, because it was a way of dissing somebody. Even the pope said if somebody makes fun of his mother, he would get violent with them.
Do you remember that quote? I think a lot of it is about that. We forget that we used to have dueling. Dueling was outlawed in the s. These were before libel suits, we demanded satisfaction. We had a vice president who killed a [former] secretary of the treasury in a duel. It was over honor. However, we do forget that one out every four people is Muslim and these terrorists represent an incredibly insignificant number of people in relation to the overall numbers of Muslims.
The Ku Klux Klan, which was clearly a terrorist organization in the United States at one point, had about three to five million members. I think people have to keep things in perspective. Partly, there are elements that are very pro-Israel and Zionist, and are worried about Muslims having a greater voice in relation to Middle Eastern politics and the support of Israel because America has a really unconditional love affair with Israel since Truman.
And they have allied with fundamentalist Christians that see Islam as a kind of competing corporation for consumers of their religious goods. I guess that came from the khutbas against them, which some of us have given. I think a lot of our mosques feel it now. A lot of Muslims feel that their mosques are no longer these safe havens. Which is really sad because, again, America is one of the few places that really was beginning to become an exemplar for a multireligious, multicultural civilization.
It was translated into Arabic. It was tweeted by even some of the heads of state. I drew blood first. Did Rabbi Kahane represent Judaism? Baruch Goldstein, who killed all those people in the masjid : did he represent Judaism? There are a lot of people who claim to represent something. Partly the media is to be blamed. The great antichristic media. What have the media done wrong, and what could they have done? For instance, Mark Twain visited Palestine a hundred years ago and wrote about it.
Just read his memoirs. Palestine was not like it is today. So what changed? What changed? So, it is hard to get in-depth. Even Haaretz , even the Israeli media, is more nuanced. We just have a cartoon worldview here that really bothers me. Yes, I do think we need educated spokespeople. My father was a humanities professor. When I went and studied overseas, it really struck me how similar traditional Islamic education was to what we call the liberal arts.
I was really flabbergasted by the emphasis on literature, the emphasis on logic, the emphasis on rhetoric, grammar. I think the liberal arts has disappeared from the Muslim World to a large degree. There is some in Turkey as well. Part of it is to revive that tradition but also with contextualizing it in the modern world. Grappling with these things and where does Islam fit into all of this?
Getting them to think about these things. Today I introduced to them their thesis they have to write and I told them they could write on any ethical problem. How did you become Sheikh Hamza Yusuf? He had books on Sufism and Islam there back in the 30s.
My mother was a seeker. My father was definitely a seeker, more in philosophy. Plato and Aristotle were his focus in his seeking, he really came out of that tradition. All my brothers and sisters were like that, too. The real catalyst was a car accident when I was 17, which was a head-on collision. Everybody will confront mortality at a certain point in their life but sometimes it takes much longer than others.
The imam quickly turns to the World Trade Centre attack - an act of "mass murder, pure and simple". Suicide, he says, is haram, prohibited by the Koran, as is the killing of innocent civilians. He quotes Koranic texts demonstrating that the suicide bombers do not qualify as martyrs. He even finds a verse outlawing flag-burning. Yet we do have people within our ranks who have reached that level of hatred and misguidance.
Indeed, he sympathises with Margaret Thatcher's statement that British Muslims have not been loud enough in condemnation. But if you say you condemn something and then try to explain the background, it can mistakenly sound like a justification, as though this is their comeuppance. His hard-line attitude to extremists in Britain would be unsayable for any mainstream politician keen to retain any respectability. The good will of these countries to immigrants must be recognised by Muslims.
It is as though he has gone through a second, possibly more radical conversion than the first from Christianity. He regrets speeches he himself has made in the past, peppered as they were with the occasional angry statements about Jews and America that are a staple of much Muslim oratory. Days before the September 11 killings, he made a speech warning that "a great, great tribulation was coming" to America.
He is sorry for saying that now. I now regret in the past being silent about what I have heard in the Islamic discourse and being part of that with my own anger. His great concern is that Muslim thinking has sunk into theological shallowness that allows violent fundamentalists to fill the vacuum. Colonialism and successor powers, he contends, dismantled the great Islamic learning institutions, leaving a poverty of great scholarship.
