What We Can All Learn From Islam & The Quran | Hamza Yusuf | EP 255

everything went into a kind of slow motion and i i just it was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash

and it was and then i just saw like my inception all the way up to that moment um

and i just saw my whole life literally and it was it was just this as if i lived my life a second time but in a moment

[Music] hello everyone today i'm going to

continue my discussions with islamic thinkers or thinkers about islam i've had previous guests uh included ayan

herzeali mustafa akhyal and muhammad hijab i'm pleased to be speaking today with hamza yusuf who serves as president of zaytuna college a muslim liberal arts college in berkeley california

he's a strong advocate of liberal education in the classical sense he was raised in a religiously eclectic family attended orthodox christian services and catholic parochial boarding

schools at the age of 18 after study the major religions of the world he converted to islam he served as translator for the chief mufti of the uae and mauritania sheikh

abdullah bin bio i'm very pleased today to be talking to hamza welcome thanks for agreeing to talk to me today

yeah thank you so you you had a eclectic upbringing as your bio indicated you went to orthodox christian services were your were your family orthodox christian

i i have two sides of the family one were irish catholics and then my mother was half irish half greek so my greek grandfather who was an archon in the greek orthodox church

he actually had that influence on on us so we were actually raised in his church but my mother was

she was actually would have considered herself a buddhist most of my um upbringing and her her mother who was an irish

woman and her brother my great uncle uh were from georgia and they actually were interested in buddhism in the 1920s

and moved out to san francisco and my great-uncle george fields opened fields bookstore which was the first metaphysical bookstore on the west coast

and it specialized just in a lot of different ways he actually was the first publisher of gerdjiff's works the fourth way works in in the u.s

and it's actually still it's an online bookstore now fields bookstore but so it's getting more it's getting more metaphysical all the time it's it was once a building and now it's virtual and

yeah it's a it's a bad joke but so you add you were exposed to a lot of different religious ideas by the sounds of things when you grew up um right and how how much did you learn about

orthodox christianity uh well i had i had my grandfather had us take greek lessons i went to greece i went to a greek orthodox camp when i was 12 years old in greece

i served the altar in the orthodox church so i i was reasonably involved and then i went to catholic schools so the orthodox tradition the catholic tradition aren't that different even

though they split in the 11th century over a diphthong as gibbon points out so when you were a kid and you were going to services do you how can you

remember well enough to characterize your beliefs at that time i mean i started having trouble with the ideas in christianity i guess when i was probably around 12 so

i'm wondering what your reaction was as a thinker that young i mean i i really love the greek service uh i love the frank incense they had great uh

these uh chants that were quite beautiful and it was very ritualistic and i i enjoyed it i had no problem

uh going to church i think like many kids at that age especially growing up in california

during that period because my formative years were the late 60s and early 70s so there was a lot of work we're a transitional generation there were a lot of radical changes

happening and california was kind of at the heart of a lot of those things but my mother did expose us to a lot of different uh faith traditions she actually took me

we went to synagogues we went to buddhist song guys we went to um different christian iterations um she also took me to a mosque when i

was 12 years old in redwood city and she was of the belief that much of religion is is a

it's this interesting where you're born and where you're brought up and that's going to determine and color the way you view the world and so she had this idea that religions

that it's very dangerous to assume just because you were born into something that that's the end-all of truth and so she was eclectic in that way

yeah so your mother was of the opinion that i guess correct me if i'm wrong there's a couple of aspects to religious thinking that are interesting and relevant given what you said i mean

one is to think of it as a set of philosophies and beliefs that you might hold like you would hold a set of philosophical or even academic beliefs and another is to become a member of a community

a community of belief and i guess the the argument you might make for the latter point is that there's something there has to be something that unites all of us in order

for us to be a community and so that proposition is hard to reconcile with the first one which is that you should be free to choose your beliefs as you would a philosophy

because if everybody chooses different beliefs then we have a hell of a time living together and that can be a problem well i think that's one of the real problems in california i mean that's

that's a very much uh this liberal idea that everything we're free to choose and be whatever we want and what do you think of that idea so

now you're much older than you were when your mother was taking you from a place of worship to place of worship i mean how would you address the problem of let's say the

conflict between freedom of choice and religion as philosophers philosophical belief and and religion as a as a cultural centerpiece that unites people

well i think that i raised my children muslim and and i hope that they remain in the muslim faith but i have to acknowledge the possibility that that might not be the case

given where we live and and the environment so i i'm very committed to the islamic tradition and i believe it to be true and i think i ha you know i feel like

i've acquired clear and compelling evidence for myself of its truth but i understand the importance of religion as a glue that holds things together and i

think when you lose that glue in any culture you're going to have great problems that emerge out of that yeah the question starts to become very rapidly

if there's no shared ground that's sacred let's say to unite people then what in the world are they supposed to unite around and because if they don't unite then they exist in

conflict and so that seems and in confusion and in anxiety and that seems to be a very meddlesome or what not meddlesome very a very difficult problem

well i i think part of the problem with you know modernity uh is grappling with the fact that a lot of these

grand narratives have broken down largely in the 20th century i mean the beginnings were happening already in the 17th 18th century but by the 20th

century there amongst the intelligentsia there's a huge problem particularly in in the west but not only in the west i think even within the muslim ethos you already had these um

ideas that were going to massively impact the culture so it's something we're all grappling with um it's it's an interesting time

in that um people do have certain abilities to look at things in ways that perhaps growing

up in an environment that really dictated to people what they would believe norms for instance just cultural norms i mean

a lot of religion ends up being cultural and it's it's a practice it's a cultural practice and a lot of people don't ever really have to deal with this in fact i think james charles taylor has a very interesting

book revisiting james the variety's religious experience and he talks about this idea that james looks at people who have

religion in this sanguine sense they simply accept their religion that they're born into and then they and then they just live and practice that and very often they have very solid lives in

that environment but then he talks about and he calls those healthy people then he talks about the sick people who actually have to grapple with these different phases he looks at

melancholy religious melancholy this idea of being in a melancholic state about the alienation of the world about the trials of the world the uncanniness of the

world the strangeness of it and then i think the second he looks at the just the the problem of evil the grappling with this problem of evil and

that third one is the sense of wrong doing right that that a lot of people feel sin yeah that's a terrible one right now i mean i think part of the reason why

our culture is rivened apart by political trouble at the moment is because issues that should be discussed at the level of the sacred have started to be discussed at the level of the political and so

there's a pervasive accusation against let's say western culture in particular coming from the more radical side of the left

claiming that our culture or the western culture is a tyrannical patriarchy and an oppressive colonial enterprise and of course all cultures are contaminated

with catastrophe and atrocity as well and we actually need to know what to do about that you know the christian doctrine of original sin is some help in

that because it makes the fact of the legacy of human evil let's say something personal but also transpersonal at the same time right

it's part of the human condition and it looks to me like without that container the guilt we have about the arbitrariness of life and the arbitrariness of our privileges

