Daniel Haqiqatjou and The Modernist Menace To Islam (2021-12-24) ​

0:00:02 Well hello everyone again and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I am delighted 0:00:08 to talk to Daniel Haqiqatjou! You are most welcome Daniel. 0:00:14 Thank you for having me Paul. Just a little bit background for those who who don't know 0:00:19 Daniel: he was born in Houston, Texas and comes from what he calls a secular a liberal secular muslim 0:00:26 background he studied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard University and 0:00:31 completed graduate studies in philosophy (a great combination by the way physics and philosophy). 0:00:36 He is a student of knowledge studying traditionally with respected scholars, he's 0:00:42 the founder and editor in chief of MuslimSkeptic and alternative muslim news research and opinion 0:00:49 outlet. He's also the founder of Alasna Institute and writes in lectures on contemporary issues 0:00:56 surrounding muslims and modernity over the past 10 years and has spoken at universities and mosques 0:01:02 around the world. I recently read his fascinating new book here it is The Modernist Menace to 0:01:09 Islam, A Muslim Critique of Modern -Isms which is an uncompromising critique of contemporary ideologies 0:01:19 ranging from feminism to secularism to atheism. Daniel is very popular with many muslims for his 0:01:27 confident no-nonsense defense of traditional islam and his refutations of many aspects of 0:01:34 the zeitgeist which he believes threaten muslim faith. Now his book the Modernist Menace to Islam 0:01:41 covers many subjects but can we perhaps begin by looking at your views on feminism which take up 0:01:48 a big chunk of your book. Actually you mention in your book that at Harvard you considered yourself 0:01:54 a feminist because of the damage done by domestic abuse against women now you see 0:02:02 feminism as not only a problem but as a pathway to apostasy. Could you explain what happened?
0:02:12 Well I realized that um well let me just start by saying this
0:02:21 i realized that islam first of all is a patriarchal religion islam 0:02:28 is patriarchal at its core and feminism is contrary at its essence to 0:02:36 patriarchy feminism is an attack against patriarchy and so this was really the 0:02:42 first sign that look if i'm going to be a muslim i cannot be a feminist this is
0:02:52 isn't feminism in islam so what i came to realize pretty quickly is that feminism doesn't 0:02:59 have a monopoly over defending women's rights uh feminism doesn't have a monopoly over protecting 0:03:07 women from uh legitimate domestic abuse uh you know real cases of domestic abuse 0:03:13 or domestic violence or what have you um in fact all systems of morality claim to protect 0:03:21 women's rights and men's rights and everyone's rights that's what all systems of morality 0:03:28 claim but who is really true to that claim which system of morality is true to that claim 0:03:34 and when we do that kind of analysis and we do that kind of comparison we see that 0:03:40 feminism actually has created women who are oppressed and who are very unhappy who are very 0:03:48 um you know beleaguered by the the modern conception of what a woman should be and what 0:03:54 a woman should do and how a woman should live um and all of the studies and statistics bear this 0:04:01 out that women are more depressed than they've ever been in countries where they have the most 0:04:08 they that score the highest on the so-called feminist index or women's rights index indices so 0:04:15 daniel what is it daniel specifically that is making women depressed in these very high feminist 0:04:22 committed societies what's going on exactly do you think well the the scientific research hasn't 0:04:30 come to definitive conclusions because it's a highly politicized topic that goes contrary to 0:04:37 the zeitgeist as you said the the western modernist zeitgeist but as muslims i think it's 0:04:45 we can see like when i look at my own family and i look to women in previous generations 0:04:51 such as my grandmothers my gran grandmothers my great-grandmothers the way that they lived their 0:04:58 lives and the stories i hear about how they were living granted this is anecdotal but they were 0:05:05 living very simple lives surrounded by loved ones taken care of by their husbands and their male 0:05:12 family taking care of children and being in these very supportive loving households and that was 0:05:21 the norm yes there were exceptions yes there are you know bad cases everywhere these were extended 0:05:28 families weren't they they weren't like our modern narrow nuclear family with just a mother 0:05:32 and a father and 2.4 kids or whatever it is these are much broader family structures and networks 0:05:38 weren't they i think yeah of course you have these extended families and and this is something that 0:05:44 the vast majority of humanity has lived in this kind of um with this kind of family 0:05:49 kinship structure and you know even if we just want to purely take an evolutionary perspective 0:05:56 if if we want to take a purely evolutionary secular perspective if humanity has been living 0:06:03 in these kinds of networks with these kinds of gender roles for men and women and women 0:06:10 through evolutionary processes have been conditioned to a certain kind of personality type 0:06:15 certain kinds of emotional emotions certain kinds of behavior certain types of instincts and then 0:06:21 suddenly within the past 100 years say or 50 years take them to a completely different mode of life 0:06:30 form of life then don't you think that that's going to have a big psychological impact and 0:06:37 arguably a destructive one so i think even from an evolution purely evolutionary perspective that 0:06:43 would make sense but from an islamic perspective from the islamic standpoint it makes sense as 0:06:48 well that allah has created women with certain intuition certain motherly instincts certain 0:06:57 um a certain need to have children a biological need to have children and nurture children and 0:07:04 family to be a supportive uh wife to be taken care of by a strong husband who loves her and 0:07:14 takes care of her and this is something that the modern world denies it fundamentally denies um you 0:07:22 can say nature or you can say it fundamentally denies the way that the creator has created 0:07:28 women and men yeah i mean there's a fascinating article by um khalid who i believe is your 0:07:34 wife actually um uh where she wrote incredibly articulate um and hard-hitting piece about the 0:07:42 myth or the lie as she calls it uh that women are told that they can have it all women can have it 0:07:48 all so they can have a career they can have highly successful jobs and they can have a family and 0:07:53 they can have children they can have everything and she's saying this is a lie because obviously 0:07:58 common sense would suggest one can't have it all but this results in this kind of existential 0:08:03 crisis that leads to depression and unhappiness that you