Islam has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and the rhetoric of rage. We have lost our bearings because we have lost our theology. While the latter retired from public life in his later career, Sheikh Hamza was highly critical of those in power in his early career, and has so far been effusive in his praise of Arab autocrats in his later career. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf has the opportunity to decide what he wishes his legacy to be.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World. We welcome all pitches and submissions to TRT World Opinion — please send them via email, to opinion. Usaama al-Azami is a British academic and a lecturer in Islamic Studies. Subscribe to our Youtube channel for all latest in-depth, on the ground reporting from around the world.
What would you like to learn more about? Yemen government ready for peace talks as Houthis halt missile strikes. US House votes to block sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia. For Trump: it's America First, morality last. Escalating violence in Iraq leaves no winners. Drone attack on Iraqi PM reveals menacing reach of Shia militias. When you have very powerful secular tyrants, religion poses a very serious threat, and religion is a very powerful force in the Muslim world.
So the repression of Islam, which has been going on for so long, has resulted in certain extreme views that have emerged within the religion. But you have to look at the reasons. Now we in the West have supported many of these regimes and see them as our interest. I personally don't think democracy is viable right now in the Muslim world. You need just governments, but you need strong governments. I think you can have situations that are not democratic but still are rooted in a concern about the people, the welfare of the people.
Q: How realistic is it to place hope on benevolent dictatorships? A: I'm not talking so much about dictators. At this stage, you have to build democratic institutions, and in that way, the West can help.
Do you know how much juice that is on the negotiating table, in terms of what you demand of Egypt? Because if you cut off that billion dollars, you're cutting off the lifeblood of the Egyptian government. America has an immense amount of power, but it doesn't use it in any benevolent way. It uses it to maintain a status quo. The same is true for almost all these Muslim countries. A: I have challenges in both worlds. I'm very active in the Muslim world.
I have very popular television programs in the Muslim world, which have, I think, a very positive impact. So I'm working there. I go quite often to the Muslim world. And then I have my challenges here. I'm one person. Q: But there are people in the Muslim world who think you're a heretic.
A: I think the majority of Muslims that know about me -- and there are quite a few in the Muslim world that do-- generally have a very good opinion of what I'm doing.
I have rarely met belligerent Muslims. Every once in a while I'll come across somebody who's just got an axe to grind. But it's actually quite unusual for me. The majority of Muslims I meet, I see smiles on their faces. I get hugs. People tell me, "Keep up the good work. I've lived in the Muslim world. I'm always struck by their incredible generosity, by their simplicity, by their love of some really basic virtues and values that I share and that most Western people share.
This is my experience as a Western person, a convert to Islam. Q: What was your experience after your speech the other night [at the Islamic Society of North America conference in Chicago], in which you talked about the fundamental humanity of people of the Jewish faith? A: The Jewish situation's bad. I have to admit that. There is an immense amount of ignorance, particularly in the Muslim world. I think less so here, but we have that problem here also.
There is an anti-Jewish sentiment. It's far more politically driven, and I think Muslims have forgotten, that's all. I think they need reminders, and I think when you remind them, they tend to respond, and that's been my experience. I was not raised as an anti-Semite. My sister converted to Judaism, is married to a Jewish man. I have nephews that are Jewish. I was not raised with any prejudice at all. But I was infected when I lived in the Muslim world. I lived in the Arab world for over 10 years, and I think I did get infected by that virus for a period of time.
But I grew out of it and realized that not only does it have nothing to do with Islam, but it has nothing to do with my core values. And I've rejected that and called others to reject it. I think it's something that really needs to change in the Muslim community, and I think it will. Q: What is your evaluation of the response of the last five years of the security apparatus, both as an American and as a Muslim? A: Well, I think we've all become much more acutely aware of the state apparatus in terms of monitoring.
I don't like the feeling that I have to think about what I say when I say things. It's not healthy, and I think a lot of people feel it now in a way that they've never felt it before, and that troubles me deeply about my country.
I think that there needs to be a return to some real central values about this country. I think Guantanamo Bay is absolutely an unacceptable event in American history.
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