can start to become overwhelming and then it can also become weaponized which has certainly happened under at the present at the present time and to a dangerous degree so you can go after people for

their privilege let's say and they do feel guilty because advantages and disadvantages are sort of parsed out to some degree arbitrarily and then you know they collapse in the

face of that onslaught and apologize and retreat and it just doesn't look to me like that's a good thing at all well it's it's not a good thing if you don't have a religious world view that

gives meaning to those situations for instance i mean one of the most important aspects of the quran i think is that it really gives

answers to these uh inequities in the world but what uh some of term the mystery of iniquity and

the the quran one of the hallmarks of a believer is uh gratefulness gratitude in fact the word in arabic for disbeliever

means ungrateful and in great um and and so gratitude for blessings and then patience for trials and tribulations and and so

there's many verses in the quran that talk about that we have raised some of you over others in privilege as a test to show

who will be the best in action who what are you going to do with those privileges how are you going to respond to those tribulations so if you have a

a world view that actually incorporates all of the problems in the world and gives them meaning then it enables people to look at them in a very different way whereas if you remove that

you're stuck with just marxist results yeah yeah yeah so all right let's i'm going to go back to your conversion because i want to understand how that happened but i'm happy about the

direction this discussion is taking so it seems to me that when you realize that you're let's say arbitrarily blessed by a certain set of advantages

now everyone is cursed with a certain set of disadvantages too so we can take that into account but so you're grateful for your privileges let's say you regard them as a gift or

maybe you regard them as something akin to grace and then it seems to me that the appropriate thing to do is attempt to atone for them which is that you try to make your advantages work for

you and for everyone else to the best of your possible ability and then in some sense you pay you pay for for having them that way you're given a gift and then you do what

you can with it you do the best you can with it and share it with people and and and and don't try to take narrow advantage of it you said that there are there's islamic commentary on that kind

of idea and so maybe you could walk me through that a bit gratitude that's very interesting one because it does seem to me that it's certainly easier on people psychologically if they're grateful for

what they have rather than resentful and bitter about what they don't have and why is that associated with belief per se let's say in islam well

first of all the gift of being itself i'm just the the participation in being is a great gift and in fact that you know the the the german word for for guilt is

actually a sense of debt and so the and the word in arabic for religion is debt it means debt so we we we have this sense of indebtedness

because we've been given so much just just the gift of life itself is just such an extraordinary gift and so religion you know in the islamic understanding

it's it's an act of gratitude it's you're showing gratitude for all that you've been given and in fact when you get reached the highest

levels of our tradition even the tribulations are seen as gifts because they're actually ways in which we learn there's an unveiling that happens and great

knowledge comes out of suffering great knowledge comes out of trials and tribulations and so in in our tradition the highest people are those who actually are are grateful

in trials and tribulations as well as in blessings and gifts because they see it all as a gift i always think of nietzsche's comment on

it when that sort of idea comes up which is whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger because the reverse of that is whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you and

the the problem i think that people face when they're trying to be sorry for tribulations is that you can learn from them but they can also just grind you into the ground and destroy

you and they do i mean people do die we suffer and die and so right in the final analysis in some sense we're defeated by by our mortal vulnerability and well

go ahead go ahead i'm sorry oh well when it visits you when a catastrophe visits you sometimes you recover and you think well i learned a lot but i don't know if it's

i don't know how salutary it is in general to make that a general case you know what i mean given that people suffer so much and sometimes it seems so pointless i know what you mean psychologically you

know if you're suffering with something catastrophic and you become resentful that certainly makes it far worse there's no doubt about that and it makes you a danger to people around you so

it's not helpful but it's sure understandable well there's a there's a very interesting uh do you know jacques lesser that he wrote a book called and there

was light he was that he was a he was a french resistance fighter and he wrote he wrote this very interesting autobiography but one of the things that happened to him when he was

eight years old he was in school and he and some some kid accidentally bumped into him and he fell onto the desk and he ended up losing both his eyes uh in that in that event one of the

things that he said that really struck me when i read that was he said that he was very grateful to god that that happened to him as a child and then he gave two reasons the first

reason was he said a child's body is still supple and they're still coming into their body so to lose his sight at that time was was very useful because somebody who's older

if they lose their their sight it's very difficult for them to readjust to the world that was the first reason for his gratitude but the second reason was he said a child does not

question injustice of events it doesn't think that events are unjust it can see injustice from people

but events just happen to children and they don't really put that valence on it as something why did god do this to me and as somebody who

worked in pediatrics for a period as a as a registered nurse it always struck me you know the parents were always devastated but the children were in these uh quite extraordinary

states and lesoran says that it's only when parents actually give the child that idea of of that something's wrong here will

they will they do that but normally children just simply accept that and i think that has a lot due to what christ said that you know that the way you come to god is like like children and i think

that's that's at the heart of it it's just accepting because the sense of entitlement that human beings have is overwhelming this idea that we're all entitled to health that we're entitled to

uh wealth that we're entitled to uh for things to work out that's it's not the way life is designed it never was and it's something the ancients

really understood and i think modern people have a really difficult time grappling with this because they're not well spiritually and pre-modern people i think generally were much healthier uh

spiritually and certainly all of these pre-modern civilizations understood that life was trial and tribulation first and foremost i mean the quran actually says

that it's god who created death and life to try you just to show to reveal who is the best of you in actions and so

accepting that is is a really great um is a really great gift and and if anything i mean that's the gift of grace one of one of the great um

scholars of our tradition said that he was so burdened his name was ibn al-qaeda he was an egyptian but he said he was so burdened with with uh his self and he went to

this teacher um abraham and he when he came in he said to him all of the world is just four conditions and each of those conditions has a

response the first condition is blessing and the response is gratitude the second condition is tribulation and the response is patience the third condition

is obedience and the response is humility is to see that the grace in that obedience and the and the fourth uh circumstance is sinfulness and the

response is repentance so that's a taxonomy for life itself so repentance that's an interesting one because

one of the things our culture seems to have a difficult time with too is allowing people to repent this social media in particular seems to have put a lot of advantage in the hands of

accusers and attackers and so people are mobbed or cancelled or so forth and it it's a rare person who doesn't have something

in their past let's say that might make them the target of such treatment but and that means that's a universal problem as well and it isn't obvious that we have a mechanism for repentance

and reintegration that's nearly as powerful as the mechanisms we've developed for accusation and exclusion i guess i guess i should throw a question on to the end of that no no

that's fine and i thought well you look like you were still thinking about it well i'm just i guess what i'm wondering is what what how would you characterize the

islamic view of repentance and people talk a lot about the necessity to forgive hey and i've thought that through fairly thoroughly as a clinical psychologist because

forgiveness isn't in my estimation isn't just a a simple act of letting something go because if something's bothering you it's not that easy to let it go if if you have a

problem with someone there's a gospel story about that you're not supposed to go pray in the church if you have a fight with pending with your brother an unresolved fight with your

brother you straighten that out first my experience as a clinician has been that for forgiveness to take place generally speaking there has to be a discussion