allude to would that be a key factor do 0:08:08 you think in what you're describing yeah why are these goals that women should have you know to 0:08:15 be you know a c-level executive at a fortune 500 company and you know why should that be a goal for 0:08:25 women why should that be a goal for men i mean we could ask these fun 0:08:28 we should ask these fundamental questions about the meaning of life and how we should spend the 0:08:34 limited time we have in this dunya on this earth why are these goals to pursue again 0:08:40 even if we take the assumption the materialistic assumption that happiness is the ultimate end okay 0:08:50 i think most people don't have a kind of reductionist understanding of happiness that oh 0:08:57 happiness just means dopamine neurotransmitters in the brain and because if that truly were 0:09:04 you know the kind of happiness that humans should aspire to then we should just be hooked up to 0:09:09 these kind of like or given soma right a brave new world just be given certain drugs that will 0:09:15 um you know artificially create this sense of this high of euphoria constantly like if that's 0:09:23 truly you know our view of what happiness is and how it should be pursued but no we have a 0:09:28 we have a more complex um profound understanding of human flourishing and and what true happiness 0:09:35 in in the in its fullest sense means i think all humans share this um this kind of view 0:09:42 and if that's the case then why would you know maximizing our income at all costs no matter what 0:09:51 why would why would that lead to that kind of happiness why would you know becoming a you know 0:09:56 c-level executive for a fortune 500 company or you know becoming the most you know renowned academic 0:10:04 in the university system but you had to sacrifice uh all meaningful human connection and and really 0:10:12 i mean this is again a scientific fact and it's also a metaphysical truth that the deepest 0:10:18 connections that we have as human beings are with blood with kin and you know we can obviously make 0:10:24 connections deep profound connections with others who are not kin but you cannot take a human being 0:10:33 and break him off of all family ties and expect that he will be in his best state uh 0:10:39 psychologically even though we all know family members can be difficult but that's also the 0:10:45 benefit of having extended family because if you if you have trouble with one or two family members 0:10:50 you still have an entire network a support system uh to to be able to live happily with and and 0:10:58 you know support so you've mentioned the the difficulties that this whole uh the feminist 0:11:03 thrusters presents to women in terms of having it all and that that being a myth but you also did 0:11:08 mention that feminism is a pathway to apostasy and in your book you uh you do outline several 0:11:14 stages that doesn't start off with apostasy far from it but as the end stage i think it's stage 0:11:19 five or something where where uh after a series of uh struggling with the text and the hadith 0:11:26 and the ulama and the scholarly rulings over the centuries ultimately the muslim feminists as you 0:11:32 as you understand them will end up apostasizing uh what what is this final end stage why do women 0:11:38 what are some women anyway apostasize some islam well they um that's not their conscious goal 0:11:46 or they don't necessarily consciously see it happening it's just something that they 0:11:50 fall into because of what feminism commits them to intellectually and emotionally because the 0:11:59 you know the way that i describe the stages is that the first stage is basically 0:12:04 coming from perhaps legitimate grievances with certain muslim male figures that they see in 0:12:10 their lives maybe at the mosque or you know in the broader community and they have these criticisms 0:12:18 and they feel like or grievances and they feel like feminism addresses those grievances but 0:12:24 the thing is that feminism commits the feminist to a broader paradigm or a broader commitment 0:12:32 such as the idea that patriarchy is inherently oppressive male authority is inherently a pr 0:12:42 excuse me male authority is inherently oppressive and anything that lacks female representation is 0:12:51 inherently illegitimate so that takes that takes them through down this path so initially it starts 0:12:59 with these perhaps legitimate grievances with a local imam or some figure somewhere in the muslim 0:13:07 community but then the because of these other commitments that criticism cannot just stop with 0:13:14 the local imam it has to be extended to well all of the islamic scholarly tradition because when we 0:13:21 look at the islamic tradition it is predominantly muslim men who are the main intellectuals and 0:13:29 the main scholars of this tradition and that's not to say that there have been 0:13:34 been female scholars because they're they there have been but they were definitely a very small 0:13:41 minority so then we have to ask the question or the feminist will ask the question why is this and 0:13:47 the answer that feminism gives is because is that the men of this tradition have been marginalizing 0:13:54 women deliberately and have been actually silencing these women or holding them back 0:14:01 uh preventing them from speaking that's the feminist answer so what this this color is 0:14:07 the entire scholarly tradition you look at someone like imam razadi well why isn't ghazali why is it 0:14:17 lifting up women and you know why is he you know not bringing someone uh you know alongside him and 0:14:25 trying to champion uh women's voices clearly he's marginalizing women he's actually silencing women 0:14:33 he has all of this authority and never once does he use it to uh promote the visibility uh 0:14:40 of a woman's voice for example these are the kinds of thoughts that will inevitably come once you've 0:14:46 bought in to the feminist mindset and and so this extends through all of islamic scholarship and 0:14:54 once you have undermined the moral legitimacy of all of these islamic scholars then really how can 0:15:02 you access the isl islam how can you access islam itself the only reason that we have islam the only 0:15:10 reason that we have the quran or we have hadith or we have we have you know tafsir or the spiritual 0:15:18 sciences of tasawa for any of these uh important islamic sciences ulum is because of this vast 0:15:28 rigorous uh tradition of islamic transmission the scholarly tradition this is this is the 0:15:35 only reason that we have it so then you have un you fundamentally undermined that tradition 0:15:40 just because of your feminist commitments but but it doesn't even stop there because 0:15:45 you have to start questioning um hadith you have to start questioning the quran 0:15:51 and this is where okay because you can still you can it's you know questionable whether 0:15:56 you can be a muslim if you've rejected the islamic tradition because you have no basis 0:16:03 for making claims about the quran and hadith or