Islam 101: 5-7-17 Adult Forum at St. John's Norwood

good morning everyone we are so glad to have all of you here today for those of you I don't know my name is Betsy Samuel and my husband Joe and I have been leading our adult forums this past spring and as you could probably tell because his absence is usually pretty notable my husband Joe isn't here today and unfortunately because of the the best tree retreat so but I know he is here in spirit because he would be so excited up to be here to welcome dr. dreck alga Hari with us today and dr. alga Hari has wears many hats and he is in involved at the Islamic Center of Potomac as well as heading the coexists Foundation as well as Corporation and they are doing some very exciting things around the world to bring various cultures and religious groups together so with that I will turn it over to dr. el-gohary and what I hope is the first of many opportunities that we have to to work together in the future thank you how's everybody doing this morning good so since Islam is such a complicated topic I thought I would show you three pictures that summarize everything you need to know about Islam you guys you guys ready this is the first picture does anyone know what this is a picture of does anyone understand the game of cricket so as Americans you know we think that this is you know funny sport people are holding a 2x4 trying to hit a ball wearing these white outfits and if you listened to a sports cast of the game of cricket you would have no idea what was going on you would hear things like wickets and sticky wickets and hookers and seams and all of these funny terminology and more importantly if I showed you the scoreboard of this game you would have no idea what the score was who was playing where in the game we were but yet cricket is called the gentleman's sport and and people will you know go to battle for their teams and cricket and that doesn't mean that cricket is a bad sport or doesn't mean that we we are bad people it just means that we do not know the language of the game of cricket and if we wanted to understand cricket you would need to learn all of that funny Evoque advertise it's funny funny vocabulary to be able to know what the game is about what's going on how you win it and more importantly if you saw the scoreboard you want to know who is playing what the score was and how the game is progressing and a lot of what I do is just essentially helping people even Muslims themselves understand the language of Islam to be able to understand the religion as vast and as intricate and as complex and as as elegant even and as sophisticated as my faith it's very importantly just know the language so you just know what's going on how about this picture maybe a little bit more familiar imagine if you were getting on a plane and the captain was in front of you and as the captain boarded the plane he looked left and he saw this and he said oh my god what is that you wouldn't wouldn't inspire a lot of confidence or imagine god forbid if the captain was incapacitated and you had to step in there and land the plane to safety I mean good lord and even know where to sit or all of those things on the top are buttons and switches we don't know what any of that means but if you are trained as a navigator or as a captain or as a pilot I hope you'll know what all that stuff means and you'll be able to know where you're going how high you are what the fuel is like what the consumption is fuel what the consumption of fuel is so on and so forth is able to land the plane to safety so a lot of what we're going to accomplish in the very few moments that we have this morning is really that is to learn the gauges because Islam today unlike other traditions is so much a part of our daily news cycle so much of the daily conversation but I think it's also important that you know where the gauges are what's happening you know why is the gauge always seemingly on red and then the last image in my favorite image this is a a control panel of a Russian nuclear power plant now what's interesting is that all the gauges have the same numbers they all go from 0 to 7 but they're all pointing at different numbers and the gauges are different colors and they're all these red lights and if I think of a nuclear power plant and red lights I think it's really really bad but I hope to god that the person sitting or the person that took this picture knows that everything is fine I'm assuming and is able to read those gauges and able to know what the power plant how its operating plutonium levels whether there's a threat or not the temperatures all of those kind of things so as funny as these images are really that's what my job is not just with you but a lot of what I spend my my days doing and my teaching opportunities is just teaching people to read the gauges particularly when it comes to Muslims Muslims need to most importantly need to be able to read the gauge is so that they can know when something is red a lot of times iin are cation interact with people here and a Muslims here in this country and abroad and there's definitely a red light and I try to step in and be like yo let's talk let's talk about that because they read something wrong and a lot of the problems that my own community has it also deals with the language of Islam so I think it's a shared I shared a shared problem so we have this very nice teaching text it's called the hadeeth of Gabriel you guys know Gabriel is right there girls are Gabriel's ok good we have something in common and all all all hadith means it's a it's a text it's a saying of the Prophet of Islam so that's your first language item we we believe very much in collecting and verifying all of the statements all of the actions the life of the Prophet because his prophetic way for us as a source of authority Authority and legislation we'll get to that in a second in this text we have Gabriel who comes in the form of a man as often times you would throughout the prophets life and he sat amongst the prophet