between the parties involved or at least a very lengthy session of thought by the person who's aggravated and offended to take

apart the offense to detail out its characteristics to separate the wheat from the chaff to understand exactly what went wrong to

negotiate an agreement moving forward that such things won't happen like there's there seems to be this continual interplay between judgment and forgiveness in something that's that really is

akin to forgiveness and for you to repent about something that you've done it seems to me that the same process of discrimination has to take place is

why did something wrong well exactly what did you do wrong and exactly why did you do it and why do you think it was wrong and what do you think that you should have done better and how are you going to conduct yourself in the future

and two questions then one is that in keeping with your understanding of what constitutes repentance and second what are the islam how would you characterize islamic thought on that

particular matter well i is the islamic tradition like the jewish and christian before have this idea of repentance um

the the in the greek new testament word metanoia is a beautiful word because it's really you know the idea of transforming the mind changing the mind

in arabic it's the idea of turning and and so there's there's this idea that the heart turns towards disobedience and then it has to turn back towards obedience

and so that that turning then one of the names of god is tawa in arabic which means the off turning the one who turns back when you turn to god god turns to you

uh and so this idea of turning back to god is very important and the prophet muhammad sallallahu is you know he taught us actually to do this at least 70 times a day

so muslims as a as a practice actually ask forgiveness preferably at least 70 times a day just saying a stuff that a lot it's something that we do as a spiritual practice and

part of the reason why we pray five times a day the prophetic son was once asked about a man who lives next to a river and he goes into it and he washes

five times a day he said do you think that you would see any filth on him and they said no and he said that's what prayer is it's like washing it's like bathing in a

river five times a day i mean one of the reasons we do lustration with uh water is a ritual purification so we wash our face we purify

our our eyes and our and our tongue we actually rinse our mouth with water before we pray and and then we wash our hands our limbs and then our feet and

and the idea is about really turning back to god because these gifts that we've been given these seven limbs that we have been given are gifts from god that should be used in good and so

the idea you know it's interesting that in in old english in new testament greek and hebrew and arabic the word for sin is an archery term

which means to to miss them it's the mark yes right and and so this idea you know uh uh this this great basketball player was

once asked what he thought about when he missed a shot he said too far too short too much to the left too much to the right that that that's what sin is it's it's basically we there's omission or

commission we did too much of something too little of something to deviate to the left or the right and so it's finding that sweet spot of

obedience uh and being in a state of ritual purity and then we have conditions so in order for a repentance to be sound

uh it has to be sincere the person actually has to have a sincere repentance it has to be done like if you're actually right and sincere

sincere means to recognize the wrongdoing and to strive not to do it again with that yeah definition of sincerity i yeah sincerity the arabic word for sincerity

is related to the word for purity and untainted and and so it's done without ulterior motives because sometimes people will will ask forgiveness and they just don't

want to be cut out of the will right that's an instrumental forgiveness right exactly okay so you you talked this is quite interesting so you

wandered through territory there that linked up physical disgust and contamination with psychological and spiritual disgust and contamination and it's my experience with people that a

good number of them feel guilty and out of sorts and alienated a good amount of the time and you say well this that sin means to miss the mark and

the reason they feel alienated at least in principle is because they're missing the mark and of course then the question is well what exactly is the mark and it seems to me that

you you you drew a parallel between prayer and washing and both of them are to remove disgusting contaminants let's say and

one of the signs that someone has a conscience although conscience can be over active and that can be a problem is that they are laboring under a burden of self-disgust and

self-contempt and they do feel their moral transgressions as something contemptuous and beneath them and base and so this

prayer upward let's say to a higher aim and a reminder of that which in your tradition you're doing at least five you're doing five times a day

that's a constant attempt to set yourself on the right track so that your aim can be true it's a reorientation it's a

reorientation yeah do you think even physiologically speaking it seems likely that there's a relationship between the the idea of decontaminating yourself

by becoming clean and spiritually decontaminating yourself with reference to something to a higher aim well i think people do like you said and i'm sure you've seen this a lot in

clinical practice people do feel unwell and they feel sick and and modern psychology attempts to give them

you know the anti-christic formula is to say unlike christ who said go and sin no more you know the the anti-christic formula is to say go and there's no more

sin so i'm just going to remove that bag of bricks that you're you're right you absolutely can't do that as a therapist you know it's not it's not even technically possible i don't

believe because sometimes you might see somebody who has an overactive super ego you know if you want to speak in a freudian sense and there are people who punish themselves

extremely harshly and then you might say their sin is excessive use of force on their self in relationship to their transgressions

and that's and then maybe you help once you understand that with them you help them understand how it might be possible to use the lightest

touch possible that still serves the purpose which is a good limit idea with regards to the administration of punishment towards yourself right

minimal necessary force that's a good common law tradition it's a good psychological tradition but as a therapist certainly can't alleviate people's guilt arbitrarily by telling them you know well there's

nothing really there to worry about they have to do all that thinking through that themselves and this very interested in this relationship between disgust physical

the physical sense of disgust and the psychological sense of disgust and the notion that i mean it's one form of prayer you might say in christianity is baptism that be

in some ways the most fundamental form of prayer it's rebirth in the christian tradition and it involves obviously it involves the use of water sometimes a full body

immersement and so there's a notion of purification there it seems to me that in the modern world people don't know what to do with the sense they have that they're bad

right it impli implies that there's a good because you wouldn't feel bad if there wasn't a good but it isn't obvious what the good is that should be aimed at well that's the difference between real

and apparent goods and so i mean one of the most important things about any true religious tradition is it has to distinguish between real and apparent goods because the reason they use that

archery term is that people are always looking for a good it's just if you don't have the discernment to distinguish between a real and a apparent good

and so discernment is very important what what the quran calls for in fact the quran itself is it terms itself as a foreign a discernment a standard by a

criteria a criterion that you can judge actions we have a great um book in virtue ethics called mizan al-amman the standard or the criterion of action

which uses definitely some of the motifs that are in the nicomachean ethics but it's it's this interesting amalgam between that hellenistic uh tradition

and then infused with the quranic theological virtues you know i i wanted to just add i forgot to uh mention that the other two um

necessary conditions for a sound uh repentance one of them was that you made a firm intention not to go back to that action

and then the the fourth one is that if it involved a wrong of another person then you had to ask them forgiveness you had to go and you had to like if you stole then you had to actually give the

money back right if you could if you didn't know who you stole it from you actually give it in charity in that person's name right so that's part of discharging that debt the debt exactly right and it's

certainly the case that people seem to feel innately i would say something akin to a psychological debt and that well on that we discussed already the fact that that can be

weaponized you know by by accusations of arbitrary privilege and so forth and so it is it isn't easy to know what to do with that so let's go back just for a moment to

to your religious upbringing tell me what led up to your conversion if you would and and why did you move away from christianity or buddhism or

all the things that you were exposed to when you were well i i had i had i was in a head-on collision and survived a a car accident that the

california highway patrol said i shouldn't have survived and i had i had what they call a near-death experience i got very interested in what happens after you die i realized that i could have very easily