you're just being intellectually inconsistent 0:16:08 for example you say oh yeah i believe in um you know the this interpretation of the 0:16:13 quran okay well where did you get that interpretation of quran did you take it 0:16:18 from a scholar from the sky like from you know ibn kefir or imam kortubi from the tafsir tradition or 0:16:26 you just happen to have a understanding of the quran on your own that happens to match 0:16:33 the orthodox interpretation how convenient but in reality we see most of these feminists 0:16:40 completely heterodox and bring these deviant bizarre interpretations of the quran and academics 0:16:49 such as amina wadud for example who says outright that we should have the ability to say no to the 0:16:55 quran if we have a moral problem with something that we read in the quran and we see that this is 0:17:02 contrary to our conscience then we should have the moral right to say no to the quran and 0:17:09 it's a very difficult thing to understand because the quran is or describes itself as the actual 0:17:14 speech of god himself so it sounds like they're inviting people to say no to god and people who 0:17:20 say no to god are not normally characterized as believers rather as anti-believers there uh and 0:17:26 so on i mean i i'm reading from a very moderate translation here this is translation of the quran 0:17:31 by abdul haleem the famous british scholar and just the the famous 4 34 004 verse 34 which you 0:17:39 alluded to several times in your book and there are different translations of them this is a very 0:17:43 moderate translation it says husbands should take good care of their wives with the bounties god has 0:17:50 given to some more than others and with what they spend out of their own money righteous wives are 0:17:56 devout and god what what god has given them uh what god sorry what god would have them guard 0:18:03 in their husband's absence and so on but this is clearly patriarchal and this is god speaking 0:18:11 uh if you're a muslim obviously and there are many similar verses in the new testament and in 0:18:15 the jewish bible and probably in most scriptures in the world's religions it's not all scriptures 0:18:20 of the world's religion so to say no to to god whatever tradition you're in is quite a big price 0:18:26 to pay for your conscience as you put it yeah i mean this is actually the nature of feminism from 0:18:34 the first wave of feminism um activists like elizabeth caddy stanton for example or susan b 0:18:42 anthony they were very rapidly anti-religious and they identified like this is the main 0:18:50 support behind patriarchy as a concept within society is religion and so they were um 0:18:58 they understood very well their project to attack um the church and to attack the bible they even 0:19:07 wrote you know the woman's bible as a kind of act of defiance against the church like i'm and this 0:19:14 is we're talking about the 19th century imagine somewhat like a muslim today we we can complain 0:19:19 about amina wadud saying no to the quran but to her credit she hasn't written a woman's quran 0:19:26 right so this is but these are the these are the type of people that muslim feminists 0:19:33 hold in high regard as the founders of the feminist movement and and it's it's anti-religion 0:19:40 from its very beginning so it seems to me people do this they do they're not on this issue but on 0:19:45 the issue the homosexuality issue and so on they can say about the bible ah well the apostle paul 0:19:50 in romans chapter 1 or 1 corinthians 6 9 he didn't really understand modern understandings 0:19:55 of homosexuality and therefore what he said is strictly cultural is irrelevant we leave 0:20:00 it 2000 years ago but you're talking about the quran which every syllable claims to be from god 0:20:05 you can't say that god didn't understand you know he is eternally present he understands everything 0:20:11 and this is his final commandment his final word to mankind from a muslim point of view so you 0:20:17 can't make that hermeneutical move you're simply not open to one i don't think islamically anyway 0:20:25 yeah i completely agree the quran is setting a moral standard um from the time of the prophet 0:20:33 sallallahu alaihi wasallam till the end of time and if you're going to have 0:20:38 a moral objection that's going to create problems for your faith okay well that's that's very very 0:20:45 interesting thank you for that that's moving on now to uh that there may many gems actually in 0:20:50 this book if people uh get it um it's full of a very robust refutations of the contemporary 0:20:56 zeitgeist and there's just a little section here on page 18 if i if i may just read it 0:21:01 to uh viewers just so they get a flavor of uh daniel's book and it's and apparently an 0:21:08 um a not particularly gripping headlight it says the unintended implications of atheism 0:21:14 but i thought it was rather clever he writes materialists naturalists and atheists have a long 0:21:20 history of denying the existence of things that do not fit into their very narrow limited conception 0:21:26 of existence god is always number one on their list of targets for denial but what the public 0:21:34 does not realize and atheists do not publicize is that their naturalistic materialist philosophy 0:21:41 requires the denial of much more than god this is where it gets interesting i think they do not want 0:21:47 the public at large to be aware of this because then the people will wake up and see what a silly 0:21:53 picture of the world these philosophers these philosophies rather commit one two for example the 0:22:00 strict scientific empiricism required by the new atheists the idea that the only things that exist 0:22:07 are those observable and detectable by science also requires denying the existence of the minds 0:22:15 and certainly the minds of others science has not detected the mind only electrical 0:22:21 signals in the brain can be detected but that is not the same thing as the mind daniel writes 0:22:27 have you ever seen someone else's mind the test we can all do have you experienced their inner 0:22:33 thoughts have you felt their emotions no all we can see is external behavior the internal 0:22:41 mind of others is inaccessible to our perceptual faculties so does that mean that we disbelieve 0:22:48 that others possess consciousnesses like our own if we consistently apply the standards of 0:22:54 scientific empiricism used by atheists that would be the inescapable conclusion 0:23:00 doing so is preposterous which is why we reject scientific empiricism and the simple-minded 0:23:07 atheism that relies on it end quote so that's a typical bit of prose there from daniel in his 0:23:14 uh book lots of punchy arguments uh there um so i'll leave that for you but there's anything you 0:23:20 want to to add to that i mean is it really the case we can't obviously we can't see people's 0:23:25 minds we can't know what people think but is there no way of yet or gauging what the contents of 0:23:31 someone's mind is are we really that in the dark