and his companions and he went to the Prophet and he asked them three questions he said what is Islam so I thought is an appropriate text for this morning so the Prophet says Islam is that you say the test if occasion of faith that there's no god but God and the Muhammad is the prophet of God that's that's our sort of the similar the same is like the Shema prayer and in the Jewish faith we pray five times a day you fast a month of Ramadan which is coming up in a couple of weeks you give alms on your residual income 2.5% on your residual income and that you make pilgrimage to Mecca once in your life if you're able to so Gabriel says you spoken the truth so the companion this is very strange that he would ask him a question and then he would that he would verify it so this is the first question he asks Islam and by the way this text is how our semi our structure the entire learning process for us is really essentially based on this text so while it's very simple it extrapolates into years and years of study so it's not as the first thing and they're all actions things that we do we pray we give money we fast or in that case you don't do something but then you break your fast so they're all related to actions and we're going to get to that the second question that Gabriel asked sees is what is faith and then the Prophet lists the six articles of faith that we believe in God his angels his messengers his revealed books destiny the final hour and destiny and destiny in another prophetic text the Prophet said destiny basically means anything that hits you was meant to hit you and anything that misses you was not meant to hit you so these become our six articles of faith so Islam makes a very big distinction between action and faith an action may be a word that you're familiar with is orthopraxy correct action and faith or correct faith is Orthodoxy correct belief and while Islam does have a very elaborate theology the obsession of Islam over the years has been on action so the law is very prevalent very very much on the forefront much more than theology very much like rabbinic Judaism it's very similar to that experience where we've been in Judaism has a very elaborate theology but what's very important is the action is the law and then Gabriel asked this last question he says well what is spiritual excellence what is perfection in religion now if you take those two and you sum them up how do you express that how do you live that and then the Prophet says is a very famous statement that most Muslims know that you worship God as if you see him and if you do not at least know that he sees you these three questions that Gabriel asked the Prophet for us perform the entire intellectual apparatus the entire paradigm intellectual paradigm of Islamic thinking there's the law and all of the things that go into the law all of the actions necessary all of the preconditions all the conditions everything that you can think about it but when you come to do something and act on something all the questions that you would think about that's the law that's how we live our liturgical life if you will that's how we live our secular life infused with our ethics and then our belief system is either saying that we believe it's an internal you believe in the unseen the things that we believe in our attitude towards those things in the past and our attitude towards those things that constantly happen to us but those two things are supposed to manifest in this spiritual experience that you worship God as if you see him well if you saw God everywhere you'd be very very different and you would reflect what you saw than if you did it and if you were heedless and I think everyone can kind of understand that kind of concept imagine if you lived in the in the light of the Lord to use some Christian terminology right if you lived that way that that's all you saw what you will you will reflect that kind of belief so when you see somebody again those dials and those gauges if you see someone that doesn't reflect when I see someone that doesn't reflect that reflects the opposite I know that something has gone wrong and then this sort of paradigm of understanding helps me be able to go in and sort of surgically remove hopefully those problems and be able to analyze and demonstrate for somebody what's what's going on so we have these three dimensions that I talked about we have correct action okay which is what we call a Sharia so all the Sharia is is legal books and commentary and opinions on interpreting the primary sources and that for us becomes correct action and you guys have heard of the Quran I hope okay so there's six 6236 verses in the Quran only 300 of those verses deal with the law of all of the prophetic texts that we have of the Prophet we have about 60,000 only 2,000 speak to the law so the law of the Sharia even though it's in our face all the time it's actually from a textual point of view less than five percent of the source text of Islam and the vast majority of the Quran the vast majority of the prophetic teachings are ethical stories as they relate to our belief system how we are to to deal with neighbors how we deal with ourselves how we do with calamity how we raise our children how we deal with the other how we deal with ourselves how we deal with our parents so on and so forth ethical statements ethical teachings so the moral paradigm is quite large so even though the law from an intellectual point of view takes up a vast space in the intellectual history of Islam from a textual point of view it's actually a very minor because to do all of this I mean I'm kind of speaking from the perspective of somebody who's studied us at a seminary I mean most people are not going to study at a seminary how many of you have studied at seminary okay so there you go of the purportedly 114,000 companions the Prophet Muhammad left behind when he passed in 623 only 20 were experts in the law so look I mean even even in this room in another faith community same sort of same kind of statistics