transitioned and so i was very interested in what happens after death i actually went and met with dr raymond moody who wrote the books on life after life and uh

he did a lot of the work with near-death um people that had had can i ask you what happened in your near-death experience i think was pretty classic you know i i

definitely saw my i went into a very different um [Music] spatial temporal state where i

that i just everything went into a kind of slow motion and i i just it was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash

and it was and then i just saw like my inception all the way up to that moment um

and i just saw my whole life literally and it was it was just this as if i lived my life a second time but in a moment

that that was the experience and why that what did that do for you that experience what how did well one one one it made me you know at the time i

was a senior in high school my my probably biggest interests were baseball and and other things but uh

music was certainly a big interest my family i come from a family of musicians so um i think what it did is it made me really

think about death in a very deep way and if you've ever seen um there's a there's a film about a man who who's in a a plane crash

and uh and then he survives the plane crash and is a man who had a lot of fears but he comes out of it jeff bridges is the person and and he's like looking at his hands

and am i alive or am i dead i was in that state for about two weeks it was very it was a very strange state to be in uh and that got me interested

in in what religions say about after death and so i decided to study all the world religions

just from that perspective and the one that really really resonated and struck me as having a very very powerful

description was the islamic tradition and i actually ended up ironically i ended up writing in the uh the study of quran

which was published by uh harper i ended up writing the essay on death in the quran which is how i actually became muslim so it was a very interesting serendipitous

uh so walk me through that so okay so you just about died how old were you 17.

yeah so i've i've there have been studies showing for example that if you have someone i remember this study if you have someone jump off a bungee cord

watching a digital clock the clock goes slower for them subjectively so if you subject people to a tremendous amount of stress then time slows down and i suspect the

neurophysiological reason for that is that when you're in a tremendous crisis your body floods itself with the hormones and neurochemicals probably mostly dopamine that are necessary for you to act

extraordinarily quickly and it's extremely energy intensive to do that so you can't do it all the time but maybe we can snap ourselves into a

psychophysiological state where we're a hundred times faster than we would normally be for some very finite amount of time i'm not trying to what would you say reduce this to a

physiological expert well that's that's a very common reductionist approach yeah yeah yeah well it's an experience and experience that i mean you you can look at the soft the uh

the hard drive aspect of it but the software's the mystery yeah i'm definitely not trying to remove the phenomenological significance you know

because that would be foolish and and even those those explanations are only attempts at understanding uh phenomenon that we really don't have

access to because cause and effect is a very difficult thing to it tonight it certainly is yeah and and that kind of explanation doesn't account for all the near-death experience phenomena

either but i mean i mean you asked you asked me how you know that that got me thinking a lot about death right irrespective of

whatever the neurochemical phenomena that were happening within my body that experience that phenomenological experience had a existential

right effect on me that was very powerful and and i decided that i really wanted to know if i could have died in that moment

which was very possible i wanted to know what what if anything happens and if something happens how do you prepare for that like what

you know it if we're on if we're genuinely on the doors of infinity then we should take this time that we have very seriously to prepare to go

through that door and that's what existentially that's what happened to me i wanted to know if i can go through that door at any moment as a 17 year old i could have

done it now as a 64 year old it's possible that i could do it today or tomorrow the next day

what type of preparation do i need why did you why do you think that you derived the conclusion that it was something that you needed to be prepared for

well i think that yeah i i just think that's a kind of uh i just think it's common sense you know like

i mean preparing for dinner it's interesting when i worked when i worked in critical care what became very clear to me some people seem to be ready for death and other

people are definitely not ready for death and i and i can see the difference i saw the difference you know i my both my parents died i was uh

with both my parents and and i could see you know i mean my mother had an incredible transition and i think my mother was fully ready to

go into the next world i don't think a lot of people are ready i think a lot of people are very afraid of death and i think that's something that one of the gifts of religion

is it does remove that fear not necessarily the act of of dying because obviously that's a very intense uh experience especially for those of us

who have seen that in people who die um but the the the transition into the next

world is something the quran says it's something to be looked forward to it's not something to fear but but it's also islam is not a death cult the

prophet allah said don't desire to die but ask god for a long life and and he said that none of you should ever desire

death you should desire to have a long life because you have more time to do more good and the more good you do the more you accrue

in terms of preparation for that transition and what do you think it means to be prepared versus not prepared to die

to be in a good state i think to be like if if you're in a state of repentance if you're if whatever you've done in the past if you've really

uh repented for any of the wrongs that you've done and there's major wrongs there's minor wrongs uh there's there's the peccadillos and then there's the

those mortal sins that that that are recognized for what they are things that literally will cause death to the soul the wages of sin is death so i think being in a good state being

prepared being ready to make that transition is very important and i think in many ways a lot of uh the practices that we do in our tradition are in preparation for death in fact

if you look at just the five prayers uh the very first prayer that we do when we wake up the prophetic gave us a prayer that i did this morning when i first came into consciousness which says

praise be to the the one who brought me back to life because death in the quran is uh sleep and the quran is seen as a little death and so it's every morning we have a resurrection

that's to remind us of the the resurrection on the day of judgment and then the very first thing that we do is we wash and then we pray that's that's the first thing that muslims do when

they wake at dawn when the sun before the sun comes up and then before we go to bed that's the last thing that we do we make a prayer oh god if you take my soul in my sleep

have mercy on it and if you let me live another day then make me amongst the righteous and protect me these are all prayers that our prophet sam did every single day and then on on friday we have

a communal prayer which is is the day of gathering which is related to the day of judgment where you all stand before god

and then also in ramadan we fast so we were giving up the pleasures of life during the daylight hours for a month and then the end of it is a celebration

of making it through that month uh hopefully with as little sin as possible and then we have the the the uh the prayer the the poor tax which

is to do good to others from the good that you've been given and then we have the hajj which is really a preparation for death because you're making this pilgrimage you're you you get into white clothes

which is the sh to symbolize the shroud and then you stand on the plane of of arafat like the day of judgment which symbolizes

that all of humanity is going to stand in a non-spatial non-temporal sense is going to stand before their creator and be judged for what they did so we

believe in a day of judgment so when you were sixteen or seventeen how old were you when you had the card so then you became interested in the issue of death and the

meaning of death and the idea of preparation for death and you read widely throughout the world's religions and you said that islam in particular struck your fancy

when did you convert how old were you 18.

