The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast


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


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Michaela Peterson speaks with Hamza Youssef about Islam, world religions, and different perspectives on sin. Hamza is an Islamic scholar, the co-founder of Zaytuna College, and the author of seven books, including The Marvels of the Heart and Science of the Spirit. He served as translator for the Chief Mufti of the UAE and Mauritania, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayou. At the age of 18, after studying the major religions of the world, Hamza converted to Islam. He is 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, and had a near-death experience. He describes his early experience with religion and spirituality, and discusses the importance of bridging between religions, repentance, and what they consider the most salient underlying problems in today s culture. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. In this episode of the JPP Podcast, I speak with Dr. Hansen about his experiences growing up in an eclectic Christian background and how they shaped his views on religion. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it serves as a reminder that there is no such thing as religion as a religion as that which is strictly defined by its beliefs and practices. in fact, it s a religion and that we can be a religion that is not a religion at all. This episode is not about religion, but rather, it is a religion in which we can learn from each other, not a place that is not a religion and but that we can all have a better understanding of or a in any of that . of which we all have the right to if we are all whether it s is a ? or not? , can be it s not so any more I s , and so on this etc & so on, etc, etc.. And so on and so forth,


Transcript

00:00:01.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:12.000 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:19.000 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
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00:00:41.000 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:52.000 Welcome to episode 255 of the JPP Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:01:00.000 In this episode, Dad spoke with Hamza Youssef about Islam, world religions, and different perspectives on sin.
00:01:08.000 Hamza is an Islamic scholar, the co-founder of Zaytuna College, and the author of seven books, including The Marvels of the Heart, Science of the Spirit.
00:01:18.000 More specifically, they discussed the core beliefs of Islam, Hamza's conversion and near-death experience, collectivist philosophy, the importance of bridging between religions, repentance, and what they consider the most salient underlying problems in today's culture.
00:01:35.000 I hope you enjoy this episode.
00:01:53.000 Hello, everyone. Today, I'm going to continue my discussions with Islamic thinkers, or thinkers about Islam.
00:02:01.000 I've had previous guests included, Ayaan Hirzi Ali, Mustafa Akyol, and Mohammed Hijab.
00:02:08.000 I'm pleased to be speaking today with Hamza Youssef Hansen, who serves as president of Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California.
00:02:18.000 He's a strong advocate of liberal education in the classical sense.
00:02:23.000 He was raised in a religiously eclectic family, attended Orthodox Christian services and Catholic parochial boarding schools.
00:02:31.000 At the age of 18, after studying the major religions of the world, he converted to Islam.
00:02:36.000 He served as translator for the chief mufti of the UAE and Mauritania, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayou.
00:02:43.000 I'm very pleased today to be talking to Hamza Youssef Hansen.
00:02:49.000 Welcome. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.
00:02:52.000 Yeah, thank you.
00:02:54.000 So, you had an eclectic upbringing, as your bio indicated.
00:02:59.000 You went to Orthodox Christian services.
00:03:01.000 Were your family Orthodox Christian?
00:03:04.000 I have two sides of the family.
00:03:06.000 One were Irish Catholics, and then my mother was half Irish, half Greek.
00:03:11.000 So, my Greek grandfather, who was an archon in the Greek Orthodox Church, he actually had that influence on us.
00:03:21.000 So, we were actually raised in his church.
00:03:24.000 But my mother was, she was actually, would have considered herself a Buddhist most of my upbringing.
00:03:35.000 And her mother, who was an Irish woman, and her brother, my great uncle, were from Georgia.
00:03:45.000 And they actually were interested in Buddhism in the 1920s and moved out to San Francisco.
00:03:51.000 And my great uncle, George Fields, opened Fields Bookstore, which was the first metaphysical bookstore on the West Coast.
00:04:00.000 And it specialized just in a lot of different ways.
00:04:04.000 He actually was the first publisher of Gurdjieff's works, the fourth way works in the US.
00:04:11.000 And it's actually still, it's an online bookstore now, Fields Bookstore.
00:04:15.000 So, it's getting more, it's getting more metaphysical all the time.
00:04:18.000 It was once a building, and now it's virtual, and yeah, it's a bad joke.
00:04:25.000 But, so, you had, you were exposed to a lot of different religious ideas, by the sounds of things, when you grew up.
00:04:31.000 Right.
00:04:32.000 And how much did you learn about Orthodox Christianity?
00:04:37.000 Well, I had, my grandfather had to take Greek lessons.
00:04:42.000 I went to Greece.
00:04:43.000 I went to a Greek Orthodox camp when I was 12 years old in Greece.
00:04:46.000 I served the altar in the Orthodox Church.
00:04:49.000 So, I was reasonably involved.
00:04:52.000 And then I went to Catholic school.
00:04:53.000 So, the Orthodox tradition and the Catholic tradition aren't that different, even though they split in the 11th century over a diphthong, as Gibbon points out.
00:05:04.000 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?
00:05:13.000 I mean, I started having trouble with the ideas in Christianity, I guess, when I was probably around 12.
00:05:19.000 So, I'm wondering what your reaction was as a thinker, that young.
00:05:24.000 I mean, I really loved the Greek service.
00:05:28.000 I loved the frankincense.
00:05:30.000 They had great, these chants that were quite beautiful.
00:05:36.000 And it was very ritualistic.
00:05:38.000 And I enjoyed it.
00:05:40.000 I had no problem going to church.
00:05:44.000 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.
00:05:57.000 So, there was a lot of, we're a transitional generation.
00:06:01.000 There were a lot of radical changes happening.
00:06:04.000 And California was kind of at the heart of a lot of those things.
00:06:07.000 But my mother did expose us to a lot of different faith traditions.
00:06:11.000 She actually took me, we went to synagogues, we went to Buddhist song guys, we went to different Christian iterations.
00:06:22.000 And she also took me to a mosque when I was 12 years old in Redwood City.
00:06:28.000 And she was of the belief that much of religion is a, it's this interesting where you're born and where you're brought up.
00:06:39.000 And that's going to determine and color the way you view the world.
00:06:42.000 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.
00:06:55.000 And so, she was eclectic in that way.
00:06:59.000 Yeah.
00:07:00.000 So, your mother was of the opinion that, I guess, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's a couple of aspects to religious thinking that are interesting and relevant, given what you said.
00:07:10.000 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.
00:07:19.000 And another is to become a member of a community, a community of belief.
00:07:24.000 And I guess 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.
00:07:35.000 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.
00:07:45.000 Because if everybody chooses different beliefs, then we have a hell of a time living together, and that can be a problem.
00:07:51.000 Well, I think that's one of the real problems in California.
00:07:56.000 I mean, that's a very much this liberal idea that everything, we're free to choose and be whatever we want.
00:08:05.000 And what do you think of that idea?
00:08:08.000 So, now you're much older than you were when your mother was taking you from place of worship to place of worship.
00:08:14.000 I mean, how would you address the problem of, let's say, the conflict between freedom of choice and religion as philosophical belief and religion as a cultural centerpiece that unites people?
00:08:28.000 Well, I think that I raised my children Muslim, and I hope that they remain in the Muslim faith.
00:08:37.000 But I have to acknowledge the possibility that that might not be the case, given where we live and the environment.
00:08:44.000 So, I'm very committed to the Islamic tradition, and I believe it to be true.
00:08:50.000 And I think, you know, I feel like I've acquired clear and compelling evidence for myself of its truth.
00:08:57.000 But I understand the importance of religion as a glue that holds things together.
00:09:03.000 And I think when you lose that glue in any culture, you're going to have great problems that emerge out of that phenomenon.
00:09:10.000 Yeah, well, 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?
00:09:23.000 And because if they don't unite, then they exist in conflict.
00:09:26.000 And so that seems, and in confusion, and in anxiety, and that seems to be a very meddlesome, or what not meddlesome, a very difficult problem.
00:09:37.000 Well, I think part of the problem with, you know, modernity is grappling with the fact that a lot of these grand narratives have broken down largely in the 20th century.
00:09:52.000 I mean, the beginnings were happening already in the 17th, 18th century, but by the 20th century, amongst the intelligentsia, there's a huge problem, particularly in the West, but not only in the West.
00:10:05.000 I think even within the Muslim ethos, you already had these ideas that were going to massively impact the culture.
00:10:14.000 So it's something we're all grappling with.
00:10:17.000 It's an interesting time in that 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.
00:10:37.000 Norms, for instance, just cultural norms.
00:10:40.000 I mean, a lot of religion ends up being cultural, and it's a practice, it's a cultural practice, and a lot of people don't ever really have to deal with this.
00:10:49.000 In fact, I think James, Charles Taylor has a very interesting book, Revisiting James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
00:10:57.000 And he talks about this idea that James looks at people who have religion in this sanguine sense.
00:11:05.000 They simply accept their religion that they're born into, and then they just live and practice that.
00:11:11.000 And very often they have very solid lives in that environment.
00:11:16.000 But then he talks about, and he calls those healthy people.
00:11:18.000 Then he talks about the sick people who actually have to grapple with these different phases.
00:11:25.000 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.
00:11:37.000 And then I think the second he looks at just the problem of evil, grappling with this problem of evil.
00:11:46.000 And the third one is this sense of wrongdoing, right, that a lot of people feel, sinfulness.
00:11:52.000 Yeah, that's a terrible one right now.
00:11:54.000 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
00:12:06.000 have started to be discussed at the level of the political.