so the law is I got to tell you very boring very dry very tedious but if you want to you know play the game if you want to read the dials if you want to be able to understand the language you got to go through that training so the phase component correct belief how we what what does God mean for us when I say about when I say there's no god but God if a Muslim says that there are certain things that you believe about God certain capacities certain attributes certain traits and also there are certain things that we believe that God is not or that God does not do and so on and so forth we'll all of the articles of faith how what is our attitude towards other religious traditions if we believe in the revealed books and all of the prophets so on and so forth what is our attitude towards that what is our belief system towards that so this becomes our theology and in Islam our theology the high theology is very similar to philosophy almost very very intricate and very very abstract and was not my favorite topic and then spiritual excellence this is really what's the most important thing because this is something that everyone has to be a part of see the Quran deposits three reasons why we exist and this is if you remember anything maybe the most important the first God says in the Quran I have not created you except to be in a state of worship to me so one of our reasons one of our essential reasons why we exist from the Islamic point of view is to worship God that our life is not ours as it were but it's really unknown to us and everything in the created universe everything that we perceive everything that we see has been given to us has been created for us to use in a certain way so worship acknowledging that is an essential part of humanity the second thing that God says in the Quran is he says blessed is the person who improves themselves and wretched is the person who doesn't so self improvement working on yourself to be the best version of yourself is one of the essential reasons why we exist so the Islam doesn't say well you know just try the BET you know try your best and that's okay and you are the way you are know you will call to what we're supposed to call ourselves to a higher moral standard to be a better version of ourselves to not give in to our base desires to not to give in to our a low way of thinking but to raise ourselves to a higher level of consciousness aptitude spiritual aptitude spiritual excellence and then the third reason the Quran posits why humanity exists why all of this happened is to build something in this world that works there's a very beautiful verse in which God says in the Quran he has caused you to dwell on the earth and has asked from you that you build it well you can't build it alone you can't build it with just people that you like so this means that you're going to live in a plural very diverse human community throughout time so these three reasons these three reason meta reasons why we exist to worship to improve ourselves to do something collaboratively are really the realm of this last area of this spiritual excellence how do we combine this so I can't follow the law and follow my belief system and hurt somebody I can't follow the law and follow my belief system and break someone's heart I can't follow the law follow my belief system and kill innocent people that doesn't add up something is wrong in that equation that's not a cohesive way of thinking or a way of living so then these become the really important ways that we understand and furthermore how we teach so the law is not just one subject but several subjects the law itself and interpretation and the Arabic language and grammar and syntax so on and so forth and theology is the same way and a lot of theology actually is looking at other religions looking at you know Hindu Vedanta looking at atomic theory of Buddhism looking at the Christian concept of the Trinity and it's different denominations looking at rabbinic law and rabbinic theological components Kabbalah things like that you find all of that all of this soup of thinking Muslim theologians over the course of history have worked with and commented on and added to and translated so on and so forth for the point of view of well how do we how do we interpret how do we form the religion and where does this all come from and I know that this is very could be abstract so I'm going to end very quickly and you know I love to hear from you the first source of authority we have as I mentioned is the Quran which we believe is the eternal uncreated Word of God so it is essentially one of God's attributes you say God is light God is merciful God is the all-seeing so the Quran takes that like understanding for us is that it's one of God's attributes and as I said the 6236 verses 114 chapters in 30 parts and then we have this area called the Sunnah which is the Sunnah is a way or a principle a habit so everything that the Prophet said did affirmed everything that happened in front of him that he was silent about or he commented on all of that is a source of authority for us we analyze it we verify throughout history and we use that so if you ask me a question in my mind I'm going to go back to these two sources I mean is there verse that talks about this is there a prophetic moment or statement or story that talks about this but then sometimes because these are limited in size you know you can put them these books on a shelf we have the consensus of the jurists over time or scholars over time so for example everybody in the history of Islamic thinking argued that lying is forbidden as a matter of fact lying lying is considered one of the grave sins so that's an area of consensus I can't come now be like well actually no you can lie it's not that bad or to steal you know these type of things are issues of consensus so precedent is one of the ways we may be more familiar term the precedent of how we interpret these things over time becomes a source of authority but all of this is is limited right I mean this