okay so that's that's that's was that a radical move as far as your family was concerned um you know my dad the first thing he did he went to gibbon and re-read the

section on the rise of islam my dad was a professor of philosophy so you know he was a lapsed catholic um

probably the most well-read person i've ever met in the western canon i think he was intrigued he didn't really understand it my mom was fine with it

she thought great you know you found a path that's how she viewed it but both my father both my parents ended up uh making the declaration of faith before

they died so my father read gazali and uh ended up becoming muslim so what was it about specifically about

the islamic treatment of death in the afterlife compared to say the christian or jewish treatment one the quran is the scent of death is on every page of

the quran so it's it's definitely a very very it's a death reminder and not in a negative way there's this tension release that happens in the quran

i was once in a in a hotel and and and in london and there was a guy across from me reading the quran english translation

and drinking a heineken beer which was very interesting and uh so i you know i was dressed in western clothes and i just asked him how are you finding that book he said this book is very interesting

and and i said in what way and he said you know it's just tension release tension release and i i said wow you got that on the first reading that's very impressive

because it's you know it'll tell you about all the the wages of sin but then it'll tell you about the blessings of of obedience and and

and turning to god and repenting and answering the call of the prophets that perennial call that the prophets to shun false idols including the idol of the self

to turn away from uh the vanities of life the vein appetites uh that are of no use for you yeah earlier you talked about apparent and real uh goods

and so you're you're referring to that in a sense here again and making the presumption that there is a hierarchy of values and that some things should be pursued in preference to others and

this is something that the modern west has great difficulty formalizing and accepting although people suffer for it regardless of their understanding of it

when when you are thinking about turning your eyes heavenward or getting your aim straight or obedience to god what do you think what does that mean to

you conceptually and what does it mean practically in your life well i mean practically it means staying within the what we call the hadoo the quran

calls the limits that god has set on us so we have certain limits that are set on us and those limits are to protect us so everything in the islamic tradition

according to our al-qazali and others everything in our tradition is to protect one of six things to protect religion itself

to protect uh human intellect reason so like the prohibition of alcohol is to protect human reason to protect life sorry life

is the next to protect life to protect human reason to protect property uh which is really what richard weaver called the last metaphysical right

standing you know the right to property um and and then to protect um family and then to protect human dignity so

those six things there's no ruling in islam that isn't addressing one of those six preservations and so everything that we do is

is for for the that that's the the way in which we try to live our lives so family being good to family taking care of those in need around you first and

foremost charity begins at home and then extending to those closest to you so islam is is antagonistic to socialism it's antagonistic to any kind of collectivist philosophy but it does

recognize that each one of us should be giving something back to okay so i'm going to let you go through that again but you said something there that's very interesting to me

you said that islam is antagonistic to a collectivist philosophy can you tell me why why either why that's true or why you believe it to be true

well first and foremost the quran itself because the quran if you look at it it's a book of individuals going against groups that are insane i mean every single story in the quran

is an individual who goes up against a group and the group says burn him throw him in the fire stone him so that you know it's pretty clear from the

quran that the group is not necessarily a good thing and the prophet muhammad said master yourselves so that you don't

become yes people that when people do good you do good and when they do bad you do bad but but be so that when people do good you're with them and when they do bad you refrain from their evil

so it's very important for you know in one of the tragedies obviously is that any group goes into group think i mean you know this is an area you're much

more familiar with than i am but group think is a is a huge problem and i think the quran addresses that problem constantly by showing that you have to stand up against the group

because the group as nietzsche pointed out you know that insanity or madness is unusual amongst individuals but it seems to be the norm amongst groups i mean i i think

kierkegaard said kierkegaard said that the the group was untruth he said even if a truth a natural truth is claimed by a group instantly it becomes untruth merely because the group

has acclaimed it because because truth for him was individual in the same sense that you're describing do you think that's a akin to the jewish emphasis on the

prophetic tradition i absolutely yeah and but i also think that that the islamic tradition does emphasize the importance of community

and the importance of sociability you know this idea that um that we are gregarious human beings that we're we're people that we need

society to to to fully realize ourselves and it's the rare individual that can be the anchorite you know as aristotle said it's it's either a beast or a god that

can live alone but um you know it's a very difficult thing there are people that can do it and and i've known a few uh people like that and we and we do have a tradition the prophet muhammad

peace be upon him said that towards the latter days it's better to avoid all the groups and that's in a sound tradition because he said the groups would be astray okay

so let me ask you a question that's always put to people who are religious how do you differentiate religious belief from idolatry from from ideological belief

i i don't personally i don't think they're the same by the way but i'm curious about you know because it's pretty easy for someone just to say well you talk about standing up against the

collective but you christians you jews you islamic types you're part of a mob just like everybody else and why does your particular mob view reign supreme

in your view why isn't that just another idol in the desert just like the rest of them what makes it different do you think well i think that you can you know as the bard said to his idolatry to make

the service greater than the god it's very easy to turn a religion into an idol and uh and and i think there are i think that's what the new atheists subject to right is that the

fact that religious belief can be maybe it can be hijacked for instrumental and dogmatic purposes extremely yeah as if as if ideology

isn't as if anything can't go wrong well there is that yes yeah and so i mean i don't know like i think you know these great the the 20th

century is is a largely irreligious century in in the western hemisphere and just look what these uh it non-religious ideologies at this point has been

pointed out by many people yes one one of the things about you know are you familiar with errol colnoy k-o-l-n-a-i no i'm i'm not k-o

yeah n-a-i so he was a hungarian jew who converted to catholicism but he wrote a very interesting paper in 1951 called the three writers of the apocalypse he also wrote a book about nazi germany in

1938 and really uh i think really just tell me his name again errol colnoy k-o-l-e-n-a-i arrow k-a-u-r-e-l

yeah oh anyway a-e-u-r-a-u-r-a-l a-u-r-e-l okay colonoid k-o-l so anyway he wrote up he wrote an essay called the three writers of the apocalypse

and he identified three totalitarian ideologies uh he said the first two fascism and communism were easy to recognize but he said that the the real

danger dangerous one was progressive liberalism because the seeds of totalitarianism were not seen uh very easily it was something that could be missed so

if well if i had to choose let's say if i had to choose the leader of a country let's say an arbitrarily powerful leader it seems to me that it would be a better

choice for me to select someone who believes that he's beholden to something above and beyond himself than to choose someone who doesn't have that belief at all

right and that seems to me regardless of what you might say philosophically or even scientifically about the utility of religious belief or the validity of religious belief

the notion that you could be the leader of a powerful country and not be serving something that wasn't only you seems to be a real problem with a

let's say a stringently atheistic philosophy because well why wouldn't you just serve you in a position like that well and and and you would need

generally it's the religious traditions that understand service is for not just the self i mean we we obviously have to serve ourselves just to live

but service to others and that's why political leaders in the pre-modern world it was always understood that they had the greatest burden of self-discipline

that that they had a greater burden of self-discipline than everybody else for that greater power and right greater temptation and so and so the religious traditions i

mean the you know the pre-modern world understood very well in whatever civilization you were in they understood very well that the the central problem

that human beings are confronted with uh is their self and and that the modern water world has completely lost that idea that you had to

uh master yourself hence hence you know one of the things that uh confucius said is that um you know that study without thinking

uh is is blindness but thinking without study is dangerous right and so if you don't study

those things that are that will equip you to deal with the self and that's why in our tradition and in all the great traditions but in the islamic tradition

the study of the self psychology the nufs it's termed in arabic it was central to our tradition to understanding the nature of the self to understanding the machinations of the