00:12:09.000 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.
00:12:28.000 And, of course, all cultures are contaminated with catastrophe and atrocity as well.
00:12:36.000 And we actually need to know what to do about that.
00:12:40.000 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?
00:12:54.000 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.
00:13:07.000 And then it can also become weaponized, which has certainly happened at the present time and to a dangerous degree.
00:13:14.000 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.
00:13:25.000 And then, you know, they collapse in the face of that onslaught and apologize and retreat.
00:13:30.000 And it just doesn't look to me like that's a good thing at all.
00:13:33.000 Well, it's not a good thing if you don't have a religious worldview that gives meaning to those situations.
00:13:42.000 For instance, I mean, one of the most important aspects of the Quran, I think, is that it really gives answers to these inequities in the world.
00:13:52.000 But what some have termed the mystery of iniquity and the Quran, one of the hallmarks of a believer is gratefulness, gratitude.
00:14:04.000 In fact, the word in Arabic for disbeliever means ungrateful and ingrate.
00:14:09.000 And so gratitude for blessings and then patience for trials and tribulations.
00:14:16.000 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.
00:14:31.000 What are you going to do with those privileges?
00:14:34.000 How are you going to respond to those tribulations?
00:14:36.000 So if you have a worldview 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.
00:14:48.000 Whereas if you remove that, you're stuck with just Marxist resentment.
00:14:51.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:14:53.000 So, all right, let's I'm going to go back to your conversion because I want to understand how that happened.
00:14:59.000 But I'm happy about the direction this discussion is taking.
00:15:02.000 So it seems to me that when you realize that you're, let's say, arbitrarily blessed by a certain set of advantages.
00:15:14.000 Now, everyone is cursed with a certain set of disadvantages, too.
00:15:18.000 So we can take that into account. But so you're grateful for your privileges.
00:15:23.000 Let's say you regard them as a gift or maybe you regard them as something akin to grace.
00:15:28.000 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.
00:15:40.000 And then in some sense, you pay you pay for for having them that way.
00:15:46.000 You're given a gift and then you do what you can with it.
00:15:49.000 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.
00:15:56.000 And you said that there are there's Islamic commentary on that kind of idea.
00:16:00.000 And so maybe you could walk me through that a bit. Gratitude.
00:16:04.000 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.
00:16:15.000 And why is that associated with belief, per se, let's say, in Islam?
00:16:20.000 Well, first of all, the gift of being itself. I'm just the participation in being is a great gift.
00:16:28.000 And in fact, you know, the the the German word for for guilt is actually a sense of debt.
00:16:34.000 And so the and the word in Arabic for religion is debt. It means debt.
00:16:40.000 So we we have this sense of indebtedness because we've been given so much.
00:16:45.000 Just just just the gift of life itself is just such an extraordinary gift.
00:16:50.000 And so religion, you know, in the Islamic understanding, it's it's an act of gratitude.
00:16:58.000 It's you're showing gratitude for all that you've been given.
00:17:03.000 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.
00:17:14.000 There's an unveiling that happens and great knowledge comes out of suffering.
00:17:18.000 Great knowledge comes out of the trials and tribulations.
00:17:21.000 And so 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.
00:17:35.000 And 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.
00:17:49.000 And the problem I think that people face when they're trying to be grateful for tribulations is that you can learn from them, but they can also just grind you into the ground and destroy you.
00:18:01.000 And they do. I mean, people do die. We suffer and die.
00:18:04.000 And so in the final analysis, in some sense, we're defeated by by our mortal vulnerability.
00:18:12.000 And well, go ahead.
00:18:14.000 Go ahead. I'm sorry.
00:18:15.000 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.
00:18:32.000 You know what I mean? Given that people suffer so much and sometimes it seems so pointless.
00:18:37.000 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.
00:18:45.000 There's no doubt about that. And it makes you a danger to people around you.
00:18:49.000 So it's not helpful, but it's sure understandable.
00:18:53.000 Well, there's a there's a very interesting, do you know, Jacques Lesseron, that he wrote a book called And There Was Light.
00:19:03.000 He was a he was a he was a French resistance fighter.
00:19:06.000 And he wrote he wrote this very interesting autobiography.
00:19:09.000 But one of the things that happened to him when he was eight years old, he was in school and some some kid accidentally bumped into him and he fell onto the desk and he ended up losing both his eyes in that in that event.
00:19:22.000 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.
00:19:30.000 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.
00:19:37.000 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.
00:19:49.000 That was the first reason for his gratitude.
00:19:52.000 But the second reason was he said a child does not question.
00:19:57.000 Injustice of events, it doesn't think that events are unjust.
00:20:02.000 It can see injustice from people, but events just happen to children and they don't really put that valence on it as something.
00:20:15.000 Why did God do this to me? And as somebody who worked in pediatrics for a period as a registered nurse, it always struck me.
00:20:24.000 You know, the parents were always devastated, but the children were in these quite extraordinary states.
00:20:29.000 And Le Sauron says that it's only when parents actually give the child that idea of of that something's wrong here.
00:20:39.000 Well, they will they do that. But normally children just simply accept that.
00:20:43.000 And I think that has a lot to do with what Christ said that, you know, that the way you come to God is like children.
00:20:49.000 And I think that's that's at the heart of it is just accepting because the sense of entitlement that human beings have is overwhelming.
00:20:57.000 This idea that we're all entitled to health, that we're entitled to wealth, that we're entitled to for things to work out.
00:21:06.000 That's it's not the way life is designed. It never was.
00:21:10.000 And it's something the ancients really understood.
00:21:13.000 And I think modern people have a really difficult time grappling with this because they're not well spiritually.
00:21:19.000 And premodern people, I think, generally were much healthier spiritually.
00:21:24.000 And certainly all of these premodern civilizations understood that life was trial and tribulation, first and foremost.
00:21:32.000 I mean, the Koran actually says that it's God who created death and life to try to show, to reveal who is the best of you in actions.
00:21:41.000 And so accepting that is is a really great is a really great gift.
00:21:48.000 And if anything, I mean, that's the gift of grace.
00:21:51.000 One of one of the great scholars of our tradition said that he was so burdened.
00:21:59.000 His name was Ibn Atayla, he was an Egyptian, but he said he was so burdened with with his self.
00:22:05.000 And he went to this teacher, Abul Abbas al-Mursi.
00:22:10.000 And he when he came in, he said to him, all of the world is just four conditions.
00:22:17.000 And each of those conditions has a response.
00:22:20.000 The first condition is blessing and the response is gratitude.
00:22:24.000 The second condition is tribulation.
00:22:26.000 And the response is patience.
00:22:28.000 The third condition is obedience.
00:22:30.000 And the response is humility.
00:22:32.000 Is to see the grace in that obedience.
00:22:36.000 And the fourth circumstance is sinfulness.
00:22:40.000 And the response is repentance.
00:22:42.000 So that's a taxonomy for life itself.
00:22:46.000 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.
00:22:59.000 Social media in particular seems to have put a lot of advantage in the hands of accusers and attackers.
00:23:07.000 And so people are mobbed or canceled or so forth.
00:23:11.000 And 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.
00:23:21.000 And that means that's a universal problem as well.
00:23:25.000 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.
00:23:35.000 I guess I should throw a question on to the end of that.
00:23:45.000 No, no, that's fine.
00:23:46.000 It looked like you were still thinking about it, so I didn't want to interrupt your thought.
00:23:50.000 Well, I guess what I'm wondering is how would you characterize the Islamic view of repentance?
00:23:58.000 And people talk a lot about the necessity to forgive.
00:24:02.000 And I've thought that through fairly thoroughly as a clinical psychologist because forgiveness isn't, in my estimation, isn't just a simple act of letting something go.
00:24:13.000 Because if something's bothering you, it's not that easy to let it go.
00:24:17.000 If you have a problem with someone, there's a gospel story about that, that you're not supposed to go pray in the church.
00:24:24.000 If you have a fight pending with your brother, an unresolved fight with your brother, you straighten that out first.
00:24:30.000 And 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,
00:24:56.000 to understand exactly what went wrong, to negotiate an agreement moving forward that such things won't happen.
00:25:04.000 There seems to be this continual interplay between judgment and forgiveness in something that really is akin to forgiveness.
00:25:13.000 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.
00:25:22.000 Well, I 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?
00:25:35.000 And two questions then. One is that in keeping with your understanding of what constitutes repentance. And second, how would you characterize Islamic thought on that particular matter?
00:25:47.000 Well, the Islamic tradition, like the Jewish and Christian before, have this idea of repentance.
00:25:54.000 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.
00:26:05.000 In Arabic, it's the idea of turning. And so there's this idea that the heart turns towards disobedience, and then it has to turn back towards obedience.
00:26:16.000 And so that turning, one of the names of God is Tawwab in Arabic, which means the off turning, the one who turns back when you turn to God, God turns to you.
00:26:27.000 And so this idea of turning back to God is very important. And the Prophet Muhammad, he taught us actually to do this at least 70 times a day.
00:26:38.000 So Muslims, as a practice, actually ask forgiveness, preferably at least 70 times a day, just saying astaghfirullah.
00:26:48.000 It's something that we do as a spiritual practice. And part of the reason why we pray five times a day, the Prophet was once asked about a man who lives next to a river, and he goes into it and he washes five times a day.
00:27:03.000 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.
00:27:14.000 I mean, one of the reasons we do lustration with water is a ritual purification. So we wash our face, we purify our eyes and our tongue.