about consciousness well this is a common point 0:23:37 that's made um that's related to what's called the hard problem of consciousness um but basically 0:23:45 our thoughts and our our feelings are things that are only accessible to us and they're and 0:23:53 it's completely opaque uh to anyone outside of us and so what scientists or neurobiologists can 0:23:59 do is they can associate certain kind of signals whether it's electrical signals or hormone signals 0:24:05 neurotransmitters um with certain emotions or certain parts of the brain are lighting up 0:24:12 in their scans but it's but that feeling like what is this person feeling or the phenom what's 0:24:19 called the phenomenology of it cannot be by its nature by definition cannot be experienced by 0:24:26 anyone else does that mean it does not exist right um and there are many things that are 0:24:33 non-empirical and non-perceptible that we completely take for granted and we have no problem 0:24:40 accepting um for example the past you know the past do we really how can we know that the 0:24:47 our memories are of what has happened in the past haven't just been implanted and this is actually 0:24:53 what they would say one of the professors uh at harvard uh in his classes he would begin the class 0:25:00 by saying well how can can anyone prove to me that we didn't just pop into existence five minutes ago 0:25:10 and all of our memories of the past also uh our brains came loaded with that kind of false 0:25:16 information can you prove to me that that's not the case can you point to anything empirical 0:25:22 that would disprove that no you can't prove point anything empirical because 0:25:28 because of the way that i've defined the problem those have also been just created five minutes ago 0:25:33 yeah this is a criterion skip this is a card rene descartes methodology of systematic methodological 0:25:39 doubt but then he said i i don't doubt that i'm doubting congito eros son i think therefore i am i 0:25:46 doubt therefore i am but of course the repository is and presumably it's implicit in your point that 0:25:50 even that thought could actually be implanted by an evil genius into my brain which is like in a 0:25:56 vat and even that could be artificially created so unfortunately even cartesian skepticism doesn't uh 0:26:02 uh it's not skeptical enough i would argue anyway well yeah and so this is um the 0:26:07 cartesian skepticism is one mode of skepticism in western philosophy the other more influential 0:26:15 form of skepticism that has been adopted by atheists is human skepticism from david hume 0:26:22 and um this is actually what the the passage you read is alluding to it's human skepticism that 0:26:30 insists on empirical data and sense data that our understanding of everything is because our senses 0:26:38 are taking in information from the world and and our mind forms this kind of map of the external 0:26:45 world but how can we be sure that that external world exists and this is the kind of questioning 0:26:51 that hume presents and it leads him to a kind of solipsism actually yeah because he denied 0:26:58 causality even he said that we can't be sure that a cause b like the billiard balls famously 0:27:04 how do we know how do we know that fire burns wool how we can't this was taken up ironically 0:27:10 well not perhaps ironically in occasionalism and ash right theology where you have this 0:27:14 um similar um world view yeah you're saying causality is an illusion the reality is just one 0:27:21 thing happening after another yes in a linear uh timeline and it's only our an illusion of 0:27:27 the mind that there's a cause and effect so yeah when it comes to this kind of skepticism like any 0:27:34 atheist should really be a solipsist because the kind of skepticism that's used against 0:27:41 god applies just as much to all of these things in that humans take for granted as truth but they're 0:27:49 not non-empirical truths there's no empirical you know uh proof of the internal mind or the past or 0:27:59 time itself what is time it's not a material thing um yeah time passes yeah we take all of these 0:28:06 things for granted but this so if you look at at some debates that atheists have um some of the 0:28:14 top atheist uh public intellectuals there's one person matt dillahunty have you heard of this guy 0:28:21 i haven't actually no i perhaps i should have yeah he's american and he uh is probably the most 0:28:28 well-known youtube atheist but he often engages with people like sam harris and richard dawkins 0:28:35 yeah yeah he's like one level below them in terms of his notoriety but but he was actually pressed 0:28:42 you know or he's often pressed by christians on these kinds of issues and ultimately he 0:28:49 has to concede that yeah i really can't refute solipsism i can't deny that i'm not a solipsist 0:28:55 despite you know despite myself so they can't just come out and be card-carrying solipsists because 0:29:02 it's so absurd to most people it's so computing isn't it because you can't say anything meaningful 0:29:06 if if we are the if i am the only reality i should say because i can only speak about myself as a 0:29:11 solipsist scientist but what do you think about i mean this is slightly changing going 0:29:15 away from your book but even tamir's response to this kind of magical skepticism which is a 0:29:19 completely reframe the whole issue strikes me as rather compelling you know saying well 0:29:24 we can't say anything about external reality if we go down the radical skeptic road so we need to 0:29:29 uh you know rooted in our fitra understanding of causality and so on god is a fundamental of that 0:29:35 reality and without god we can't have anything no perception nothing intelligible can be said 0:29:40 about reality whatsoever so you know there are some things that are just given that we have to 0:29:45 work with and accept that we can't go behind them if i've understood even correctly 0:29:52 yeah i i understand him uh and those who argue in this kind of tamian line as making a sort 0:30:00 of transcendental argument um and it's what i mean by transcendental argument because this 0:30:07 is an argument that's also picked up in the western tradition by people like emmanuel kant 0:30:12 and others but basically the the idea of a transcendental argument as a response to hume the 0:30:18 kind of skepticism that hume has is that by virtue of speaking or thinking about these issues yeah 0:30:27 that has to presuppose a reality exactly exactly and so this so you cannot doubt it it would be 0:30:38 you know the kind of contradiction as analogous to saying this sentence is false right so that 0:30:45 that kind of performative contradiction yeah uh so this is i think a very interesting and 0:30:51 sophisticated argument against human skeptics i think it's a defeater of human human skepticism 0:30:56 and uh that's the way that i read evan tamiya when he's discussing the fitra 0:31:01 yeah okay um moving on and as someone who's studied physics at harvard what do you think 0:31:07 is the best evidence