self the tricks of the self how the steps and and and to understand those things so that you could you could learn to discipline them i mean this gets back to

you know imam markazari uses the idea of the sage the dog and the pig which obviously you know plato would have said the charioteer and and the two horses

uh it's the same idea but you know the pig is the uh the concupiscent soul the the dog is the harassable soul and then the sage is the is the rational soul if

if the sage is in charge then things will turn out well but if if if you allow the pig or the dog to take over in our culture you know the pig

has definitely it's the pig seems to really be having a field day right the uh the pig is doing very well you know the dog is not doing too bad either well

it's interesting because exactly and i think the world is split you know vinnie brown back in the 70s saw this north-south problem of of i mean he didn't term it like this but but i i see

it as as the pig and the dog you know i mean if you if if you have affluence on on one spectrum and you have real um

uh just diminishing of goods just of human goods on the other you're going to create a lot of resentment and and so that's a huge problem that we have so

this idea you know frost talked about fire and ice some say the world will end in fire some saying ice he was talking about this the dog and the pig from what i've tasted of desire

i hope with those who favor fire right in other words the world's end will come from the pig just wreaking havoc and and uh but then he said but if it

happened here twice i think of you know so let me ask for yeah sorry please finish that ice is yeah yeah that that hate is also great and

will suffice you know that that the erasable can do it as well it's one or the other it's either going to be fire or ice okay but that's in the absence that's in the absence of

the uh you know the the sage that's in the absence of wisdom and wisdom is a word that's not often heard

yes well i've had a lot of discussions with people who regard themselves as explicitly atheistic and it seems to me that

a lot of the discussion about religious belief in atheism misses the mark let's put it that way i tend to think of god if i'm thinking about the idea of

god psychologically i tend to think about something akin to a hierarchy of values and that's very much similar to the proposition that you're putting forward with the metaphor of the pig and

the dog and the sage that there are some values that are higher than others and so i would say i think that's psychologically true that there are some values higher than others

i mean we tend to put our families before ourselves for example and we tend to have a sense that we would we would like to be good people

i i use this this illustration of the relationship between values imagine that you're making a meal you might ask yourself well what are you

doing say you're cutting up vegetables okay so you're moving your hand back and forth that's not abstract at all that's where the mind meets the body you're moving your hand back and forth to cut the vegetables

to put them in the pot to cook a good dinner to be a good father to be a good husband to be a good

citizen to be a good person so you're doing all those things at the same time right and each of the more particular things nests in the broader value

and the broader a value is the more other values depend on it and also maybe the broader value is the more other people can be united within it and so i think you can come to a technical understanding of something

like depth of value and then it seems to me that the religious proposition is that there is an ultimate value that's either at the pinnacle or at the base depending on how

you conceptualize the metaphor and that that ultimate value is expressed in religious terminal terminology as the absolute the ineffable absolute as the god that's

supposed to be served and in some sense it has to remain ineffable and beyond comprehension because otherwise it turns into an idol and so what you do in a religious sense is posit

an ultimate ideal subordinate subordinate yourself to it regarded as something that you can only ever approximate to even in principle

and organize all the other virtues and defeat the faults in relationship to that highest order value and that's more like i think part of the reason that religious traditions insist upon faith

isn't it's not faith it's not the faith that the scientists the scientists types criticize which is sort of like an

empirical statement about the structure of objective reality it's more like the notion that there is a hierarchy of values and that there's something that has to be absolute ineffable and

ultimately uniting at the apex that we should be subservient to you know that we should consider all our behaviors in relationship to and and and so that's

you know there's not a metaphysics there in some sense because i i'm not saying anything about the final nature of that absolute value right that's an ontological question i don't feel

qualified to answer it but i can't see how there can be an absence of an absolute unifying value that's super ordinate to all other values

without society degenerating into conflict without people becoming anxious and confused and aimless without without the consequences being that we all miss the mark

so i guess i'd like your comments about that yeah i don't think god's something that we posit um i think and i also certainly don't think god is a value um i think that god

that we respond to uh god and and that god makes a call and that call is through these intermediaries and and the prophets the

quran says in in the chapter called the be that there is no nation that hasn't been given warners that say shun idols and worship god and and so i wasn't trying to i wasn't

trying to what would you say reduce god to a human value because but a lot of people do i mean i know i know that i don't understand that of viewing god yeah well that's why i

insisted upon the ineffability well yeah however you want to uh state that i mean i for for for us for abrahamic people in particular

god that we respond to god god makes a call and that calls through the prophets and the prophets are surprisingly consistent unlike philosophers who the student invariably rejects uh the master

you know uh plato is a friend but the truth is a greater friend whereas the prophets are extraordinarily consistent in their messaging um that there is a god that that god

demands that that you you live within the limits that god has set as your creator i mean one of the things that atheists to me uh that the atheist

you know there's a definition of health um which which looks at the physical the emotional and the spiritual uh george vitholka is a great uh

health practitioner from greece um said that atheism is really one of the most serious uh signs of ill health

because it's a denial of your creativeness that you have to really be unhealthy to do that so he saw it as a deep spiritual

sickness to deny your creator whether that creator is is uh is a personal creator is the next stage that you're going to to have to ask

yourself but to deny your creativeness um is is something quite extraordinary by saying there's no creator so how do you deal with the challenges

the hypothetical challenges presented to the notion of created human beings the conflict between that and modern evolutionary theory as a modern

thinker i mean the catholics have accepted evolutionary theory but that's my understanding of the situation yeah guided evolution guided evolution not

this idea of randomness i mean to get the best response to that is uh i think robert frost's poem called accidentally on purpose that would be my answer somebody can if they're interested can

google it look at it but you know i this idea that randomness um that created this i i just i won't buy

that and if if uh if if they want to say it's because i don't understand evolution that's fine i'll accept that well i talked to sam harrison richard

dawkins recently i'm going to release the discussion i had with dawkins and the randomness argument's an interesting one because it's the variability between people

that's in some sense random but sexual selection plays an awfully powerful force in evolutionary biology and sexual selection is anything but random and so to me i see the action

of consciousness in in perhaps in the ultimate sense operating not least through the mechanism of sexual selection so the selection mechanisms aren't random even if the variation might be

generated in part randomly and it seems to me that there's something there that would reconcile the relationship in modern biology between the spirit and the matter spirit and matter let's say

so because consciousness calls matter into being in some real sense so well consciousness also for us is a spiritual phenomenon it's not it's not a

material phenomenon and and uh you know the the ancients said that the the one who denies the soul that you'd have to determine him an

idiot uh it's you know they really saw it as a kind of absurdity to deny the existence of a soul because it's so clear if anybody's ever seen a corpse

that something's very profoundly missing so what let's go back to practicalities with regards to islam and also i'd be

interested in you you said that you chose so i want to know what it following the islamic faith has done for your life personally how has it helped you put yourself

together and also i'm interested in again why you found the islamic tradition preferable let's say to the orthodox

tradition that you did you did enjoy the rituals that were part of that at least so let's deal with practical issues first so well i yeah um