does not cover everything under the Sun there are always new issues there are always always new transactions there are always new crises and things that we need commentary on and we need guidance on so the last thing I want to share with you is what is our oops yeah there we go what is huh excuse me they didn't teach us this in seminary so you have to so how do we interpret and this is maybe the most relevant to I think what a lot of people's questions are today is that the first thing is that there is understanding the text itself what is the verse in the Quran actually mean in its original Arabic language what is this statement of the Prophet actually mean it is original Arabic language just as a text just as a piece of language what does that mean that's one level and then I need to understand my situation my moment now just like I understand the text I have to understand my moment a lot of times because we have a lot of literature about usury and and certain prohibitions of financial transactions a lot of Muslims ask questions about well can we do can we invest in this instrument you know how about the stock market what if you invest in a company that deals with alcohol because we don't we don't consume alcohol things like that so I have to understand the moment now what does that mean to invest in a company what is the interest of the bank mean what does this type of financial instrument actually mean and then I have to be able to bring the text into the moment I have to link the two to be able to provide an answer there's a lot of stages and many times these situations are things the moment component things that I don't know about so I have to study or I have to ask or maybe the text is not clear to me so I have to ask a teacher or another colleague that's more well-versed in that area so this constant process of interpretation means that the linking component the last part is really the most important part is to be able to find a copasetic way to link our ethical teachings our moral teachings in a way in the moment in which we live now that makes the most sense which is why Islam is essentially very elastic and very malleable in the way we actus in the way we interpret throughout time especially in the time that we live now because it's so different than the time of the original revelation of the text I mean the way that we live life now is very very different than the eighth century Arabia or 13th century about that or 9th century Cairo or these were a lot of our medieval literature comes from so this last component this is where you have to be able to read all of the gauges not not just the gauges of the religion not just the language of the religious texts but you have to be able to read the gauges of the life that you live in now and things vary from country to country like for example you know the concept of citizenship as we are all citizens is a very new concept in human history we didn't really have this for a long time so what does that mean these are the relations with people of other faiths what is the nation-state mean when I come and I look at Islamic governance the section of the law that talks about that and the nation's they are the nation-states our language the state or the government what does that mean visa vie our understanding of a republic or a federation or a democracy and citizenship that essentially undoes any other type of identity yeah we're you know Christian Muslim Hindu Buddha but we're all citizens and that relationship of citizenship in a sense Trump's and is above all other relationships that our identity primarily now as as citizens and we vote and we argue about this bill or that bill this piece of legislation that piece of legislation what's very new so what is it some say about citizenship democracy you know one can ask such a question well I'd have to go through all of this process and be able to understand what is these what are these identities really mean in its original context as they were revealed in my in my understanding and then what does it mean today and then trying to link them so on and so forth so this is the most important active process of Muslim leadership Muslim intelligentsia today to be able to to go through this process I rambled more than I wanted to and I'm cognizant of the time so please feel free to you know ask anything that's on your your mind when I was in the sixth grade there was a banner in the classroom that said the only stupid question was the one that wasn't asked so with that please shoot away thank you so much very very enlightening and of at the end of your remarks just now you you touched on a question that has been served in my mind for a that has been in my mind for long time it seems that a lot of the kind of misunderstanding that goes on between people of one country and people of another country have to do with in the West a lot of people tends to look at Islam as identified with political entities let's say in the Middle East Saudi Arabia for example and that's of course not true because there are millions of Muslims living in countries that are not under Islamic governments but that confusion I think often leads to misunderstandings where political disagreements get interpreted as religiously imposed disagreements so what what is the best way or what is a useful way for non-muslims to think of the relationship between the religion of Islam and political theory what does Islam if anything say about political theory is is that clear what I'm asking yes okay thank you nice smile only because only once every like seven years I get this kind of question because essentially what my my doctorate work was was in so I get a little excited with all right we do have another service at 11:15 it's um has a lot to say about Islamic about government there's a whole section sections in Islamic law in the Sharia that talk about the formation of government the establishment of the head of state conditions and things like that but when you read that you realize very quickly that it's