for the existence of god the creator of the heavens and the earth 0:31:14 well i find um a lot of the arguments to be intuitive um and to have to carry uh a 0:31:23 lot of intuitive weight and i think that human beings are uh natural theists this is actually 0:31:32 the statement of many psychologists today that they say that humans are naturally theistic 0:31:40 and that we are born as theists believing in a creator god and they do studies of children and 0:31:46 i did an um actual episode of this series on my youtube channel uh genius of islam 0:31:52 and there's the second episode of this series is dedicated to atheism and so i cite different um 0:32:00 academics in that non-muslim academics in that where they acknowledge that when we look and we 0:32:06 asked children at a young age you know who created you know a car who created a house who created you 0:32:14 know a building child children will say well man these are these are all man-made things uh and 0:32:21 but when they ask the children okay who created this mountain who created this ocean who created 0:32:26 the sky children will say oh god god created that and these children are not necessarily in 0:32:34 theistic cultures so japanese children were asked this question uh and they what's fascinating is 0:32:42 that shinto religion doesn't have a concept of a creator god like that concept is absent 0:32:49 in the their religion so you can't say they were socialized to give this kind of response um 0:32:55 olivera petrovic is the researcher she's oxford researcher and and she wrote a paper and then 0:33:01 a book about this and so there are many kinds of arguments uh i think there's the um cosmological 0:33:10 argument contingency argument i prefer or what i find very compelling to me and i guess uh 0:33:18 eben tamiya rahima low would also agree with me is that the i guess what's called the design argument 0:33:25 so there when i look at the into the world and i see the complexity and the beauty and 0:33:33 the grandeur uh the sublime nature of the world around me and you know i i reflect on the the 0:33:40 human body or the human cell and the complexity i just there's i i can't it's not like i'm 0:33:50 doing a kind of a deduction in my mind that oh okay things are complex therefore god exists 0:33:57 rather i just see that this is a creation of god i just experience it as this is from from god and 0:34:07 so i don't i don't think that i think there can be many compelling arguments 0:34:11 deductive arguments inductive arguments abductive argument to the best explanation arguments that 0:34:18 can be given to establish uh the existence of god but i think ultimately what drives 0:34:25 the compellingness of all of these arguments are deep intuitions that we have which which is 0:34:31 the fifth raw but if you don't want to accept if a non-muslim doesn't want to accept the idea of just 0:34:36 look at all the research that shows that children are born with this kind of understanding of the 0:34:42 world that it's a create that's been created yeah there's research has been done at harvard univer 0:34:48 malta and in oxford uh by academics not religious psychologists and others uh investigating uh the 0:34:55 question of children's belief and it seems to be universal as you say every culture every 0:34:59 civilization throughout history as far as we can see uh bears witness to uh this belief um 0:35:06 and it doesn't seem to depend on a particular religious context shintoism as you say is not 0:35:11 a theistic uh religion and the quran itself endlessly reiterates this the signs the ayat 0:35:17 the the of god's uh power of his majesty of his creator creative uh mobility um in creation so um 0:35:25 yeah that's very good thank you um if we can just shift gear a little bit here perhaps to another 0:35:31 subject that you're very passionate about um and i'm in france and they're passionate about it here 0:35:36 too and that is secularism we have a religion in france it's the official religion of the french 0:35:41 republic and it's called secularism by esct in french um you don't like secularism very much 0:35:49 so there's an understatement of the the of the hour um what's wrong with secularism daniel
0:35:57 where where can i start how much time do we have okay yeah so um secularism is 0:36:08 i mean from uh any kind of believing perspective or standpoint secularism is uh completely 0:36:17 anti-religion obviously the deeper point is that it's a human because remember that if 0:36:25 as we claim human beings are theistic inherently naturally you have a system that is 0:36:35 taking god completely out of the public sphere and saying that god has no relevance to the way 0:36:43 that we ultimately organize our lives in the way that we ultimately run our society 0:36:51 so this should be understood as an anti-human ideology a an ideology that is actually going 0:36:57 to destroy humanity and and this is i think what we are seeing i think secularism is 0:37:04 destroying humanity and this is what i argue in the book in many many places but a lot of as as a 0:37:11 sign of the fact that this is happening take these universal human values that muslims share with 0:37:19 non-muslims like the value of marriage you know we all value uh the idea of marriage love between 0:37:30 people let's just say love you know and forming these kinds of romantic relations between people 0:37:36 uh of the opposite gender let's say that this is a universal value how about the value of family 0:37:44 you know whether it's nuclear or extended family there there's a human who is going to say that 0:37:49 no family has no value i mean that would be the extreme minority most people say yeah this is 0:37:54 something that human beings value having healthy happy families what about community uh communal 0:38:00 bonds um and and human beings naturally form groups and that that is you know in the modern 0:38:09 world because of how much uh secularism and modernity has destroyed these kinds of relations 0:38:16 nowadays people uh congregate around these artificial relations like uh what sports team 0:38:24 do you love like let's rally around manchester united or liverpool or what and they get very 0:38:31 aggressive around their team but they have these kinds of deep bonds with their fellow fans 0:38:38 uh around sports for example or um i don't know star wars or harry potter or whatever 0:38:45 these kinds of these kinds of uh this forms identity um so communal identity is another 0:38:52 very important part of the human experience and uh and then religion as i mentioned religion is 0:38:59 also very important to human to human beings so all on all these fronts secularism is destroying 0:39:08 all of these things that we value the pair bonding and romantic bonding 0:39:16 marriage and also long-term committed relationships have been have gone off 0:39:21 a cliff how how i didn't quite catch that how is secularism directly attacking or undermine 0:39:26 undermining f family or uh love marriage and so on the way you're describing what's the causality 0:39:33 there so