00:27:25.220 We actually rinse our mouth with water before we pray. And then we wash our hands, our limbs, and then our feet.
00:27:32.420 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.
00:27:44.240 And so the idea, you know, it's interesting that in Old English, in New Testament Greek, and Hebrew, and Arabic, the word for sin is an archery term, which means to miss the mark.
00:27:57.320 Miss the mark, yes, absolutely.
00:27:59.040 And so this idea, you know, 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's what sin is.
00:28:15.040 It's basically, there's omission or commission. We did too much of something, too little of something to deviate to the left or the right.
00:28:25.940 And so it's finding that sweet spot of obedience and being in a state of ritual purity.
00:28:33.680 And then we have conditions. So in order for a repentance to be sound, it has to be sincere.
00:28:41.360 The person actually has to have a sincere repentance.
00:28:45.180 It has to be done like if you're actually engaged.
00:28:49.140 And sincere means to recognize the wrongdoing and to strive not to do it again.
00:28:55.640 Would that be a definition of sincerity?
00:28:57.400 Yeah. Sincerity, the Arabic word for sincerity is related to the word for purity and untainted.
00:29:04.900 And so it's done without ulterior motives, because sometimes people will ask forgiveness and they just don't want to be cut out of the will.
00:29:15.700 Right. So that's an instrumental forgiveness.
00:29:17.880 Exactly.
00:29:18.340 Okay. So you talked, this is quite interesting.
00:29:22.420 So you wandered through territory there that linked up physical disgust and contamination with psychological and spiritual disgust and contamination.
00:29:33.500 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.
00:29:41.380 And you say, well, that sin means to miss the mark.
00:29:46.600 And the reason they feel alienated, at least in principle, is because they're missing the mark.
00:29:51.160 And of course, then the question is, well, what exactly is the mark?
00:29:54.680 And it seems to me that you drew a parallel between prayer and washing.
00:30:04.620 And both of them are to remove disgusting contaminants, let's say.
00:30:09.140 And one of the signs that someone has a conscience, although conscience can be overactive and that can be a problem, is that they are laboring under a burden of self-disgust and self-contempt.
00:30:22.800 And they do feel their moral transgressions as something contemptuous and beneath them and base.
00:30:29.140 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.
00:30:45.540 That's a constant attempt to set yourself on the right track so that your aim can be true.
00:30:51.840 It's a reorientation.
00:30:57.680 Do you think, even physiologically speaking, it seems likely that there's a relationship between the idea of decontaminating yourself by becoming clean and spiritually decontaminating yourself with reference to something, to a higher aim?
00:31:13.980 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.
00:31:24.700 And modern psychology attempts to give them, you know, the antichristic formula is to say, unlike Christ who said, go and sin no more.
00:31:35.140 You know, the antichristic formula is to say, go and there's no more sin.
00:31:39.720 So I'm just going to remove that bag of bricks that you're carrying around called guilt.
00:31:43.900 You absolutely can't do that as a therapist.
00:31:46.760 You know, it's not even technically possible, I don't believe, because sometimes you might see somebody who has an overactive superego, you know, if you want to speak in a Freudian sense.
00:31:58.200 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.
00:32:09.900 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?
00:32:34.500 Minimal necessary force, that's a good common law tradition, it's a good psychological tradition.
00:32:39.900 But 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.
00:32:51.220 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, there's one form of prayer you might say in Christianity is baptism.
00:33:08.360 That'd be, in some ways, the most fundamental form of prayer.
00:33:12.020 It's rebirth in the Christian tradition.
00:33:15.380 And it involves, obviously, it involves the use of water, sometimes a full body immersement.
00:33:20.460 And so there's a notion of purification there.
00:33:22.460 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?
00:33:31.280 It 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.
00:33:39.540 Well, that's the difference between real and apparent goods.
00:33:43.540 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.
00:33:50.640 Because the reason they use that archery term is that people are always looking for a good.
00:33:57.140 It's just, if you don't have the discernment to distinguish between a real and apparent good.
00:34:03.640 And so discernment is very important, what the Qur'an calls furqan.
00:34:08.780 In fact, the Qur'an itself is, it terms itself as a furqan, a discernment, a standard by a criteria, a criterion that you can judge actions.
00:34:18.420 We have a great book in virtue ethics called Mizan al-Amal, the standard or the criterion of action,
00:34:26.480 which uses definitely some of the motifs that are in the Nicomachean ethics, but it's this interesting amalgam between that Hellenistic tradition and then infused with the Quranic theological virtues.
00:34:42.820 You know, I wanted to just add, I forgot to mention the other two necessary conditions for a sound repentance.
00:34:52.900 One of them was that you made a firm intention not to go back to that action.
00:34:59.960 And then the fourth one is that if it involved a wrong of another person, then you had to ask them forgiveness.
00:35:08.060 You had to go and you had to, like if you stole, then you had to actually give the money back.
00:35:13.420 If you couldn't, if you didn't know who you stole it from, you actually give it in charity in that person's name.
00:35:18.820 Right.
00:35:19.320 So that's part of discharging that debt.
00:35:21.300 The debt, exactly.
00:35:23.360 Right.
00:35:23.640 And it's certainly the case that people seem to feel innately, I would say, something akin to a psychological debt.
00:35:31.720 And that, well, on that, we discussed already the fact that that can be weaponized, you know, by accusations of arbitrary privilege and so forth.
00:35:40.060 And so it isn't easy to know what to do with that.
00:35:43.960 So let's go back just for a moment to your religious upbringing.
00:35:49.100 Tell me what led up to your conversion, if you would, and why did you move away from Christianity or Buddhism or all of the things that you were exposed to when you were growing up?
00:36:01.080 I was in a head-on collision and survived a car accident that the California Highway Patrol said I shouldn't have survived.
00:36:10.540 And I had what they call a near-death experience.
00:36:14.380 I got very interested in what happens after you die.
00:36:17.520 I realized that I could have very easily transitioned.
00:36:20.060 And so I was very interested in what happens after death.
00:36:24.280 I actually went and met with Dr. Raymond Moody, who wrote the books on life after life.
00:36:29.740 And he did a lot of the work with near-death people that had...
00:36:35.000 Can I ask you what happened in your near-death experience?
00:36:37.640 I think it was pretty classic.
00:36:40.280 You know, I definitely saw my...
00:36:44.060 I went into a very different spatial-temporal state where I just...
00:36:54.480 Everything went into a kind of slow motion.
00:36:57.860 And I just...
00:36:58.920 It was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash.
00:37:04.040 And it was...
00:37:07.300 And then I just saw, like, my inception all the way up to that moment.
00:37:14.480 And I just saw my whole life, literally.
00:37:18.380 And it was just this...
00:37:22.100 As if I lived my life a second time, but in a moment.
00:37:26.360 That was the experience.
00:37:28.780 And so I...
00:37:29.440 What did that do for you, that experience?
00:37:32.680 How did it change?
00:37:33.540 One, it made me...
00:37:36.340 You know, at the time I was a senior in high school, my probably biggest interests were
00:37:42.360 baseball and other things.
00:37:46.260 But music was certainly a big interest.
00:37:51.140 My family...
00:37:51.920 I come from a family of musicians.
00:37:54.360 So I think what it did is it made me really think about death in a very deep way.
00:38:00.600 And if you've ever seen...
00:38:03.400 There's a film about a man who's in a plane crash.
00:38:10.760 And then he survives the plane crash.
00:38:13.420 And it's a man who had a lot of fears.
00:38:14.980 But he comes out of it.
00:38:16.020 Jeff Bridges is the person.
00:38:17.620 And he's like looking at his hands.
00:38:21.420 And am I alive or am I dead?
00:38:23.040 I was in that state for about two weeks.
00:38:26.000 It was a very strange state to be in.
00:38:29.880 And that got me interested in what religions say about after death.
00:38:35.860 And so I decided to study all the world religions just from that perspective.
00:38:43.480 And the one that really, really resonated and struck me as having a very, very powerful
00:38:52.780 description was the Islamic tradition.
00:38:55.700 And I actually ended up, ironically, I ended up writing in the study of Quran, which was
00:39:03.960 published by Harper.
00:39:06.040 However, I ended up writing the essay on death in the Quran, which is how I actually became
00:39:10.940 Muslim.
00:39:11.500 So it was a very interesting, serendipitous evolution.
00:39:16.380 So walk me through that.
00:39:18.420 So, okay.
00:39:19.300 So you just about died.
00:39:20.560 How old were you?
00:39:22.200 17.
00:39:25.040 Yeah.
00:39:25.320 So I've, I've, there have been studies showing, for example, that if you have someone, I remember
00:39:31.760 this study, if you have someone jump off a bungee cord, watching a digital clock, the
00:39:38.080 clock goes slower for them subjectively.
00:39:41.440 So if you subject people to a tremendous amount of stress, then time slows down.
00:39:45.840 And I suspect the neurophysiological reason for that is that when you're in a tremendous
00:39:51.140 crisis, your body floods itself with the hormones and neurochemicals, probably mostly dopamine
00:39:56.740 that are necessary for you to act extraordinarily quickly.
00:40:00.020 And it's extremely energy intensive to do that.
00:40:03.940 So you can't do it all the time, but maybe we can snap ourselves into a psychophysiological
00:40:09.760 state where we're a hundred times faster than we would normally be for some very finite
00:40:14.340 amount of time.
00:40:16.080 I'm not trying to, what would you say, reduce this to a physiological explanation.
