RISTalks: Dr. Ingrid Mattson - "Living the Ten Commandments with Purpose" - RIS Canada 2010

bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim in the name of God the merciful the compassionate I I want to begin by talking a little bit about the two people who will be speaking after me and I know you have your bios and you're going to hear about them but one of the things that happens in conventions like this is that it's a wonderful way to learn a great deal about a topic but but I hope that for many of us we take it as the beginning of learning and not the end of that of learning and everyone who's who has spoke to you this weekend and who will speak to you has learned from other people and has learned not just by by listening but also by spending significant time reading their books and articles and contemplating them and I want to take this time to acknowledge my intellectual debt to the two men who are speaking after me we know that the Prophet Muhammad sallallaahu Hollywood said of them peace be upon him said whoever does not thank people does not thank God gratitude is one of the most important characteristics of a Muslim and we all you know intellectual gratitude an intellectual indebtedness is a great debt to have it is one of the good debts most debts are bad but we should you know continue to expand our learning not just by listening because it's a little bit easy come easy go but please go back and do some more learning I just want to you know highlight some things about these people dr. Ahmed I first encountered his work when I was a student at the University of Chicago and even then his legacy as an interpreter of the Islamic legal tradition loomed large I was later blessed to be involved with the Nelly Foundation which was established to allow more people to benefit from doctors on the scholar doctor with scholarship when he returned from Chicago after a lengthy period of teaching abroad dr. Ahmed has taught us a great deal about the importance of authentic culture as a vehicle for religious values about the necessity of digging deeply into the history of minority and Western Muslim cult communities like the Chinese Muslims the Andalusians and early American Muslims to know our roots to be grateful to our ancestors who struggled and sacrificed in the face of enormous obstacles and to see how they survived or failed based on their abilities to distinguish the important from the trivial and always to be open to witnessing God's grace and mercy in unfamiliar and sometimes frightening ly different surroundings as for dr. Saul as a Canadian living in the United States in the 1990s always looking for a way to tune into CBC Radio now with with the streaming radio it's not difficult but it wasn't available then and I would always visit bookstores when I would come back to Canada I remember picking up and reading his book the unconscious civilization and feeling such a sense of relief that there were intellectuals who were still digging into the facade of this freedom presenting unbridled capitalism as freedom his later book on equilibrium has had a major impact on my conviction that balance is one of the most important principles in managing integrating the various tools and sources of Islamic ethics for practical application and this is something that is very relevant to this panel tonight as we talk about the purposes or the goals of the Sharia which are multiple and need to be held in balance not last and certainly not least but enough for tonight Atlee is a mention of a fair country a recent book of his that is a marvelous look at the obscured and denied but nether nevertheless authentic Aboriginal foundation of the Canadian ethos and I think there are a lot of lessons there for the Muslim community including for the American Muslim community as we try to remember and understand both the denied and often covered up foundation of the of American Islam which is african-american and beyond that the American Aboriginal ethos that underlies some of the best of the notions of community in the United States so really it is I want you to pay attention to the fact that the what you will hear tonight is just a small bit of a enormous legacy intellectual legacy that both of these men have produced and God willing will continue to produce and I hope that you continue to try to learn from them by reading their books and discussing them with others in your community now my theme in in the short time I have tonight is simply this that it is absolutely important for a Muslim to adopt multiple frames of analysis or multiple perspectives simultaneously on any issue that we face that is a human issue an issue of human concern there is never one model one frame of analysis that can in some scientific manner organize all our concerns and allow us to solve them neatly what do I mean by this well even if we look at the human condition from a scientific model which those who do not have a religious worldview might say is is the only real perspective on the human reality so even if we took a scientific perspective what does science say about what it means to be human well does that not depend on what kind of scientist you will ask an end rely on ologist a geneticist a neurologist each one of them can map out and analyze a complex physical system their function and their dysfunctions so that any even small injury or illness in that one system can lead to the total destruction of a human being you can die from a dysfunction in one of these bodily symptoms systems yet none of these systems alone or even together come close to constituting a whole functioning body and then if we add the social sciences sociology psychology anthropology we see more of the complexity not just of the human body but of the human experience and still it's not enough to show us what it means to be human we can add poetry and art and literature but still do we have the whole