secularism is again part of secularism is liberalism so whenever i um write or i discuss 0:39:46 secularism i pair it and i say that we have a liberal secularism 0:39:51 and liberal secularism is based on this philosophy that we have to maximize individual liberty and we 0:39:59 have to maximize uh equality and that cannot be done according to a secularist if the law of the 0:40:06 land is based on a particular religion so these things go hand in hand and they're synonymous 0:40:13 in many ways but when you are prioritizing individual liberty then this is going to 0:40:22 create a lot of problems in these other domains of life why because if your marriage 0:40:29 for example requires you to sacrifice your individual preferences marriage requires you 0:40:35 to sometimes say okay this is what i would prefer this would give me the most gratification instant 0:40:41 gratification but i have to put that aside for the sake of this marriage this institution 0:40:48 that that is a cost that the liberal secular world order is constantly conditioning us to 0:40:56 avoid making those kinds of sacrifices and you see this online i mean social media is replete with 0:41:03 these men and women who will admit like oh i'm just so tired of my relationship this guy is 0:41:11 holding me back uh my wife is holding me back i'm tired of it i need to pursue my own dreams 0:41:17 i need to pursue my own life my own interests he's this so there's this constant drive to prioritize 0:41:27 your own interests and your own dreams and your own career that puts marriage uh on the back 0:41:36 burner so that's marriage what about family family look at the kinds of lives that people are living 0:41:41 individuals individualistic lives where fam why should i care about my parents why should i care 0:41:47 about my aunts and uncles they're irrelevant this is something that is not relevant to me 0:41:54 pursuing my life goals in fact i'm going to move to the other side of the world 0:42:00 for a job even though it means i won't see any family member for maybe months or years at a time 0:42:08 that's fine like this is the kind of this is there's not not even a second thought about 0:42:12 that in the in the modern mind like yeah of course who and if if someone were to say that actually no 0:42:18 i'm i prefer to stay in my hometown because i want to be closer to my family that's seen as something 0:42:24 weird that's seen as something quite unusual oh really you want okay that's that's interesting 0:42:30 choice that you're making you're sacrificing your career for family so these are what's 0:42:36 happening now is that all of these important human bonds and human ties are being dissolved 0:42:42 and are all kinds of statistics that that show how much uh marriage family communal bonds 0:42:50 all of these are are suffering uh to such a huge extent um and religious belief because of this 0:42:57 liberal secular world order that is being imposed everywhere well this this this really makes very 0:43:04 acute though the position of muslims and not just muslims there are some traditionalists catholics 0:43:09 perhaps maybe some traditions evangelicals ultra orthodox jews as well but particularly muslims 0:43:15 due to the numerical sheer number of muslims in the world of course is that if if muslims 0:43:20 are at odds with the liberal secular order with the american republic with the french republic 0:43:26 and with britain as well because it's more or less the same thing even though there is a monarchy 0:43:30 um then they they could be perceived then as out of touch with the social order so what is the role 0:43:38 of muslims in these countries and if they reject the prevailing social order lock stock and barrel 0:43:45 then that they are suggesting the alternative which is whatever an islamically run or the 0:43:51 society that is run in accord with the divine law understood as sharia or the halakhah or christian 0:43:57 law whatever that may be um so what i'm trying to say is that the the muslims and these other groups 0:44:03 are then perceived as dissidents as radicals as revolutionaries as counter revolutionaries 0:44:09 it's not just like a just a view to have it has repercussions politically does it not in terms of 0:44:14 stigma in terms of labeling subversive dangerous whatever so and this is quite a a risky in today's 0:44:23 world that's quite a risky position to take is it not in the united states in france germany britain 0:44:29 that the one could be labelled certain bad words by the authorities by the state by the police 0:44:35 by the media so this is not just an intellectual game and i'm not suggesting you are saying it's a 0:44:40 game but it's much more than that it affects how we're perceived by our peers by the state itself 0:44:46 is it not well yeah of course i think that the way that you've described it is exactly 0:44:52 the way that these liberal state authorities understand it and this is why they spend so much 0:44:59 uh resources to crush any kind of dissent against the liberal order and um look at how much uh money 0:45:10 and resources they have spent in the uk in the us and canada australia to attack muslims 0:45:18 and to demonize muslims and to basic and this is just in their countries look at the kind of uh 0:45:26 operations that they've been doing in the muslim world for the past 200 years with colonialism and 0:45:32 neocolonialism to stamp out any kind of non-liberal political expression this is 0:45:41 the most brutal the most brutal type of crackdown is on muslims because muslims are the only ones 0:45:51 who have not basically compromised on liberalism and secularism and we've been insistent that no 0:45:59 because we we're we recognize what is at stake we're talking about a human if we're talking about 0:46:08 humanity itself it's not just muslims so when we advocate and when i write you know the book 0:46:14 modernist menace to islam it could have been the modernist menace to humanity you know it's because 0:46:20 it's not just muslims that are impacted it's the entire globe humanity itself is uh being impacted