00:40:19.960 Well, that's a, that's a very common reductionist approach to, to an experience, an experience
00:40:26.760 that, I mean, you, you can look at the soft, the, uh, the hard drive aspect of it, but the
00:40:31.860 software is the mystery.
00:40:33.960 Yeah.
00:40:34.600 I'm not, and I'm definitely not trying to remove the phenomenological significance, you
00:40:39.080 know, because that would be foolish.
00:40:41.120 And, and even those, those explanations are only attempts at understanding a phenomenon that
00:40:47.880 we really don't have access to because cause and effect is a very difficult thing to, to
00:40:54.320 nail down.
00:40:54.680 It's, it's, it certainly is.
00:40:57.040 Yeah.
00:40:57.300 And, and that kind of explanation doesn't account for all the near death experience phenomena
00:41:01.740 either.
00:41:02.680 But.
00:41:04.280 I mean, you asked, you asked me how, you know, that, that got me thinking a lot about death.
00:41:11.320 Right.
00:41:12.020 Irrespective of whatever the neurochemical phenomena that were happening within my body, that experience,
00:41:18.680 that phenomenological experience had a existential effect on me.
00:41:25.800 Right.
00:41:25.900 That was very powerful.
00:41:27.320 And, and I decided that I really wanted to know if I could have died in that moment, which
00:41:34.240 was very possible, I wanted to know what, what, if anything happens, and if something happens,
00:41:41.820 how do you prepare for that?
00:41:44.480 Like what, you know, if we're on, if we're genuinely on the doors of infinity, then we
00:41:51.300 should take this time that we have very seriously to prepare to go through that door.
00:41:57.080 And that's what existentially, that's what happened to me.
00:42:01.800 I wanted to know if I can go through that door at any moment, as a 17 year old, I could
00:42:08.320 have done it.
00:42:09.280 Now, as a 64 year old, it's possible that I could do it today or tomorrow, the next day.
00:42:17.540 What type of preparation do I need?
00:42:20.620 Why did you, why do you think that you derived the conclusion that it was something that you
00:42:25.780 needed to be prepared for?
00:42:28.980 Well, I think that I, yeah, I, I just think that's a kind of, uh, I just think it's common
00:42:38.260 sense, you know, like, I mean, preparing for death.
00:42:41.620 Well, it's interesting.
00:42:42.440 It's interesting.
00:42:43.060 When I worked, when I worked in critical care, what became very clear to me, some people seem
00:42:49.620 to be ready for death and other people are definitely not ready for death.
00:42:53.560 And, and I, and I can see the difference.
00:42:56.480 I saw the difference.
00:42:57.720 You know, I, my, both my parents died.
00:42:59.840 I was, uh, with both my parents and, and I could see, you know, I mean, my mother had
00:43:07.960 an incredible transition and I think my mother was fully ready to go into the next world.
00:43:15.220 I don't think a lot of people are ready.
00:43:16.660 I think a lot of people are very afraid of death.
00:43:19.120 And I think that's something that, uh, one of the gifts of religion is it does remove
00:43:26.320 that fear, not necessarily of the act of, of dying, because obviously that's a very intense,
00:43:32.280 uh, experience, especially for those of us who has seen that, uh, in people who die.
00:43:38.340 Um, but the, the, the transition into the next world is something the Quran says, it's something
00:43:47.580 to be looked forward to.
00:43:49.340 It's not something to fear, but, but it's also, as long as not a death cult, the prophet
00:43:54.780 said, don't desire to die, but ask God for a long life.
00:44:00.200 And, and he said that none of you should ever desire death.
00:44:06.200 You should desire to have a long life because you have more time to do more good.
00:44:12.260 And the more good you do, the more you accrue in terms of preparation for that transition.
00:44:19.240 And what do you think it means to be prepared versus not prepared to die?
00:44:23.200 Uh, to be in a good state, I think to be like, if, if you're in a state of repentance, if
00:44:31.820 you're, if, if whatever you've done in the past, if you've really, uh, repented for any
00:44:37.540 of the wrongs that you've done, and there's major wrongs and there's minor wrongs, uh, there's,
00:44:42.840 there's the peccadillos and then there's the, those mortal sins that, that, uh, that are
00:44:49.060 recognized for what they are, things that literally will cause death to the soul.
00:44:53.400 The wages of sin is death.
00:44:55.240 So I think being in a good state, being prepared, being ready to make that transition is very
00:45:00.860 important.
00:45:01.200 And I think in many ways, a lot of, uh, the practices that we do in our tradition are in
00:45:06.940 preparation for death.
00:45:08.020 In fact, if you look at just the five prayers, uh, the very first prayer that we do when,
00:45:14.100 when we wake up, the provostalism gave us a prayer that I did this morning.
00:45:17.960 When I first came into consciousness, which says, praise be to the, the one who brought
00:45:23.240 me back to life because death in the Quran is, uh, sleep in the Quran is seen as a little
00:45:28.820 death.
00:45:29.220 And so it's every morning we have a resurrection that's to remind us of the, the resurrection
00:45:35.360 on the day of judgment.
00:45:36.600 And then the very first thing that we do is we wash and then we pray.
00:45:41.240 That's, that's the first thing that Muslims do when they wake at dawn, when the sun, uh,
00:45:46.500 before the sun comes up.
00:45:48.160 And then before we go to bed, that's the last thing that we do.
00:45:51.660 We make a prayer.
00:45:52.980 Oh God, if you take my soul in my sleep, have mercy on it.
00:45:56.600 And if you let me live another day, then make me amongst the righteous and protect me.
00:46:01.520 These are all prayers that our provostalism did every single day.
00:46:04.460 And then on, on Friday, we have a communal prayer, which is, is the day of gathering, which
00:46:11.420 is related to the day of judgment, where you all stand before God.
00:46:15.580 And then also in Ramadan, we fast.
00:46:18.980 So we were giving up the pleasures of life during the daylight hours for a month.
00:46:25.060 And then the end of it is a celebration of making it through that month, uh, hopefully
00:46:31.480 with as little sin as possible.
00:46:33.580 And then we have the, the, the, uh, the prayer, the, the poor tax, which is to do good to others
00:46:40.080 from the good that you've been given.
00:46:41.240 And then we have the hajj, which is really a preparation for death because you're making
00:46:46.420 this pilgrimage.
00:46:47.080 You're, you, you get into white clothes, which is the, to symbolize the shroud.
00:46:53.340 And then you stand on the plane of, of Arafat, like the day of judgment, which symbolizes that
00:47:00.100 all of humanity is going to stand in a non-spatial, non-temporal sense is going to stand before their
00:47:06.580 creator and be judged for what they did.
00:47:09.940 So we believe in a day of judgment.
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00:48:48.920 So when you were 16 or 17, how old were you when you had the car accident?
00:48:58.320 17.
00:48:58.760 17.
00:48:59.020 And so then you became interested in the issue of death and the meaning of death and
00:49:03.820 the idea of preparation for death.
00:49:05.480 And you read widely throughout the world's religions.
00:49:08.460 And you said that Islam in particular struck your fancy.
00:49:13.460 When did you convert?
00:49:14.720 How old were you?
00:49:15.880 18.
00:49:17.280 Okay.
00:49:17.800 So that's, that's, that's, was that a radical move as far as your family was concerned?
00:49:24.460 You know, my dad, the first thing he did, he went to Gibbon and reread the section on
00:49:28.340 the rise of Islam.
00:49:30.980 My dad was a professor of philosophy.
00:49:33.820 So, you know, he was a lapsed Catholic.
00:49:39.020 Probably the most well-read person I've ever met in the Western canon.
00:49:42.240 Um, I think he was intrigued.
00:49:46.060 He didn't really understand it.
00:49:47.900 My mom was fine with it.
00:49:49.880 She thought, great, you know, you found a, a path.
00:49:53.700 That's how she viewed it.
00:49:55.180 But both my father, both my parents ended up, uh, making the declaration of faith before
00:50:01.620 they died.
00:50:02.220 So my father read Ghazali and, uh, ended up becoming Muslim.
00:50:10.120 So what was it about specifically about the Islamic treatment of death in the afterlife
00:50:15.520 compared to say the Christian or Jewish treatment?
00:50:18.900 Well, one, the Quran is, the scent of death is on every page of the Quran.
00:50:25.140 So it's, it's definitely a very, very, it's a death reminder and not in a negative way.
00:50:32.360 There's this tension release that happens in the Quran.
00:50:35.660 Um, I was once in a, in a hotel and, and, and, and, and in London, and there was a guy
00:50:41.800 across from me reading the Quran, an English translation and drinking a Heineken beer, which
00:50:47.940 was very interesting.
00:50:49.560 And, uh, so I, you know, I was dressed in Western clothes and I just asked him, how are
00:50:53.420 you finding that book?
00:50:54.260 He says, this book is very interesting.
00:50:57.000 And, and I said, in what way?
00:50:58.560 And he said, you know, it's just tension release, tension release.
00:51:02.600 Uh, and, uh, I said, wow, you got that on the first reading.
00:51:06.580 That's very impressive because it's, you know, it'll tell you about all the, the wages of
00:51:12.080 sin, but then it'll tell you about the blessings of, of obedience.
00:51:16.580 And, and, and turning to God and repenting and answering the call of the prophets, that
00:51:23.720 perennial call that the prophets to shun false idols, including the idol of the self, uh,
00:51:30.140 to turn away from, uh, the vanities of life, the vain appetites, uh, that are of no use for
00:51:36.520 you in this world.