picture so when we look at something like the goals of the Sharia this is simply one of the frames by which Muslim jurists try to organize and manage different understanding how to apply our principles to different aspects of human life more than anything how do we pay attention to those things that are important you know that for example we have according to our scholars five or six purposes of the sacred law protection of religion life property intellect family and then some add-on er which I would rather translate as dignity human dignity now you could say as a Muslim well you don't need to look through all of those perspectives you could just look at them to the perspective of religion after all are these not all religious concerns so why separate out life and property and intellect and family the the reason we do that is so that we can pay attention to those concerns because if we only say well everything is important under religion it's very easy to overlook or give undue priority to certain issues or certain aspects of what it means to be human and neglect another aspect for example I'll give you a very practical example that that I know of and you know it confused me a great deal when I worked with Afghan refugees to encounter you know religious Afghan scholars or at least religious leaders preachers and others who continually justified incredibly harsh restrictions on women banning them from education banning them from work and the reasoning was that sometimes it was too dangerous for women to be in the street there's political insecurity so they needed to protect their life right they needed to protect their life by keeping them in the house this would protect their life they would not be harmed in the street and banning them from education well because it's not necessary for the salvation of of women to be to have a higher education and the risk of of them neglecting family duties by being educated then they should be banned from education higher education of course this is a small group in terms of population of those in Afghanistan who believe this way but they were powerful and they really used religious language to justify this but this is the nature of extremism what is the problem with the logic here extremism is is really a problem in reasoning very often it's logical extremism where you take one principle or one factor and you take it to its logical extreme and neglect all other principles and priorities and interests so for example we could say yes we want to preserve life but what about the preservation of intellect when many of these women were confined to their homes ended up having major clinical depression because of being confined for so long what about the preservation of human dignity the ability of a human being to express their value in public life to use the gifts the intellectual gifts they had the gifts for service the gifts to give to the community what about the need to preserve religion itself because when religion is used as a tool of control then people will turn against religion so this is a simple demonstration of how the goals of the Sharia the the goals of the Sacred Law can be used to try to bring back some balance as communities are determining how they're going to order themselves and what kind of policies they're going to determine now well these six five or six goals of the Sharia are an excellent mechanism for helping us further our discussions a rational basis for us to organize a conversation about our policies and practices and institutions we need to understand that Muslims today like Muslims in earlier times need to assess the reality of our situation the urgent needs that we face and continue to develop additional models or frames of bringing balance to our community for example one of the things that we don't see as a particular focus of attention by being identified as a goal of the Sharia is the need for privacy now we could say that the need for privacy is something that we could subsume under the need for honor or dignity but remember everything could be subsumed under the goal of preserving religion the purpose is the purpose of identifying a separate goal is to give it attention so in our time what is a desperate crying need certainly as Muhammad Hashim Kamali professor Kamali who has written a number of books on this subject has identified there is a pressing need for the protection of privacy individual privacy from the intrusion of the state in our time the ability of the state to intervene and and Chris Hedges mention this earlier tonight to to monitor and surveil people in this time is so extraordinary and of a nature far beyond anything in human history before that this is a new pressing urgent need and so as we talk about whether it's public policies in a in a Muslim majority country or in the society in which we live we need to very seriously take this as a as one of the goals of the Sharia that we need to identify and filter and then another focus of attention which we could identify in our time as a goal of the Sharia again we could subsume it under something else but is the to give special attention to our experience as living creatures in a world teeming with life from worms and minnows and crayfish to pigeons and sparrows geese and robins squirrels and deer cats and chickens donkeys and bears dogs and ducks what does it mean for me to be a human from the perspective of my relationship to the cat sitting on my lap or the chickens sitting on my plate and then in my stomach what what does that mean now we could subsume this under the preservation of life as one of the goals of the Sharia but again do we need to give it special attention because of the urgency of the matter the fact that in our time there is a real very imminent risk of the majority of species on the earth disappearing I would say that it requires a new special urgency now I want to draw your attention