in terms of of uh of why i chose islam i mean i'm not completely convinced that i chose islam i mean in some ways islam chose me as well

so it's you know guidance is a very strange thing for people like i saw an inevitability when i look back on what happened i saw an inevitability

of of my embracing islam i had some very interesting experiences that could be term in mystical or however

you want to determine them but uh the the tradition itself what what struck me was one i got to keep all of the prophets that i i believed in

already and i added in addition uh what we consider to be the final prophet and just as very often christians marvel at how jews miss jesus

muslims also marvel at how christians and jews miss muhammad although to be fair to the jews they do acknowledge the prophet uh as a providential force and and they

do acknowledge him as a a noah hiddick messenger preparing the way for the the coming of the messiah so they do recognize that he was a providential force at least the great um

if you read george kohler's book on jewish theology as a chapter on judaism in islam and certainly the great father of orientalism

uh ignites goals at her he actually said that he felt that islam was the only religion that somebody of a philosophical bent could actually accept

and he wanted to to to really bring in the gift of philosophy into judaism that had been that the muslims had so richly participated in in fact

you know there's an argument that just as judaism prepared the way uh for christianity it was islam that prepared the way for uh for a philosophical western christendom

because if you look at the transmission of all of that knowledge that comes into europe it's quite extraordinary i mean saint thomas aquinas who's 13th century

he dies in 1274 and yet he's the doctor of the church just look at the number of times he quotes muslims i mean he calls average the commentator so i think

islam you know one of the beauties of the religion to me is that you'll find whatever you're looking for in it i mean islam

you you it has a a very simple theology that anybody can understand in sort of the chapter that says say god is is unique

uh god is completely independent god neither gives birth nor was god born and there's nothing like god so it gives you a very simple

uh theology that anybody can understand and yet embedded in that simplicity is an extraordinary complexity that actually created a metaphysical tradition

that western scholars have spent their lifetime studying people like already correanor or somebody it's it's like uh maxine rodents and

uh not maxine rodison but uh uh the great uh catholic uh theologian and and metaphysician jacques maratin you know recognize the genius of people like

al-halaj and things so within the islamic tradition there's just an extraordinary spectrum you can spend your entire life and have a satisfying life and i know people that have done

this just mastering their ascensions of the quran and the the actual oral expression of the quran through the the

rules of tajweed you can spend your life studying exegesis you can spend your life studying prophetic tradition you can spend your life studying the great mystics of islam we have the best poets

in the world we also have the best architecture i mean there's nothing like the taj mahal or the alhambra palace and even western architecture if you read

stealing from the saracens she shows how some of the finest western architecture was basically taken from the islamic civilization including notre dame in in

paris so you can find incredible i know people that just uh came to islam through music i mean i know some really uh professional musicians that

fell in love with arabic music which led them into uh muslim culture people that um love just i mean one of the most interesting

things about islam is it is a truly universal religion in that you can go from indonesia to california and find all of these different

expressions of the same central truths of islam with their own local colorings so the west african muslims are not like the middle eastern muslims the middle eastern muslims are not like the indian

muslims and you have people like uh you know one of the great um impressionist painters of of sweden i think he's actually

considered a national treasure in in sweden but uh his his painting's hanging the museum there he became muslim uh in in jail in uh

in um for for actually he he shot a a matador because he was raised but his father was a veterinarian and he shot a matador um

because he was so horrified that they were bringing bull fighting into france and there was such an uproar that they actually released him but when he was in jail he befriended an algerian who

used to recite quran all the time and he ended up becoming muslim and uh and then studying in egypt and then going back to uh

to his native land he died in spain but extraordinary individuals so you have people like that you have people that anybody can find what they're looking

for and and that is the power of the faith i think is that it is truly a universal faith and i think one of the things that western people tend to do one they don't recognize that it's a

western faith because it is it's part of the abrahamic phase it was in spain for centuries it's been in eastern europe for centuries

um and even istanbul which is the great capital of islam for centuries is half in europe and happened in in in the east and that's why it really bridges these two worlds

and so there's so much i mean part of the reason why i think it makes sense for religious people christians jews and islamic alike to focus on

their commonalities in the face of the things that are disintegrating our cultures we could start by trying to make some peace between us if we're going to consort ourselves reasonably as

religious individuals right and i commend you for trying to to do some bridge building because uh you know arguably um

there there's been so much negativity around this faith and around its adherence that there's an almost instantaneous um association with the most negative

aspects of humanity with the religion and and it's it's quite tragic and so just as an exercise a kind of bracketing for a second and try to try

to think about things uh a mentor of mine and a friend of mine dr thomas cleary wrote a book called zen koans he also translated the quran he's one of the brilliant translators of the of of

our lifetime but he wrote a book called zen koans and in the introduction of that book he actually says that the purpose of a koan is to snap

people out of of of selection yeah but he says in there but you don't need a co-on to do that just ask an educated western person what they think about islam and they'll start expressing all

of these prejudices and if you ask them have you ever read the quran no do you know anything about the prophet muhammad no other than maybe something they read in a a newspaper article or in time or

newsweek or the atlantic monthly something yeah well it's not it's not an easy thing to try to get a toehold in a different tradition especially it's not that i don't even have a toehold in your own

yeah i it's not that hard especially for an educated person you're obviously a highly educated person it's not that hard islam one of the things given said is that islam spread because it's it was

a very easy religion to understand so this idea that i can't understand it i can't i'm having a hard time it's not that hard to understand

i mean islam is actually a very straightforward okay then give me a give me a five minute summary of the core beliefs

i i don't want to put you on the spot i'm it's not a question no no no that's not it's not that's not hard at all so so lay it out that would be very so so we have a famous hadith in which

uh we're we're told that the angel gabriel came in the form of a man and asked the prophet tell me about faith and and the prophet muhammad said faith

is to believe that there's only one god and that muhammad which includes all the previous messengers is a messenger of god to believe in angels to believe in the books that god has revealed

to believe in the last day the day of judgment and to believe in the measuring out of good and evil that good and evil is part of life

and then he said tell me about islam and he said islam is that you make the testimony of faith that you pray five times a day that you fast

ramadan that you pay zakat the 2.5 of your standing wealth at the end not your income tax but your standing wealth at the end of the year that's a whole year 2.140 is given to

poor people there's eight categories that are given in the quran and that you if you're able to you make a pilgrimage once in your lifetime to mecca and then he said tell me about

ichsan which is the third dimension of islam and he said and this is the dimension of virtuous being by being a person of

erity of excellence in the world and he said is to worship god as if you see god and if you and if you don't see him at

least you know that he sees you so you have an awareness of that that that you're that there is a divine presence and you should be in a state of

awareness in your behavior i mean one of the things about you know if you're driving and everybody's speeding and then somebody sees a cop they all suddenly slow down you know i have a friend once who

just zoomed past the cop when everybody slowed down and he pulled him over and he said why didn't you slow down he said i felt like a hypocrite so the guy

he let him go but you know that's people when they're in the presence of authority they tend to behave well unless they're an utter rebel i mean there are those people