0:46:30 if i may um some people may see you as a radical voice a dangerous voice and i just wanted to 0:46:36 um juxtapose that with a video i saw on youtube it came up a couple of days ago with someone i happen 0:46:42 to know uh he's variously known as doctor tim winter at the university of cambridge 0:46:46 of a mild-mannered professor a sufi he's a convert to islam he's also called 0:46:51 sheikh abdul hakeem murad as i say he's a muslim i mentioned him because he is a very 0:46:58 moderate figure but on a recent video he had a discussion much like we're having on youtube 0:47:04 but he's there now he publicly criticized the what's called the prevent program in the uk 0:47:10 this is uh labeled as a government or police program that is ostensibly uh you know protecting 0:47:16 the public preventing terrorism extremism but he was criticizing the chilling effect that this has 0:47:23 had on the muslim community in just speaking out on everyday issues and this is him saying this 0:47:28 and i know tim i mean he is not someone given to speaking out really isn't on these kind of 0:47:36 things he is a very mild figure and for tim abdul hakim to speak out publicly like this 0:47:41 shows the level of frustration that i every level and he was saying look this this program this 0:47:48 state program um muslims feel targeted by it and they feel they can't speak out on certain issues 0:47:55 they didn't see what the issues were but i can tell you what they are because i happen to know 0:47:59 what they are they are muslims can't speak out about palestine they can't speak out against 0:48:05 zionism why because it's anti-semitism so-called allegedly and they can't speak out on lgbtq issues 0:48:12 very often because they'll be perceived as haters whatever so the whole discourse 0:48:18 on many controversies that have been shut down um so it's not just daniel or sponsored viewers 0:48:23 no it is a a wide range of islamic intellectual uh content it is um is being affected by this liberal 0:48:32 authoritarianism both in britain i know it happens in france and elsewhere possibly in america too 0:48:38 so it's a serious problem across the board i think yeah and this kind of censorship um and these 0:48:44 kinds of programs like you mentioned prevent in the u.s is called cve countering violent extremism 0:48:52 these programs are expanding rapidly like muslims were the first targets of these programs now it's 0:48:59 expanding basically anyone who has a conservative view on any of these issues whether it's lgbt 0:49:05 whether it's you know immigration whether it's any of these kinds of issues if you 0:49:10 have a conservative view or even women's issues then you are you're considered a violent threat 0:49:18 um and you will be surveilled you will possibly be detained you'll possibly 0:49:23 end up on a no-fly list uh your bank accounts can be seized or frozen um all of these kinds 0:49:30 of things it's more than just chilling free speech people are being thrown in prison 0:49:35 yeah and if you're and if you are in the muslim world you could be assassinated you could end up 0:49:40 you know being disappeared uh into some cave somewhere or some uh black site 0:49:46 all of this is has been used and why why is this um massive surveillance net or as you 0:49:56 called it liberal authoritarianism expanding it's because more and more people are realizing that 0:50:02 liberalism doesn't deliver the goods liberalism was supposed to be the path liberal secularism was 0:50:10 supposed to be the path to prosperity to this kind of utopia of complete equality between people and 0:50:17 we'd all be living happy lives with our families uh with our wives and children and be able all we 0:50:25 all people want to do is go to work you know whatever work it may be earn money bring it 0:50:32 back to their family enjoy life you know in the comfort of their a home that they own not 0:50:38 be under crippling debt not be constantly worried if they've gotten the latest injection of whatever 0:50:45 experimental drug not be worried about all of these kinds of uh programs aimed at children 0:50:51 uh tran you know drag queen story hour and um did you see the latest news about the lutheran 0:50:59 church that brought a trans uh person or drag queen to read a christmas story to children yeah
0:51:09 lutheran church in america so this is the kind of world that liberalism has created that liberal 0:51:16 secularism has provided and people are waking up and realizing that this was all false promises 0:51:24 this is all false promises and now more and more people are being pushed under the poverty line 0:51:30 in the supposedly superior west you know look at the amount of people on the level of homelessness 0:51:37 in the major u.s cities i don't know how it is in france in in britain in london where i 0:51:43 i'm also based uh i've never seen anything like it on almost every street corner you see people 0:51:48 literally sleeping in the streets and uh you know we i feel powerless i mean what come on do uh 0:51:53 it's extraordinary what you're saying absolutely true yeah so then people this is leading 0:51:58 to massive societal discontent and that is a volatile situation and so the liberal state has to 0:52:08 crack down basically and to maintain its power and so it's going to get increasingly violent 0:52:14 it's going to get increasingly brutal and the thing that distinguishes our time from 0:52:21 points in history is that now they have the technology to actually 0:52:25 put up a very good against a population where 90 of people are dissatisfied and 0:52:31 want to overturn the power structure now there that there are technological ways 0:52:38 either we're at that point or just to be about that point where it's going to be impossible to 0:52:44 change anything um unlike in the past and in the past if there was enough societal 0:52:50 discontent and enough people got into the streets you could overthrow you know the ruling authority 0:52:57 but we're reaching a point because of technology where that is not there's not 0:53:01 going to be any kind of popular uprising that can be successful because uh of the technocratic state
0:53:09 gosh that's clearly me this is this is my life paul this is my life 0:53:16 but surely it's not the house daniel i'm not being flippant here i i mean this seriously 0:53:21 if the quran teaches me anything it's that god is in control god is the lord of history and that 0:53:29 nothing happens apart from his will or agreement and so on so from a muslim point of view and also 0:53:36 from a traditional fierce view more generally from the abrahamic faith surely there's more to this 0:53:41 bad news than just the crumminess of our situation that god is however bad things are the lord of 0:53:49 history is the lord of history is that not the case yes i i don't think that we should ever 0:53:58 lose hope and there is the famous uh statement of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam peace 0:54:04 be upon him where he says that if you are in the middle of planting a tree or planting a sapling 0:54:11 and the day of judgment comes or the basically the apocalypse descends at that moment just continue 0:54:19 to plant the tree you know so even in that mo you're literally seeing the apocalypse with your 0:54:25 own eyes the advent of the end and in front of you but you're in the middle of planting a tree 0:54:31 well you'll never see the fruit of that tree the the end is already nigh uh but the prophet 0:54:38 peace be upon him says no continue to do your work so this is i think uh very irrelevant to our times 0:54:45 but when we look at islamic eschatology and what muslims and the world is going to face 0:54:51 it is very gloomy because it's not it's not a positive in many aspects there's there are going 0:54:57 to be major uh fitness or like these kind i think you did a recent video on fitness or fitnah right 0:55:05 now yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah so this is some of the most difficult and trying fitnas are going 0:55:13 to befall uh muslims