00:51:38.160 Earlier, you talked about apparent and real, uh, goods.
00:51:42.200 And so you're, you're referring to that in a sense here, again, and making the presumption
00:51:47.760 that there is a hierarchy of values and that some things should be pursued in preference
00:51:52.820 to others.
00:51:53.360 And this is something that the modern West has great difficulty formalizing and accepting,
00:51:59.460 although people suffer for it, regardless of their understanding of it.
00:52:05.700 When, when you are thinking about turning your eyes heavenward or getting your aim straight
00:52:12.140 or obedience to God, what do you think, what does that mean to you conceptually?
00:52:17.880 And what does it mean practically in your life?
00:52:21.960 Well, I mean, practically it means staying within the, what we call the hudu, the Quran calls
00:52:28.580 the limits that God has set on us.
00:52:30.560 So we have certain limits that are set on us and those limits are to protect us.
00:52:35.180 So everything in the Islamic tradition, uh, according to our Al-Ghazali and others, everything
00:52:42.960 in our tradition is to protect one of six things to protect religion itself, to protect, uh, human
00:52:51.580 intellect reason.
00:52:52.960 So like the prohibition of alcohol is to protect, uh, human reason, uh, to protect life.
00:52:58.980 Sorry, life is the next to protect life, to protect human reason, to protect property, uh, which
00:53:05.180 is really what Richard Weaver called the last metaphysical right standing, you know, the right
00:53:10.900 to property, um, and, and then to protect, um, family and then to protect human dignity.
00:53:19.860 So those six things, there's no ruling in Islam that isn't addressing one of those six
00:53:25.760 preservations.
00:53:27.580 And so everything that we do is, is for, for the, that, that, that's the, the way in which
00:53:35.080 we try to live our lives.
00:53:36.220 So family being good to family, taking care of those in need around you first and foremost,
00:53:42.180 charity begins at home and then extending to those closest to you.
00:53:46.240 So Islam is, is antagonistic to socialism.
00:53:49.140 It's antagonistic to any kind of collectivist philosophy, but it does recognize that each
00:53:54.200 one of us should be giving something back to, uh, to, sorry, I'm going to let you go
00:54:00.040 through that again, but you said something there that's very interesting to me.
00:54:04.180 You said that Islam is antagonistic to a collectivist philosophy.
00:54:08.740 Can you tell me why, why either why that's true or why you believe it to be true?
00:54:14.300 Well, first and foremost, the Quran itself, because the Quran, if you look at it, it's
00:54:18.680 a book of individuals going against groups that are insane.
00:54:23.580 I mean, every single story in the Quran is an individual who goes up against a group and
00:54:28.700 the group says, burn him, throw him in the fire, stone him.
00:54:33.100 So that, you know, it's pretty clear from the Quran that the group is not necessarily a
00:54:39.680 good thing.
00:54:40.380 And the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, no.
00:54:44.300 Master yourselves so that you don't become yes people, that when people do good, you do
00:54:49.380 good.
00:54:49.720 And when they do bad, you do bad, but, but be so that when people do good, you're with
00:54:55.260 them.
00:54:55.520 And when they do bad, you refrain from their evil.
00:54:58.640 So it's very important for, you know, and one of the tragedies obviously is that any group
00:55:05.680 goes into group think.
00:55:07.020 I mean, you know, this is an area you're much more familiar with than I am, but group think
00:55:12.580 is a, is a huge problem.
00:55:14.220 And I think the Quran addresses that problem constantly by showing that you have to stand
00:55:18.940 up against the group because the group, as Nietzsche pointed out, you know, that insanity
00:55:25.460 or madness is unusual amongst individuals, but it seems to be the norm amongst groups.
00:55:29.960 I mean, I, I think Kierkegaard said, Kierkegaard said that the, the group was untruth said, even
00:55:36.200 if a truth, an actual truth is claimed by a group instantly, it becomes untruth merely
00:55:41.240 because the group has acclaimed it because, because truth for him was individual in the
00:55:46.780 same sense that you're describing.
00:55:47.980 Do you think that's akin to the Jewish emphasis on the prophetic tradition?
00:55:54.660 I, I absolutely, yeah.
00:55:55.980 And, but I also think that, that, that the Islamic tradition does emphasize the importance
00:56:01.540 of community and the importance of sociability.
00:56:04.940 You know, this idea that, um, that we are gregarious human beings, that we're, we're people
00:56:10.740 that we need, uh, society, uh, to, to, to fully realize ourselves.
00:56:17.680 And it's the rare individual that can be the anchor, right?
00:56:21.600 You know, as Aristotle said, it's, it's either a beast or a God that can live alone, but, um,
00:56:27.500 you know, it's a very difficult thing.
00:56:29.220 There are people that can do it.
00:56:30.660 And, and I've known a few, uh, people like that.
00:56:33.440 And we, and we do have a tradition, the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said that towards
00:56:38.760 the latter days, it's better to avoid all the groups.
00:56:42.480 And that's in a sound tradition because he said the groups would be astray.
00:56:47.580 Okay.
00:56:48.120 So let me ask you a question that's always put to people who are religious.
00:56:54.040 How do you differentiate religious belief from idolatry, from, from ideological belief?
00:57:01.920 I don't personally, I don't think they're the same by the way, but I'm curious about,
00:57:05.940 you know, because it's pretty easy for someone just to say, well, you talk about standing
00:57:11.100 up against the collective, but you Christians, you Jews, you Islamic types, you're part of
00:57:16.400 a mob, just like everybody else.
00:57:17.980 And why does your particular mob view reign supreme in your view?
00:57:22.480 Why isn't that just another idol in the desert, just like the rest of them?
00:57:27.280 What makes it different?
00:57:28.280 Do you think?
00:57:28.780 Well, I think that you can, you know, as the bard said, to his idolatry, to make the
00:57:34.020 service greater than the god.
00:57:35.780 It's very easy to turn a religion into an idol.
00:57:39.780 And, and, and I think there are many people-
00:57:42.780 I think that's what the new atheists subject to, right?
00:57:45.140 Is that the fact that religious belief can be, maybe it can be hijacked for instrumental
00:57:50.360 and dogmatic purposes.
00:57:51.680 Yeah, as if, as if ideology isn't, as if anything can't go wrong.
00:57:57.960 Well, there is that, yes.
00:57:59.480 Yeah.
00:57:59.800 And so, I mean, I don't know, like, I think, you know, these great, the 20th century is,
00:58:08.920 is largely an irreligious century in the Western hemisphere.
00:58:12.460 And just look what these non-religious ideologies, this point has been pointed out by many people.
00:58:20.660 One of the things about, you know, are you familiar with Errol Kolnoy, K-O-L-N-A-I?
00:58:27.700 No, I'm not.
00:58:29.180 K-O-L-N-I-A.
00:58:30.380 Yeah, N-A-I.
00:58:31.400 So he was a Hungarian Jew who converted to Catholicism, but he wrote a very interesting
00:58:35.300 paper in 1951 called The Three Writers of the Apocalypse.
00:58:39.040 He also wrote a book about Nazi Germany in 1938, and really, I think, really understood.
00:58:45.360 What's his, tell me his name again.
00:58:47.100 Errol Kolnoy, K-O-L-N-A-I.
00:58:49.960 Errol, A-U-R-E-L.
00:58:51.960 Yeah.
00:58:52.420 Anyway, he.
00:58:52.980 Oh, A-U-R-A-L?
00:58:56.300 A-U-R-E-L.
00:58:58.600 Okay.
00:58:59.280 Kolnoy, K-O-L-N-A.
00:59:00.460 So anyway, he wrote a, he wrote an essay called The Three Writers of the Apocalypse.
00:59:04.320 And he identified three totalitarian ideologies.
00:59:09.840 He said the first two, fascism and communism, were easy to recognize.
00:59:14.440 But he said that the real danger, dangerous one was progressive liberalism, because the
00:59:20.100 seeds of totalitarianism were not seen very easily.
00:59:24.120 It was something that could be missed.
00:59:25.560 Yeah, so, well, so when I think about this, I think, if, well, if I had to choose, let's
00:59:35.220 say, if I had to choose the leader of a country, let's say an arbitrarily powerful leader, it
00:59:42.080 seems to me that it would be a better choice for me to select someone who believes that he's
00:59:47.180 beholden to something above and beyond himself, than to choose someone who doesn't have that
00:59:53.100 belief at all.
00:59:54.200 Right.
00:59:54.460 And that seems to me, regardless of what you might say philosophically or even scientifically
01:00:00.240 about the utility of religious belief or the validity of religious belief, the notion
01:00:05.480 that you could be the leader of a powerful country and not be serving something that
01:00:10.540 wasn't only you, seems to be a real problem with a, let's say, a stringently atheistic
01:00:17.260 philosophy, because, well, why wouldn't you just serve you in a position like that?
01:00:21.580 Well, and you would need, generally, it's the religious traditions that understand service
01:00:28.420 is for not just the self.
01:00:31.140 I mean, we obviously have to serve ourselves just to live, but service to others.
01:00:37.060 And that's why political leaders in the pre-modern world, it was always understood that they had
01:00:42.060 the greatest burden of self-discipline, that they had a greater burden of self-discipline
01:00:48.780 than everybody else.
01:00:50.440 Yeah, because they had greater power and greater temptation.