i'm trying to figure out how to be a jew and a christian and a muslim at the same time but become muslim that's the best way because the beauty of islam is you get

the old testament the new testament the last testament i mean that really is for me even the jews acknowledge this because islam in many ways is a universalized

judaism it's judaism for the gentiles uh we we have the mikvah you know they do hustle we have will soul i mean you know which is the ritual uh the the

baptism a total immersion in water ritually to to purify yourself which is done at least once a week and uh okay so let me ask you maybe i'll ask you because we're gonna run out of

time i want to ask you a final question then you can maybe help me in my aim i've been trying to understand the christian doctrine of the word and its

relationship to the jewish prophetic tradition for a long time and i know that christ is a central figure in islam as well i mean the christians make the claim that

christ is the son of god right he's the messiah himself and it's very difficult if you're going to be a christian not to accept that claim and i think i

understand the claim in some sense psychologically and i think the notion that the free word the free truthful word is the

fundamental redeeming force i believe that's true i think it's true literally and i think it's true metaphorically and i suspect it might be true religiously although i'm not exactly sure what that

means and i think part of the stumbling block for me in relationship to islam i can understand christianity in relationship to judaism but i can't understand islam in relationship to christ

because i i understand the christian idea that christ was a what would you say a transcendent

consequence of the prophetic tradition and the christian insistence that his life is associated with the divinity of the word and that that is in some sense a final statement and so i don't

understand how islam moves beyond that and still places christ in a place of centrality well

i mean the jews don't accept christ at all like the the best of the jews will say he was a rabbi but many of the rabbis considered him to

be a charlatan a a magician and and jesus in the talmud is which was printed by princeton university press you know makes makes that argument that the talmudic um

uh views of christ which he he argues in that book that was understandable given that the jews were so persecuted by the christians but um

the the muslim theology is is a i think it's it's a radical monotheism that that even i think it transcends the

monthism of uh judaism which has some anthropomorphic elements in it that the muslims would not accept but generally the jews and the christians agree on the theology

rabbis i've had many talks with rabbis and and they they see islam in fact kohler says that muslims were always seen as full proselytes of the noahidic laws whereas christians were

not because of the trinity so the trinity is you know the the principle of the triad is uh you know in plato and the timaeus talks about that so the principle the triad is very

powerful principle and there are many many um trinities in the world that we see so i don't know i don't understand exactly why that constitutes such a stumbling

block i mean again i'm trying to speak at least to some degree psychologically well if you if you read uh-huh well sorry

it seems to me that the idea of the holy ghost is allied with the idea of conscience you know that voice that speaks from within and then the idea of the

sun element of the trinity that's the fact that divinity can reveal itself within a personality well i think and then the idea of god it's himself the god the father that

seems to me to be the idea that's more most tightly associated with the jewish idea of the absolute and the islamic idea of allah well i don't think so because uh if you

read meister eckhart or even aquinas on trinity you know but eckhart the godhead you know is is infinite

cannot be embodied uh is simple there's no parts so i think if you get into deep catholic theology you'll find that in the end it

is a type of unity so the personas and they are called personas in latin means mask in latin

it's a mask right and so for for muslims uh christ is a central figure and muslims do believe in a second coming of christ uh

born of the virgin birth but christ is not divine christ is human and and you'll find that in the dual nature not in the monophysit or the diaphysis traditions of christianity that you find

like in coptic christianity and some of the monophysites that believed in that christ was purely divine but in this idea that christ is of a dual

nature so the logos in hears and that's a mystery but i don't i this idea i catholics never said call like evangelicals they don't call on christ

as you know when they pray they call on on god the father through an intercession of christ which is i think very different from worshipping christ

as the godhead um because and and i think it becomes very confusing even for i think it is i think it is confusing and and the fact that it

is one of the stumbling blocks to something approximating a union of the great abrahamic traditions is quite a problem and well we can agree on a lot of things

i mean we certainly agree on we agree that there is a god that he created us we agree that the prophets were sent to warn people and to give them good news and we agree that there's a day of judgment and people are going to be

resurrected i mean we those are some pretty strong things to to base uh a sense of shared concern on we certainly agree on family we agree on

the importance of raising children healthy we all share the liberal arts tradition muslims christians and jews all share the tradition of the liberal arts which is well maybe

maybe we could start in our efforts to move forward by concentrating on those things that unite us well also virtue like virtue ethics i

mean right all three of our religions share virtue ethics all three and we all really acknowledge and and really have benefited greatly

from the nicomachean ethics all three traditions recognize the nicomachean ethics and its importance and that's why our ethical tradition our great treatises

reflect many of the truths that aristotle articulated in the nicomachean ethics well i think we should probably

call that a day i would like to keep talking to you i think it's very useful to outline i think it was very useful to outline the central tenets of islamic faith i think

it's very useful to begin a re-conceptualization in some sense in the intellectual sphere that it might be useful for all the people of

the abrahamic traditions to recognize their similarities moving forward rather than concentrating on their differences i mean we could we could start by assuming that perhaps our differences are in some sense apparent and a

consequence of our ignorance you know what i mean it's not like any of us can claim to be omniscient interpreters even of our own faith tradition and so we could say well there's a lot

of confusion that reigns and that disunites us and we'll be a little careful about making any authoritarian authoritative claims on behalf of our own faith and and see

because we need to figure out how to tolerate each other and to appreciate each other and i also think the disunion between judaism christianity and islam is also one of

the sicknesses that besets the west the fact that that disunity exists makes it more difficult for people who are searching for something akin to a tradition to believe that there's something solid there

because even those who are staunch adherents of their own traditions don't seem to be able to get along with those who are staunch traditions holders of others so

anyways discussions like this are some markers on the pathway to peace let's say there's a we have an important tradition from our prophet that says woe unto those who arrogate to

themselves the judgment of god yeah that's for sure and and and he was asked how do they do that and he said by saying these people are

in hell and these people are in paradise you know so that's something no muslim is permitted to death like i could never say you're going to hell or i mean some people do that but it's it's

absolutely prohibited in the islamic tradition yeah well the problem with making a judgment like that is it's pretty easily turned upon yourself well exactly

it was really good of you to talk to me today i appreciate it very much all right um i have a message here my my uh

my camera person who set this up just put a little message he wanted me to mention the hadith of the prophet in which he said none of you will enter paradise by your actions but by the grace of god alone

so we need deeds but in the end we're justified through grace thank you very much i hope we get a chance to speak again where are you

located i'm in berkeley ground zero for the dissolution of the western civilization yeah mm-hmm

i'm coming to california in uh very soon maybe i'll see if you'd like to come well if you do yeah sure and and come visit the college you know we have a small liberal arts

college um and uh you know we're we're trying to uh revive a tradition that's fallen on hard times in both the west and the east but it's an

important tradition and it's the greatest bulwark against a lot of the things that we're up against because it really does teach people to

to discern between real and apparent goods well good luck in that endeavor truly thank you yeah thank you

take care