an extremely imperfect system and even the jurors themselves they were sort of like agnostic towards what kind of system we have is really not important ie and they're almost not writing but sort of saying because they all suck anyway or they're all short term anyway it's really about concepts of Justice that that people can practice their religion freely and and things like that and if there's any form of government that allows these conditions then that's okay and if you look throughout his political history we've had all sorts of political systems you know we've had a caliphate we've had sultanates we've had monarchies we've had democracies republics some of them have been good some of them and have been atrocious some of them have been so so just like any other sort of human political experience so the form of the government or the form of the state is really there's there's a blank there that it could be any form which is one of the problems with with this mismatch of our understanding in the West because in the West we're so domesticated that this is the best form of government well in Islamic political literature you don't have that there is no best form of government because it's all man woman made anyway so it's going to be imperfect what matters is what the government does how it meets the needs of its citizens it's people and things like that so without getting too far off into the deep end I think that's that's one way of looking at it the other thing is your observation is correct I mean there are many Muslim countries today and it makes understanding the difference between religion and practice and politics very confusing especially when you look at sectarian issues like Sunnis and Shias and you know the inter fighting between Muslim nations you know the Prok the war in Yemen between the Saudis and Iran the constant battle of the Bahrain between the Saudis and the Iranians Iraq Syria things like that so yeah it's just it's just confusing and and and if it makes you feel any better a lot of Muslims are confused themselves because the the subject of Islamic governance is not something that you you know teach at Sunday School it's a very you know so the end of the book as it were not in the beginning of the book so a lot of people don't get to that and they don't realize that there is a very rich lit but there's an extremely vast literature about that and if you're interested I can point you to some English sources that would be a good summary thank you for visiting with us today thank you for having one of the things I think that confuses many Americans or maybe many Westerners are the splits within Islam and although Christianity is fractured into Methodists Presbyterians Catholics and the like for the most part they don't hate each other or fight each other with perhaps the exception of people in Cairo but we constantly see in the news stories about struggles fighting hatred between Sunnis and Shia and then maybe there's Wahhabis or there's Sufis and I don't think we quite understand why sometimes it appears and that some Muslims hate each other more than they hate Crusader infidels so we studied the the various Christian churches and in school the the subject of that was the joy of sects but in your right to to observe that in in the Muslim world there's there's not much joy in the sects as there is in the Christian world and it's these are very big questions it's hard to answer you know you know very succinctly but I think it's related to the previous conversation that a lot of it has to do with politics and if you look at the relationship the sectarian relationship or that's a bad word but the the relationship between the different sects before for example the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran or before the modern Saudi state it would be very different than what's happening today so these in my understanding these are political today political tensions and not tensions of religion and the proof is like in this country we have there's a Shia school mosque on Montrose Road actually my kids go to that school I'm a Sunni my kids go to that school we pray together we celebrate you know holidays together so I think because we're minorities together in this country religiously those kind of sectarian issues don't exist but when when we talk with each other things we're into the heated zone they're always political look what Saudi Arabia did look what Iran did look what's happening they assassinated this person's all political geopolitics and that's that's what happens when religion and politics makes it's a very bad it's a very dangerous you know mixture of things and it's just true I think but all joking aside even in other faith traditions I think intra religious conflict is oftentimes more severe than inter-religious conflicts and because everyone if you're part of one religion you always feel that you have a monopoly on the truth I'm right you're wrong you know I'm a true Christian you're not I'm the real Jew you're not you know I'm a real Muslim you're not and I think that it's just the nature of religion that it happens the things like what happies Sufis those are not sects as the way Sunnis and Shias those are groups or or sort of political activism perspectives we're happy ism is sort of a fundamentalist movement that happened emerge at the end of the 18th century and is the cause of much you know problems and turmoil and there are links between that that movement and you know organizations like Al Qaeda and Isis and things like that and Sufism is a still mana but Sufism is really the expression the spiritual expression in Islam so it's just the name of the subject just like Sheree has the name of the law Sufism or Tazawa and Arabic is the name of spirit the spiritual practice in the spiritual disciplines so just sort of on those terms first of all I very much very much enjoyed your presentation as somebody who lived about 30 of his 75 years in Muslim countries one of the things that strikes me as a Christian