01:00:54.340 And so, and so the religious traditions, I mean, the, you know, the pre-modern world understood
01:00:59.800 very well in whatever civilization you were in, they understood very well that the central
01:01:05.560 problem that human beings are confronted with is their self.
01:01:11.760 And, and that the modern, modern world has completely lost that idea that you had to master yourself.
01:01:20.600 Hence, hence, you know, one of the things that Confucius said is that, you know, that study
01:01:28.620 without thinking is, is blindness, but thinking without study is dangerous.
01:01:35.520 Right.
01:01:36.860 And so if you don't study those things that are, that will equip you to deal with the self.
01:01:45.120 And that's why in our tradition and in all the great traditions, but in the Islamic tradition,
01:01:51.620 the study of the self psychology, it's termed in Arabic, it was central to our tradition,
01:01:58.600 to understanding the nature of the self, to understanding the machinations of the self,
01:02:02.860 the tricks of the self, how the steps, and, and, and to understand those things so that
01:02:08.240 you could, you could learn to discipline them.
01:02:10.560 I mean, this gets back to, you know, Imam al-Ghazari uses the idea of the sage, the dog
01:02:15.900 and the pig, which obviously, you know, Plato would have said the charioteer and the two horses.
01:02:22.140 It's the same idea, but, you know, the pig is the, the concupiscent soul, the dog is
01:02:28.680 the irascible soul, and then the sage is the, is the rational soul.
01:02:32.980 If, if the sage is in charge, then things will turn out well.
01:02:37.000 But if, if, if you allow the pig or the dog to take over in our culture, you know, the pig
01:02:42.760 has definitely, uh, it's, the pig seems to really be having a field day, right?
01:02:49.440 The, uh, the pig is doing very well.
01:02:51.920 You know, I mean, the dog is not doing too bad either.
01:02:54.880 Well, it's interesting because exactly.
01:02:56.920 And I think the world is split, you know, Billy Brant back in the seventies saw this
01:03:00.780 north-south problem of, of, I mean, he didn't term it like this, but, but I, I see it as,
01:03:07.060 as the pig and the dog, you know, I mean, if you, if, if you have affluence on, on one
01:03:12.780 spectrum and you have real, um, uh, just diminution of goods, just of human goods on the other,
01:03:22.060 you're going to create a lot of resentment.
01:03:24.000 And, and so that's a huge problem that we have.
01:03:27.420 So this idea, you know, Frost talked about fire and ice.
01:03:31.340 Some say the world will end in fire.
01:03:32.660 Some say in ice.
01:03:33.920 He was talking about this, the dog and the pig from what I've tasted of desire.
01:03:38.380 I hold with those who favor fire, right?
01:03:41.740 In other words, the world's end will come from the pig, just wreaking havoc.
01:03:49.160 And, and, uh, but then he said, but if it had to perish twice, I think of, you know, that
01:03:54.460 for destruction.
01:03:56.400 Yeah.
01:03:57.040 Ice is left.
01:03:57.680 Sorry.
01:03:58.160 Yeah.
01:03:59.140 Sorry.
01:03:59.720 Please finish that.
01:04:00.580 Ice is.
01:04:01.060 Yeah.
01:04:01.560 Yeah.
01:04:02.080 That, that hate is also great and will suffice, you know, that, that the irascible can do it
01:04:06.420 as well.
01:04:06.800 It's one or the other.
01:04:07.720 It's either going to be fire or ice, but that, that's in the absence.
01:04:11.860 That's in the absence of the, uh, you know, the, the, the sage that's in the absence of
01:04:20.320 wisdom and wisdom is a word that's not often heard.
01:04:25.040 Yes.
01:04:25.520 Well, I've had a lot of discussions with people who regard themselves as explicitly atheistic.
01:04:32.280 You know, and it seems to me that a lot of the discussion about religious belief in atheism
01:04:39.860 misses the mark.
01:04:41.420 Let's put it that way.
01:04:44.080 I tend to think of God.
01:04:46.840 If I'm thinking about the idea of God psychologically, I tend to think about something akin to a hierarchy
01:04:53.120 of values and that's very much similar to the proposition that you're putting forward with
01:04:58.880 the metaphor of the pig and the dog and the sage, that there are some values that are higher
01:05:03.900 than others.
01:05:04.580 And so I would say, I think that's psychologically true that there are some values higher than
01:05:12.580 others.
01:05:13.080 I mean, we tend to put our families before ourselves, for example, and we tend to have a sense that
01:05:19.420 we would, we would like to be good people.
01:05:22.200 So I use this, this illustration of the relationship between values.
01:05:29.500 Imagine that you're making a meal.
01:05:33.200 You might ask yourself, well, what are you doing?
01:05:35.840 Say you're cutting up vegetables.
01:05:38.400 Okay, so you're moving your hand back and forth.
01:05:40.760 That's not abstract at all.
01:05:42.100 That's where the mind meets the body.
01:05:43.620 You're moving your hand back and forth to cut the vegetables, to put them in the pot, to
01:05:49.240 cook a good dinner, to be a good father, to be a good husband, to be a good citizen, to
01:05:57.440 be a good person.
01:05:59.500 So you're doing all those things at the same time, right?
01:06:01.940 And each of the more particular things nests in the broader value.
01:06:07.380 And the broader a value is the more other values depend on it.
01:06:11.140 And also maybe the broader a value is the more other people can be united within it.
01:06:15.900 And so I think you can come to a technical understanding of something like depth of value.
01:06:22.400 And then it seems to me that the religious proposition is that there is an ultimate value
01:06:26.600 that's either at the pinnacle or at the base, depending on how you conceptualize the metaphor.
01:06:32.180 And that that ultimate value is expressed in religious terminology as the absolute, the
01:06:39.800 ineffable absolute, as the God that's supposed to be served.
01:06:42.960 And in some sense, it has to remain ineffable and beyond comprehension, because otherwise
01:06:47.940 it turns into an idol.
01:06:49.760 And so what you do in a religious sense is posit an ultimate ideal, subordinate yourself
01:06:56.340 to it, regard it as something that you can only ever approximate to, even in principle,
01:07:02.860 and organize all the other virtues and defeat the faults in relationship to that highest order
01:07:08.400 value.
01:07:09.540 And that's more like, I think, part of the reason that religious traditions insist upon
01:07:14.860 faith isn't, it's not faith, it's not the faith that the scientists, the scientist types
01:07:22.120 criticize, which is sort of like an empirical statement about the structure of objective
01:07:27.500 reality.
01:07:27.960 It's more like the notion that there is a hierarchy of values and that there's something that has
01:07:32.760 to be absolute, ineffable, and ultimately uniting at the apex, that we should be subservient
01:07:38.340 to, you know, that we should consider all our behaviors in relationship to.
01:07:42.640 And so that's, you know, there's not a metaphysics there in some sense, because I'm not saying
01:07:49.680 anything about the final nature of that absolute value, right?
01:07:54.120 That's an ontological question.
01:07:55.500 And I don't feel qualified to answer it, but I can't see how there can be an absence of an
01:08:02.920 absolute unifying value that's superordinate to all other values without society degenerating
01:08:09.060 into conflict, without people becoming anxious and confused and aimless, without the consequences
01:08:15.560 being that we all miss the mark.
01:08:18.020 So I guess I'd like your comments about that idea.
01:08:21.440 Yeah, I don't think God's something that we posit.
01:08:23.380 I think, and I also certainly don't think God is a value.
01:08:27.920 I think that God, that we respond to God, and that God makes a call, and that call is
01:08:36.460 through these intermediaries.
01:08:38.500 And the prophets, the Quran says in the chapter called the B, that there's no nation that hasn't
01:08:44.320 been given warners that say, shun idols and worship God.
01:08:49.260 And so...
01:08:50.020 Well, I wasn't trying to, I wasn't trying to, what would you say, reduce God to a human
01:08:54.600 value.
01:08:55.840 But a lot of people do.
01:08:57.280 I mean, that's a very common, modern way of viewing God.
01:09:00.500 Yeah.
01:09:01.140 And so...
01:09:01.620 That's why I insisted upon the ineffability.
01:09:03.600 Well, yeah, however you want to state that.
01:09:10.040 I mean, I, for us, for Abrahamic people in particular, God, that we respond to God, God
01:09:17.980 makes a call, and that calls through the prophets.
01:09:19.840 And the prophets are surprisingly consistent, unlike philosophers, who the student invariably
01:09:25.080 rejects the master.
01:09:28.080 You know, Plato is a friend, but the truth is a greater friend.
01:09:30.960 Whereas the prophets are extraordinarily consistent in their messaging, that there is a God, that
01:09:36.900 that God demands that you live within the limits that God has set as your creator.
01:09:42.620 I mean, one of the things that atheists, to me, the atheist, you know, there's a definition
01:09:48.980 of health, which looks at the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual.
01:09:55.260 George Vithoulkas, a great health practitioner from Greece, said that atheism is really one
01:10:04.220 of the most serious signs of ill health, because it's a denial of your creativeness, and that
01:10:15.160 you have to really be unhealthy to do that.
01:10:17.940 So he saw it as a deep spiritual sickness to deny your creator.
01:10:23.280 Whether that creator is a personal creator is the next stage that you're going to have
01:10:30.760 to ask yourself.
01:10:32.180 But to deny your creativeness is something quite extraordinary.
01:10:37.680 By saying there's no creator.