to something when I mention these different creatures and animals except for I noticed I had a little bit of a kind of fishing bait theme running at the beginning with worms and minnows and crayfish but other than that when I mentioned the animals I didn't categorize them in a way that you might find typical I didn't say cats and dogs or ducks and geese and I did that deliberately because I want to point out and draw your attention to the fact that our lives our world our human experience my human experience your human experience is not an Aristotelian diorama where we're all organized in these neat categories that we encounter going from one room to the other but we live in a web of complex continually changing decidedly unorganized relationships and the only way to deal with this the only good way to deal with this is to be flexible nimble to have a good humor a great sense of adventure and to constantly shift our perspectives from how how does this look from the perspective of me as a human what is this look from the perspective of my relationship with animals what does this look from the perspective of me as an intelligent thinking person as an individual so we keep shifting this may seem complicated it may seem difficult it may seem unorganized but I want to suggest to you that this is in fact the one of the messages that the Quran gives us by the medium through which it gives us its messages what do I mean by that and we're in Toronto the city of the great Marshall McLuhan who said the medium is the message think about the poor end and how the Koran is organized some people you know non-muslims who first read the paren find it disorganized why is that because the Koran is constantly shifting perspective there's the grammatical shift of pronouns even God speak sometimes from the perspective of enna and then God is being described huwa so we have this is called UT fete it's a grammatical or rhetorical device of shifting stylistically the Quran shifts from a straightforward narrative to a doxology to an evocative almost poetic description of nature to a legislative passage from one to the other narrative Lee the Quran draws us into a description of different figures people in even animals as it describes a scenario for example the beautiful passage in surah taneema Derr of the ant which describes at the beginning the marshalling of the prophet Sulayman the prophet solomon his troops giving the impression of an impressive and awesome military presence then suddenly were pulled into a completely different perspective and the Quran says at length when Solomon's army came to a valley of ants one of them cried this is the ant hey ants get into your houses or else Solomon and his armies might crush you and not even notice you this is an this is extraordinary because here here we are in the middle of war war is about the relationship of humans to others this political demonstration of power human to human and suddenly boom were pulled down to the tiny perspective of an ant how does this look to an ant hey don't forget us we're here too we are in God's world just like you are so shifting perspective is is the medium of the Quran it's one of the messages of the Quran it's something that is confusing only if you feel that you need to do everything yourself you know it would be confusing as an individual but this is one of the reasons why we live in community we have in our community we have scholars we have those who are going to sit for many hours reading books but we also have poets we also have activists we have young people with their energy and their vigor we have older people we have those who don't get along that well with people but they get along great with animals and they can tell you a lot about the natural world from their experience so part of the perspective then that we need to examine things by is from this perspective of a true shorter shorter meaning not just some kind of democratic political mechanism for making decisions at this high level but just for our lives our general decision-making who who needs to give input and of course we can have experts and a scholar who has interactive with people will bring in that experience but people also need to speak for themselves now we have a bit of a challenge with animals because of course the Prophet Solomon understood the language of the animals could understand the animals according to the paren so how will we listen to them and how will we understand what they're saying to us through science through study but also through imagination imaginative scenarios what would the world look like to them all of these things are useful and we need the impact or input of everyone for that the but one of the things that helps us with the goals of the Sharia is that these are goals or aspects of human life that are quite universally understandable and this is why we're able to make a comparison between them and the ten commandments because even as our scholar said that someone who a society does not necessarily need revelation to identify these as goals Imam al-ghazali said these things are known intuitively an intuition is really just a kind of experience that it's known intuitively that any society needs to protect these goals to preserve these goals if they're going to survive and this is why when we talk about the goals of the Sharia there is an understanding but again what does it mean to understand to preserve family if we don't have experience with families you know okay I'm talking about family and you're talking about family but if we don't know the stories of families if we don't know the family that you know is down the street and they're having to make a decision between dental care for their children and elderly care for their parents how are we going to make policy decisions about the distribution of property because the distribution of property taxation how we will determine how