as very distinctive about Islam is the way in which it infuses every sort of small aspect of life when you live with Muslim neighbors you see that religion touches what they say when they put their children on the bus to go to school what they say when they take a cup of soup to a sick neighbor it people invoke God or a part of a surah maybe two hundred times in a day when speaking without thinking about it's just it's just natural like the air and the water Christian's don't do that you know I mean I'm one and maybe once in a day or once or the week I really stop and think I am a Christian I'm doing this in a Christian context and I wonder if you could elaborate a little on that the way in which a mother will will will say this mullah Elijah Holly throughout today and to her children and to her friends and and and so the religion is is enveloping a lot of that has to do with the concept of repetition and invocation and remembrance which is a very key central spiritual tool in the Psalms oh there's a verse in the Quran that says the people that remember God standing sitting and lying down and contemplate the heavens and the earth so this concept that you're remembering God in every moment standing sitting lying at meaning in every mode of your life there's some form of invocation if you collect all of the supplications and invocations of the Prophet it would be impossible to do the law because it's like that's all he did when you would open the door he would say this when you would exit the door he would say that when he would eat he would say this when he was sick he would say that when someone's dying you would do this this is never ending so this concept of Vic or constant remembrance is the tool that we use one of the main tools that we use so we do not become heedless so it's very much ingrained and even just in our secular life you know repetition is the mother of skill I mean the more you repeat something the more you're going to be good at it the more it becomes part of your conscious your subconscious so it's it's all that that's what happens you you know and there are benefits we have in our literature to saying a certain thing a hundred times a thousand times so itself is an act of worship to recite like a verse X number of times per day or morning and night and things like that so it's very common that you know that's you know that's what we do one of the things that we do and the idea is that it helps you stay connected to some of the things that I have been trying to communicate all right well since I have the mic I'm going to ask a question you're the boss so as one of the few people in the room that have been to seminary one of the the areas that I enjoyed studying the most was about the practice of Ramadan and could you and it's definitely from a purely secular perspective something we hear a lot about in the news can you just give us the you know the cliff note version of Ramadan and so that you know we're better informed about what it means and what it's and how significant it is to the muscle Ramadan is the 9th month of our calendar we follow a purely lunar calendar so it's about 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar every year so our every 36 years or so our calendar makes an entire you know cycle as it were in relation to the to the solar Gregorian calendar in the month of Ramadan and all of the months are 29 or 30 days depending on how we sight the moon and we start fasting before sunrise which means that we do not eat anything or drink anything nothing passes the the oral cavity other than air of course until the Sun sets and when the Sun sets every day we break our pen so some people think we don't eat at all for 30 day well we'd be dead if we did that so no we do break our fast every day quite well and we can eat at night until the next day and the idea in that practice is that and of course if you're sick and if you're traveling and if you're you know ill you can't you know diabetes or something you know you don't have to you don't the fast of course if you're young you know kids things like that but for normal healthy adults you know young adults this is the practice and as I said it's one of the five pillars of Islam it's one of the essential legal or religious practices that we have and the idea behind fasting is that we believe that we are created with a soul that is inside or attached to the soul as our ego our self and that is enveloped in our body in our physical body and every time you feed the body you kind of cloud the soul a little bit so heart you know the the kumbaya stuff I mean the stuff on the inside and when you starve the body then your soul or your heart is is the opposite happens you feed your your heart so part of fasting as a spiritual practice is hard to describe because you have to kind of experience it is that by starving the body a little bit you kind of awaken and you're nourishing your heart and your soul so your soul becomes a little bit more alert a little bit more aware and you start to experience things and see things very differently than when you when you're eating and you know having coffee on you know three or four times a day so when you fast you know in the very beginning you just you can't wait till you break your fast it's sort of like okay how many more hours how many more minutes how many more second we come up with all of these ways and what ends up happening is you end up finding yourself more efficient because you cut out eating and for for working hours so that means you don't have to necessarily use the bathroom as many times and so it actually think about all of the things that come with eating thinking about what you're going to eat going to eat getting sleepy after you eat having to use the bathroom to get rid of what you ate just to fill it up again that's like all of that stuff for the working hours after a few days of fasting always go away so it's really just you and then you're like oh my god where have I been the last 11 months yeah and you get hungry