towards the end of the time are we at the end of times now like is are those 0:55:18 major calamities going to befall now or do we still have some time left uh only god knows allah 0:55:25 but you know the believer is can be living in the most gloom and 0:55:33 uh difficult times that muslims have throughout history but what uh but that's as as the prophet 0:55:39 saw islam said that that's good for the believer because if he's patient with that then he'll be 0:55:44 rewarded in that in in the afterlife and that is ultimately what is most important i mean can you 0:55:51 i don't want to turn this into a big discussion about islamic eschatologies perhaps we're drawing 0:55:55 to it can close uh both uh societally and in this video but what what are some of the 0:56:00 indications uh that we might be seeing that are spoken of in the uh eschatological or the 0:56:06 apocalyptic hadith that are so well known do you have any indications of what they might be 0:56:12 uh well i think that one of the themes like it without going into one specific hadith one of the 0:56:21 major themes of uh islamic eschatology towards the end of times are that everything will be backwards 0:56:29 what is considered good what what is considered good is in reality evil and what is truly evil 0:56:37 will be considered something that's good so so there basically it's a time of delusions and 0:56:45 it's a time of uh deception and people for example will that the most trustworthy person will be seen 0:56:54 as a liar and and the biggest liar will be seen as trustworthy and um also when 0:57:02 it comes to gender roles um masculinity will be turned into feminism femininity and vice versa 0:57:08 so the this is i think we haven't seen any time period like we are our time period now 0:57:15 is categorically different than anything that we've seen in history and um these are the kinds 0:57:22 of signs that i notice and makes me feel like we're getting close to some kind of uh final 0:57:30 point yeah okay well that's that's that's very helpful thank you for that well uh in conclusion 0:57:34 that uh daniel is anything you'd just like to share with us as viewers um before we close 0:57:41 yeah so i think that um just to give more of a sense of where this this book is coming from to 0:57:49 make it like a more personal um uh so in terms of my background uh i'm persian so actually uh 0:57:59 iran obviously a muslim country has been muslim for centuries and uh i come from a long line of 0:58:08 um religious scholars basically and imams so like on my mother's side 0:58:16 my great grandfather he was like a mullah or a pharisee pharisees called
0:58:23 it's now it's a pejorative term now because iran iran has become so secularized 0:58:30 the people have become so secularized uh that now it's a pejorative term and on my father's side um 0:58:37 great great grandfather he was a body a judge and that's where the my name comes from 0:58:47 because means truth in arabic and jew means seeker so as a judge they called him 0:58:58 like the he's the true seeker he's trying to find the truth of a matter as a judge 0:59:02 so you have this long line of you know religious figures and 0:59:09 i you know my when i look at this generation my generation went throughout my extended family 0:59:14 like my father had 19 brothers and sisters so i have you know if you look at cousins and ex
0:59:23 second cousins i have hundreds of cousins basically and a very small or the majority 0:59:29 the vast majority of them are secular yeah so and even though a lot of them move to the west 0:59:36 but even the ones that are still in iran they're very deeply secular and religion has 0:59:42 islam has if they if they're neutral they might at best they're neutral about islam but many of 0:59:48 them actually are antagonistic to islam i mean so many iranians who in london who are just 0:59:54 just like that actually seems to be maybe their recent history is informing their views but yeah 0:59:59 yeah so this is something that i i think it is definitely iranians but uh all all of these kind 1:00:06 of muslim cultures have are experiencing something like this and so ultimately this is what led me 1:00:11 on a journey of like well why you know has this happened like just look at the loss 1:00:17 look at the and i experienced you know deep sense of loss just reflecting on all of this 1:00:23 um has gone down the drain basically in the modern world so there's this sense of tragedy 1:00:30 um that i think all muslims experience especially if they reflect if they have a family like this so 1:00:39 you know this book is kind of like a coping with with that uh yeah that unfortunate 1:00:44 reality i i just say i mean i i hear what you're saying it's very real it's just 1:00:49 in my experience both when i was a christian and and now i i was struck by how many uh how 1:00:56 robust the faith was of many young muslim men and women in london anyway uh the the the modernism or 1:01:05 skepticism or liberalism is not the dominant theme i mean so many young muslim guys inside who 1:01:10 are very robust and they've got lots of questions and they want to uh and they want to go out there 1:01:15 and do stuff and i was impressed by that i haven't seen that nearly as much in the christian church 1:01:20 in britain and it's supposed to be a christian country um um so i i'm not totally pessimistic i 1:01:27 i think there's a robust enduring faith in young muslim men and women as i say uh it could just 1:01:35 be my experience but i i i'm optimistic actually for the future although all these realities that 1:01:40 you outline are very real haven't said that so that's just my objective it's this kind of 1:01:46 um hedger money that is affecting everyone and so i think there are pockets of resistance and 1:01:53 we just should i mean it's just the ideological um and intellectual resistance i think we can 1:02:01 we should be concerned about other people even non-muslims to call them and show them that 1:02:06 look all of this kind of modern malays you are suffering from it you're a victim of it we're all 1:02:12 victims of it and islam is providing a solution to that at least recognize the problem this is why i 1:02:17 would say to muslims like at least non-muslims at least acknowledge that there is a problem 1:02:23 uh in the world today and that life and on any objective standard human life is becoming worse 1:02:31 at least acknowledge that and then we can talk about possible solutions if you want to talk 1:02:35 about christianity if you want to talk about um jewish law or whatever we can have that debate 1:02:41 at some point but at least acknowledge that all is not right this is serious uh 1:02:48 what is happening to everyone okay that's great well thank you very much daniel a few times an 1:02:54 incredible uh experience hearing your views and i'll link to uh the book uh beneath and 1:02:59 uh everyone please do leave your comments in the comment section below and thank you once again 1:03:05 daniel for all your time really appreciate it thank you paul until next time thank you