the wealth is spread and how we understand what we have in common and a part is intimately will affect intimately the kind of families that we want we need to understand that there's going to be conflicts and sometimes there's not a good answer except to take a completely different perspective you own a store a little shop somewhere and a teenager comes in and steals something shoplift something from your store at this point do we bring down the law and say this is about protection of property you stole you're going to be punished or is this a time when we bring in the perspective of mercy and say what made you do that who are you we may find out that this teenager is homeless has run away from an abusive home and so again we need to bring in all of these different perspectives and frames in order to get a grasp and this is something that a well-trained scholar in a society that is functioning where they can interact with people and have input and care about that will be able to bring in and that without it we will be impoverished because we will not be able to understand things from all of these different perspectives so finally what are some of the the the ways that we can balance or integrate these goals it is impossible to do this simply as an academic exercise there need to be institutions through which we further these goals as well as talk about these goals so for example a a family can only be preserved and protected and encouraged through formation which means good examples through education by good nutrition and what does that mean does that mean that the family is responsible for all of these aspects themselves we know that that's not the case and it's why I think this community is a very generous and compassionate community and tends to support public policies that really do protect and encourage family but it's very easy to get distracted by words without digging into the meaning of what it is yes we believe in family we believe in honoring parents we believe in the preservation and protection of property but what how can we organize ourselves in order to do it it before me you had a number of public servants politicians who came and and thanked you on about for what you're doing these you know it's not just voting for them but it's really understanding the impact of the policies that they are advocating for and putting in place when they're in office how they affect all of the community and my final the final point that I want to say is that for the Muslim community you know very often you hear many of us say we need to break out you know our parochial kind of perspective looking at things from our perspective I think we want to be inclusive but sometimes again if we don't have the framework for doing that we can overlook people or we can overlook things and so I want to suggest at the end of it that another layer that we put on in our decision-making process or in our analysis in addition to something in addition to the goals of the Sharia would be to an analysis that I would call circles of community and what I mean by that is that each one of us is in multiple circles of community on each of these according to each of these goals of the Sacred Law for example family we have our nuclear family we have our extended family we have beyond that other relatives and then we can go to sort of the the loser ethnic group which is family light or from the same heritage now as we to be committed and responsible to our nuclear family does not mean that we don't care about other families or that we don't care about the extended family it means that there's an intensity of commitment at that smaller circle of belonging then there is beyond that and as we go beyond the smaller circle then our responsibilities and commitments become more collective so there's one circle then we have the circle of our religious community and this is something that's very clear in the poor end the Quran does not describe two religious communities believer and unbeliever the Quran shows very clearly that the Muslim community this is our you know our Muslim Ummah our Muslim brothers and sisters are our nuclear family there are tight circle beyond that is the broader circle of believers of people who believe in God and the last day again and again allah subhanho wa taala in the holy quran talks about those who believe in God in the last day primarily advocate AB the scriptural lists but more inclusive than that but does our circle end with that it does not end with that because the very dignity that is imprinted on us by being created by the divine which is Kurama nobility and dignity is something that is for all human beings who are human beings Bano Adam this is the Quranic description of humanity what does it mean children of Adam you can't get rid of your family you may not like them you may sometimes be annoyed with them but whatever there's still our family so this is another circle so let me suggest then that we can continue to do this with all of the human interests and draw circles where being part of a very intense relationship with other people religiously or familiar or politically nationally ethically never means that you need to exclude others it just means that your world can continue to expand and we should never forget that we belong to these broader circles and that we can continue to expand them a little more and a little more to bring more people in as we do not neglect our very close and tight and intimate obligations thank you for your attention Salman

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Keywords: ristalks, ingrid, mattson, ingrid mattson, ten commandments, purpose of life, ris talks, ris, islam, muhammad, inspiration, motivation, toronto, reviving the islamic spirit, conference, convention, islamic conference, youth

Id: MEtQHNRNs-s

Length: 32min 51sec (1971 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 22 2012