and thirsty and you know and all of that that stuff happens but that's the point and then you start to feel a little bit differently you kind of feel alive in a way that you're not when you're eating and you're drinking and you're you know hooked on caffeine at least that's the theory behind it fasting also is a way for us to just mechanically feel the way other people feel that don't have food and drink all the time so way for us to realize that there are people that go you know there are people in this country there are people in the city that only eat once a day or two our mountain and you know nourished children at school and things like that so sort of wakes you up to like yeah this this you know this sucks we should do something about that we should be more charitable so it's a month of charity and a month of giving it's also the physical fast is also a way is a segue to a larger fast which is you know to fast from thoughts to fast from bad actions it's very much like lent so fast from you know I'm not going to say anything bad I'm going to try not to think of anything bad during these months because the Prophet said you know a person can fast and they curse this person and they did this and they did that and that end of the day all they got is that they were hungry and thirsty meaning that they missed out on the whole point of fasting so we don't want to be like that we want to also be a higher version of ourselves during this month so you know that's that's what we do and in our mosque we we provide a meal a Friday Saturday and Sunday to the community you guys are all welcome to come it's like a big party on Friday Saturday and Sunday we have a nice property in Potomac so you guys can hang out and basketball courts and everything so you guys are more than welcome and then we have an evening prayer service that's about an hour long supposed to be an hour long that's sometimes we go a little bit over and yeah so and then at the end of it as you would imagine we have a big holiday and we'd just to embarrassin the amount on June 8th will have an interfaith staff which is breaking a fast dinner and I'll send an invitation to your interfaith communities it'll be coming in just a few days so please circulate to your parishioners who also join and give me the numbers so it will be very happy to receive a there Thursday is 8:15 we expect you because the break of us will be about 8:30 something and then followed by a prayer and then did we keep very good time in Ramadan so we can you can be sure that the food will be exactly to the second I know we have a few more questions but I wanted an two but I know people will start to leave soon so I just wanted to take a moment to recognize that in addition to the Imam we have some people who attend the ICCP mosque who are here today would you all stand up so that we can welcome you please please and I just want to say we're so happy that you could join us today and we're really honored that we're building this relationship with the Mullins and we're exploring different things we might be able to do together as faith community and one of the things that happens is on Wednesday morning from 8:00 to 9:00 a group of women get together informally at the Penco TVN at Wildwood Center and anyone's welcome to join that informal group we call it the Breakfast Club so please join us there and one of the first things we're going to be doing is there's another Imam at the mosque right the mantra reef shrine and he works a lot with youth and he's going to be coming on the 21st of May to meet with our j2 a group along with some of the youth from the mosque so that's the first step that we hope we'll be building on in the year to come so I don't want to wrap it up if you have time for more questions but I just wanted to be sure that we welcome to our guests thank you thank you so much for being here I have a basic question and so Jesus and Mohammed both you know came to earth that kind of pivotal times and wanted us to wake up to different things and I know you're a scholar of comparative religions and I just wondered if you could give us some perspective of some basic differences or sameness --is in what they taught and what they were trying to wake us up to sure great question so in our belief system we believe that all prophets all messages all previously revealed religions have the same essential message which is why we find so many similarities there are all these differences because they come at different times in history and there are different things that each your religious figure asks of their community but the message is really the same what you just said wake up you know and and worship the Almighty I think when it comes to Islam and Christianity a good way to think about about these things is that Christ is really the Quran in Islam because Christ was the Word of God in Christian theology in the beginning was the word and the word became flesh you know John right look of John okay making sure so the Quran for us is the Word of God the Gospels are really like the hadith sorry previous slide is really like the sayings of the Prophet because the Gospels are really an account of the life of Christ according to the different you know people that observed it so if you're thinking of like a comparison chart the Quran would be similar to Christ and then the Gospels would be similar to the hadith now we do not believe we believe in the infallibility of all prophets so all prophets including Christ are infallible morally and fallible and fallible from sin and the like I mean they're human in the sense that they get sick they get tired they need to eat they need to rest but they're infallible and their ability to deliver the message we believe in the Immaculate Conception and as a matter of fact in the Quran does an entire chapter dedicated to Mary in which God says when Mary's parents wanted to conceive and the mother became impregnated with Mary she says to God I'm going to you know dedicate what's in my room to your service