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01:11:48.940 So how do you deal with the challenges, the hypothetical challenges presented to the notion
01:11:56.180 of created human beings, the conflict between that and modern evolutionary theory as a modern
01:12:03.740 thinker?
01:12:08.540 I mean, the Catholics have accepted evolutionary theory, but that's my understanding of this.
01:12:13.240 Yeah, guided evolution, not this idea of randomness.
01:12:17.720 I mean, the best response to that is, I think, Robert Frost's poem called Accidentally on Purpose.
01:12:23.800 That would be my answer.
01:12:24.820 Somebody can, if they're interested, can Google it and look at it.
01:12:27.500 But, you know, this idea that randomness that created this, I just, I won't buy that.
01:12:36.420 And if they want to say it's because I don't understand evolution, that's fine.
01:12:41.820 I'll accept that.
01:12:43.740 You know, I talked to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins recently.
01:12:47.580 I'm going to release the discussion I had with Dawkins.
01:12:50.080 And the randomness argument's an interesting one because it's the variability between people
01:12:57.140 that's in some sense random.
01:12:58.500 But sexual selection plays an awfully powerful force in evolutionary biology, and sexual selection
01:13:05.620 is anything but random.
01:13:07.540 And so, to me, I see the action of consciousness, perhaps in the ultimate sense, operating not
01:13:14.200 least through the mechanism of sexual selection.
01:13:17.040 So the selection mechanisms aren't random, even if the variation might be generated in part
01:13:22.000 randomly.
01:13:22.500 It seems to me that there's something there that would reconcile the relationship in modern
01:13:28.620 biology between the spirit and the matter, spirit and matter, let's say.
01:13:33.100 So, because consciousness calls matter into being in some real sense.
01:13:37.800 So, well, consciousness also for us is a spiritual phenomenon.
01:13:43.260 It's not a material phenomenon.
01:13:45.120 And, you know, the ancients said that the one who denies the soul, that you'd have to determine
01:13:53.060 him an idiot.
01:13:54.660 It's, you know, they really saw it as a kind of absurdity to deny the existence of a soul.
01:14:00.580 Because it's so clear, if anybody's ever seen a corpse, that something's very profoundly
01:14:07.340 missing.
01:14:07.920 So, what, let's go back to practicalities with regards to Islam.
01:14:15.600 And also, I'd be interested in, you said that you chose, so I want to know, what following
01:14:22.600 the Islamic faith has done for your life personally?
01:14:26.120 How has it helped you put yourself together?
01:14:28.860 And also, I'm interested in, again, why you found the Islamic tradition preferable, let's
01:14:35.920 say, to the Orthodox tradition, that you did enjoy the rituals that were part of that,
01:14:41.060 at least.
01:14:42.040 So, let's deal with practical issues first.
01:14:44.860 So, can you just...
01:14:46.120 Yeah.
01:14:49.440 In terms of why I chose Islam, I mean, I'm not completely convinced that I chose Islam.
01:14:57.720 I mean, in some ways, Islam chose me as well.
01:15:01.080 So, it's, you know, guidance is a very strange thing for people.
01:15:05.060 Like, I saw an inevitability.
01:15:07.480 When I look back on what happened, I saw an inevitability of my embracing Islam.
01:15:14.940 I had some very interesting experiences that could be termed mystical or however you want
01:15:22.440 to determine them.
01:15:24.300 But the tradition itself, what struck me was, one, I got to keep all of the prophets that
01:15:32.860 I believed in already.
01:15:34.280 And I added, in addition, what we consider to be the final prophet.
01:15:38.880 And just as very often Christians marvel at how Jews miss Jesus, Muslims also marvel at
01:15:46.240 how Christians and Jews miss Muhammad.
01:15:48.960 Although, to be fair to the Jews, they do acknowledge the prophet as a providential force.
01:15:54.340 And they do acknowledge him as a Noahidic messenger preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah.
01:16:02.340 So, they do recognize that he was a providential force.
01:16:05.120 At least the great, if you read George Kohler's book on Jewish theology, has a chapter on Judaism
01:16:10.540 and Islam.
01:16:11.540 And certainly, the great father of Orientalism, Ignaz Golzeher, he actually said that he felt
01:16:19.740 that Islam was the only religion that somebody of a philosophical bent could actually accept.
01:16:25.160 And he wanted to really bring in the gift of philosophy into Judaism that had been, that
01:16:32.740 the Muslims had so richly participated in.
01:16:36.320 And in fact, you know, there's an argument that just as Judaism prepared the way for
01:16:41.060 Christianity, it was Islam that prepared the way for a philosophical Western Christendom.
01:16:47.520 Because if you look at the transmission of all of that knowledge that comes into Europe,
01:16:51.820 it's quite extraordinary.
01:16:53.280 I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas, who's 13th century, he dies in 1274, and yet he's the doctor of the
01:16:59.760 church.
01:17:00.440 Just look at the number of times he quotes Muslims.
01:17:02.880 I mean, he calls Averroes the commentator.
01:17:07.300 So I think Islam, you know, one of the beauties of the religion to me is that you'll find whatever
01:17:13.900 you're looking for in it.
01:17:15.760 I mean, Islam, it has a very simple theology that anybody can understand in Surat al-Ikhlas,
01:17:23.700 the chapter that says, say God is unique, God is completely independent, God neither gives
01:17:33.800 birth nor was God born, and there's nothing like God.
01:17:37.380 So it gives you a very simple theology that anybody can understand.
01:17:42.600 And yet, embedded in that simplicity is an extraordinary complexity that actually created
01:17:48.360 a metaphysical tradition that Western scholars have spent their lifetime studying.
01:17:54.580 People like Henri Corwin or somebody, it's like Maxine Rodenson, not Maxine Rodenson, but
01:18:01.600 the great Catholic theologian and metaphysician, Jacques Maritain, you know, recognized the genius
01:18:10.960 of people like Al-Hallaj and things.
01:18:13.100 So within the Islamic tradition, there's just an extraordinary spectrum.
01:18:17.680 You can spend your entire life and have a satisfying life, and I know people that have
01:18:22.020 done this, just mastering the recensions of the Quran and the Quran, the actual oral expression
01:18:31.360 of the Quran through the rules of Tajwi.
01:18:34.660 You can spend your life studying exegesis.
01:18:37.980 You can spend your life studying prophetic tradition.
01:18:40.160 You can spend your life studying the great mystics of Islam.
01:18:43.040 We have the best poets in the world.
01:18:45.360 We also have the best architecture.
01:18:48.240 I mean, there's nothing like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra Palace.
01:18:52.720 And even Western architecture, if you read Stealing from the Saracens, she shows how some of
01:18:57.940 the finest Western architecture was basically taken from the Islamic civilization, including
01:19:03.880 Notre Dame in Paris.
01:19:05.880 So you can find incredible...
01:19:08.380 I know people that just came to Islam through music.
01:19:13.420 I mean, I know some really professional musicians that fell in love with Arabic music, which led
01:19:20.380 them into Muslim culture.
01:19:23.960 People that love just...
01:19:27.820 I mean, one of the most interesting things about Islam is it is a truly universal religion
01:19:33.680 in that you can go from Indonesia to California and find all of these different expressions
01:19:40.060 of the same central truths of Islam with their own local colorings.
01:19:45.440 So the West African Muslims are not like the Middle Eastern Muslims.
01:19:49.240 The Middle Eastern Muslims are not like the Indian Muslims.
01:19:51.620 And you have people like, you know, one of the great Impressionist painters of Sweden.
01:20:00.680 I think he's actually considered a national treasure in Sweden.
01:20:04.840 But his paintings hang in the museum there.
01:20:07.460 He became Muslim in jail for actually...
01:20:16.060 He shot a matador because he was raised by...
01:20:19.580 His father was a veterinarian and he shot a matador because he was so horrified that they
01:20:24.860 were bringing bullfighting into France.
01:20:26.620 And there was such an uproar that they actually released him.
01:20:29.780 But when he was in jail, he befriended an Algerian who used to recite Quran all the time.
01:20:36.320 And he ended up becoming Muslim and then studying in Egypt and then going back to his native land.
01:20:45.420 He died in Spain.
01:20:47.540 But extraordinary individual.
01:20:50.000 So you have people like that.
01:20:51.180 You have people that anybody can find what they're looking for.
01:20:56.500 And that is the power of the faith, I think, is that it is truly a universal faith.
01:21:01.900 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.
01:21:08.780 It's part of the Abrahamic faith.
01:21:11.020 It was in Spain for centuries.
01:21:13.880 It's been in Eastern Europe for centuries.
01:21:17.320 And even Istanbul, which is the great capital of Islam for centuries, is half in Europe and half in the East.
01:21:25.200 And that's why it really bridges these two worlds.
01:21:28.980 And so there's so much...
01:21:29.900 This is 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.
01:21:45.820 We could start by trying to make some peace between us if we're going to consort ourselves reasonably as religious individuals.
01:21:52.400 Right. And I commend you for trying to do some bridge building because, you know, arguably, there's been so much negativity around this faith and around its adherence that there's an almost instantaneous association with the most negative aspects of humanity, with the religion.
01:22:16.540 And it's quite tragic.
01:22:18.540 And so just as an exercise, a kind of bracketing for a second and try to think about things, a mentor of mine and a friend of mine, Dr. Thomas Cleary, wrote a book called Zen Koans.
01:22:31.540 Zen Koans. He also translated the Quran. He's one of the brilliant translators of our lifetime.
01:22:37.620 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 sloppy thinking.