thinking that it would be a boy but when she gave birth and it was a girl the Quran says and the girl is not like the boy meaning that the girl is better than the boy and that's how the the jurists have understood this verse that there's a special quality to a girl that does not exist in the boys so we believe in the Immaculate Conception we believe that Christ was risen but not crucified that he was risen before he was crucified and that which was crucified was somebody that looked like Christ but was not Christ and we actually believe in the second coming of Christ so any differences that we have will wait for him to come back and he'll tell us who is right and who is wrong no problem real problem one question that strikes me about a major difference I don't think there's much that gets people in America more upset than issues of justice and and it seems to me from what I understand that Islam has a different sense of of justice than than the judeo-christian tradition which is fine and I don't mean to judge that but I do think that there is a difference in I think that the cheer of law creates a lot more fear in Americans that may be as necessary but certainly there is a difference and could you speak to that at all sure the second part of your question first I think that Sharia law if people understood that Sharia law was about how you relieve yourself in the bathroom and how you eat and how you sleep and things like that I don't think there'll be any fear it's just sort of how we conduct ourselves so when people are like Oh Sharia law is going to come and take this and take that they're actually not talking about the Sharia they're talking about something else so I think that it's very important that that you know again with definitions and and and the language of the somme and things like that but you do make an extremely astute observation the there is a slight difference because justice in the Islamic ethics cannot exist if there's no peace so you can add justice is very much a ethical is a virtual without doubt but you can't have justice at the expense of peace and that's really critical I think because as Americans much more than even Westerners we have taken that for granted that we live in peace that we free movement and you know more or less things work and we're okay and we're safe so always in your justice justice justice and looking at the other side justice justice justice but a lot of those places a push for justice in some parts of the world would make those societies collapse if there was not some kind of peace and reconciliation first and that's you know what happened in South Africa there was this constable let's do this Pete you know reconciliate we all messed up we all screwed up let's you know talk about it and get over it so we can move on and in Islam this is very very important this concept that there has to be some sort of peace establishment of peace before we enter into the realm of justice but when it comes to justice we believe that the almighty has infinite names and attributes and we categorize the attributes of God in three ways there are the attributes of mercy and beauty you know God is love peace light justice peace love mercy compassion and then there are attributes of majesty like justice the Avenger the one that causes death the one that brings life and then there are attributes of wholeness or completed miss the all hearings are all seeing we take from that that we as humans should hold ourselves to the attributes of mercy we should be merciful we should be compassionate the attributes of majesty of which justice is a part that belongs to the Almighty we do not want to be vengeful with one another we do not want to be hurtful of one another we don't want to cause death of one another so justice in the human way kind of straddles that a little bit so it's it's not that it's not a virtue but its secondary to sort of murder and compassion and peace I mean I know that you're probably thinking well that's not what I'm seeing on TV but I'm talking to you as a as a man of the cloth as it were I mean that's sort of clickers but trying to inculcate in our in our people but that's how we were taught and that's what the sources teach us does that kind of make sense as much as a religion makes sense as much as a religion makes sense I think we have time for one more question of you could you just help us understand Isis of it I think I do I have a better administer I'd have a better task explaining the Trinity than I would [Laughter] you know Isis is an aberration of the of the of the primary sources a lot of the concepts that they advocate are just flat-out lies miss reading of text literally miss reading the Arabic of the text there unlettered you know buffoons and that the whole thing in the beginning about the language of cricket and the dials of the plane that's that's really what that's why I use those images is to impress upon us that these people do not know the language of Islam they are not half of what I said they do not know they do not understand and you know there are many causes and root causes for that that you know time does not allow for us to discuss today but it all comes back to not understanding the function of these texts and how you use them in the world in which we live which is essentially what this this slide was was about and that's just as as much of a summary as I can give you it was a good summary and I was timing you you did that in about 48 seconds I think that was excellent well on behalf of all of st. John's I first I'd like to give dr. Dale zaharie a warm ham every day man thank you so much and again we really look forward to working together we're going going forward so if you have more questions I'll let you all take those offline but thanks thanks for coming thank you [Applause]

Channel: StJohnsNorwood

Views: 20,093

Rating: 4.8036809 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: N7ZGXhF2vrw

Length: 54min 9sec (3249 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017