01:22:48.540 I think I read that book. Yeah.
01:22:50.260 But he says in there, but you don't need a koan to do that. Just ask an educated Western person what they think about Islam and they'll start expressing all of these prejudices.
01:22:59.760 And if you ask them, have you ever read the Quran? No. Do you know anything about the Prophet Muhammad? No.
01:23:05.020 Other than maybe something they read in a newspaper article or in Time or Newsweek or the Atlantic Monthly, something like that.
01:23:13.440 Well, it's not an easy thing to try to get a toehold in a different tradition, especially when you don't even have a toehold in your own.
01:23:21.440 Yeah. It's not that hard, especially for an educated person. You're obviously a highly educated person. It's not that hard.
01:23:27.180 One of the things Gibbons said is that Islam spread because it was a very easy religion to understand.
01:23:33.820 So this idea that I can't understand it, I'm having a hard time. It's not that hard to understand.
01:23:40.660 I mean, Islam is actually a very straightforward.
01:23:45.180 Okay. Then give me a five-minute summary of the core beliefs. I don't want to put you on the spot. It's not a question.
01:23:56.420 No, no. That's not hard at all.
01:23:59.360 So lay it out. That would be very helpful.
01:24:02.520 So we have a famous hadith in which we're told that the angel Gabriel came in the form of a man and asked the prophet, tell me about faith.
01:24:14.260 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 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.
01:24:36.660 And then he said, tell me about Islam.
01:25:06.640 Lifetime to Mecca. And then he said, tell me about Ihsan, which is the third dimension of Islam.
01:25:14.920 And he said, and this is the dimension of virtuous being, like being a person of arity, of excellence in the world.
01:25:23.060 And he said, Ihsan is to worship God as if you see God.
01:25:27.820 And if you don't see him, at least you know that he sees you.
01:25:32.740 So you have an awareness of that there is a divine presence.
01:25:39.700 And you should be in a state of awareness in your behavior.
01:25:43.940 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.
01:25:51.680 You know, I have a friend once who just zoomed past the cop when everybody slowed down and he pulled him over.
01:25:57.900 And he said, why didn't you slow down?
01:25:59.560 He said, I felt like a hypocrite.
01:26:02.520 So the guy let him go.
01:26:05.760 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.
01:26:13.220 I mean, there are those people.
01:26:15.660 I'm trying to figure out how to be a Jew and a Christian and a Muslim at the same time.
01:26:21.960 But become Muslim.
01:26:23.180 That's the best way.
01:26:24.360 Because the beauty of Islam is you get the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Last Testament.
01:26:29.660 I mean, that really is, for me, even the Jews acknowledge this.
01:26:34.380 Because Islam, in many ways, is a universalized Judaism.
01:26:38.320 It's Judaism for the Gentiles.
01:26:40.240 It's, we have the Nikva, you know, they do Hussle, we have Hussle, you know, which is the ritual, the baptism, a total immersion in water, ritually, to purify yourself, which is done at least once a week.
01:26:56.480 Okay, so let me ask you, maybe I'll ask you, because we're going to run out of time, I want to ask you a final question, then you can maybe help me in my aim.
01:27:05.020 I mean, I've been trying to understand the Christian doctrine of the Word and its relationship to the Jewish prophetic tradition for a long time.
01:27:15.400 And I know that Christ is a central figure in Islam as well.
01:27:21.280 I mean, the Christians make the claim that Christ is the Son of God, right?
01:27:25.480 He's the Messiah himself.
01:27:26.720 And it's very difficult, if you're going to be a Christian, not to accept that claim.
01:27:33.440 And I think I understand the claim, in some sense, psychologically.
01:27:38.280 And I think the notion that the free word, the free, truthful word, is the fundamental redeeming force.
01:27:46.340 I believe that's true.
01:27:48.240 I think it's true literally, and I think it's true metaphorically.
01:27:51.220 And I suspect it might be true religiously, although I'm not exactly sure what that means.
01:27:56.240 And I think part of the stumbling block for me in relationship to Islam, you can understand Christianity in relationship to Judaism, but I can't understand Islam in relationship to Christ.
01:28:07.400 Because 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.
01:28:27.580 And so I don't understand how Islam moves beyond that and still places Christ in a place of centrality.
01:28:37.400 Well, I mean, the Jews don't accept Christ at all.
01:28:41.320 Like, the best of the Jews will say he was a rabbi, but many of the rabbis considered him to be a charlatan, a magician.
01:28:50.100 And Jesus in the Talmud, which was printed by Princeton University Press, you know, makes that argument that the Talmudic views of Christ, which he argues in that book that it was understandable given that the Jews were so persecuted by the Christians.
01:29:08.320 But the Muslim theology is, I think, it's a radical monotheism that even, I think, transcends the monotheism of Judaism, which has some anthropomorphic elements in it that the Muslims would not accept.
01:29:29.800 But generally, the Jews and the Christians agree on the theology.
01:29:34.520 Rabbis, I've had many talks with rabbis, and they see Islam.
01:29:39.720 In fact, Kohler says that Muslims were always seen as full proselytites of the Noahidic laws, whereas Christians were not because of the Trinity.
01:29:46.940 So, the Trinity is, you know, the principle of the triad is, you know, in Plato, in the Timaeus, that talks about that.
01:29:55.240 So, the principle of the triad is a very powerful principle, and there are many, many trinities in the world that we see.
01:30:02.480 So, it is...
01:30:03.500 I guess I don't understand exactly why that constitutes such a stumbling block.
01:30:08.980 I mean, again, I'm trying to speak at least to some degree psychologically.
01:30:14.440 Well, if you...
01:30:16.440 Well, it seems to me that the idea of the Holy Ghost is allied with the idea of conscience.
01:30:24.820 You know, that voice that speaks from within.
01:30:27.760 And then the idea of the sun element of the Trinity, that's the fact that divinity can reveal itself within a personality.
01:30:37.180 Well, I think...
01:30:37.800 And then the idea of God himself, the God, the Father, that seems to me to be the idea that's most tightly associated with...
01:30:44.440 ...with the Jewish idea of the absolute and the Islamic idea of Allah.
01:30:48.540 Well, I don't think so, because if you read Meister Eckhart or even Aquinas on Trinity, you know...
01:30:54.560 But Eckhart, the Godhead, you know, is infinite, cannot be embodied, is simple, there's no parts.
01:31:05.440 So, I think if you get into deep Catholic theology, you'll find that in the end it is a type of unity.
01:31:13.040 So, the personas, and they are called personas in Latin, means mask in Latin.
01:31:19.400 It's a mask, right?
01:31:20.600 And so, for Muslims, Christ is a central figure, and Muslims do believe in a second coming of Christ, born of the virgin birth.
01:31:32.080 But Christ is not divine.
01:31:33.660 Christ is human.
01:31:34.640 And you'll find that in the dual nature, not in the monophysic or the diaphysic traditions of Christianity that you find, like in Coptic Christianity,
01:31:42.040 and some of the monophysicites that believed in that Christ was purely divine, but in this idea that Christ is of a dual nature.
01:31:51.060 So, the logos inheres, and that's a mystery.
01:31:54.980 But I don't...
01:31:55.640 This idea...
01:31:57.040 Catholics never call, like evangelicals, they don't call on Christ as, you know, when they pray,
01:32:04.080 they call on God, the Father, through an intercession of Christ, which is, I think, very different from worshipping Christ as the Godhead.
01:32:18.140 And I think it becomes very confusing, even for a lot of Christians.
01:32:21.280 Well, I think it is.
01:32:22.060 I think it is confusing.
01:32:23.700 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.
01:32:31.700 Well, we can agree on a lot of things.
01:32:35.660 I mean, we certainly agree on...
01:32:37.000 We agree that there is a God, that he created us.
01:32:39.720 We agree that the prophets were sent to warn people and to give them good news.
01:32:43.880 And we agree that there's a day of judgment and people are going to be resurrected.
01:32:47.780 I mean, those are some pretty strong things to base a sense of shared concern on.
01:32:55.080 We certainly agree on family.
01:32:56.880 We agree on the importance of raising children healthy.
01:32:59.480 We all share the liberal arts tradition.
01:33:01.980 Muslims, Christians, and Jews all share the tradition of the liberal arts, which is very, very important.
01:33:09.380 Well, maybe we could start in our efforts to move forward by concentrating on those things that unite us.
01:33:15.720 Well, also virtue, like virtue ethics.
01:33:18.480 I mean, all three of our religions share virtue ethics, all three.
01:33:23.360 And we all really acknowledge and really have benefited greatly from the Nicomachean ethics.
01:33:30.820 All three traditions recognize the Nicomachean ethics and its importance.
01:33:36.120 And that's why our ethical tradition, our great treatises reflect many of the truths that Aristotle articulated in the Nicomachean ethics.
01:33:45.620 Well, I think we should probably call that a day.
01:33:52.220 I would like to keep talking to you.
01:33:55.120 I think it's very useful to outline.
01:33:57.420 I think it was very useful to outline the central tenets of Islamic faith.
01:34:01.780 I think it's very useful to begin a reconceptualization 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.
01:34:18.400 I mean, we could start by assuming that perhaps our differences are in some sense apparent and a consequence of our ignorance.
01:34:26.380 You know what I mean?
01:34:27.340 It's not like any of us can claim to be omniscient interpreters even of our own faith tradition.
01:34:32.540 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 authoritative claims on behalf of our own faith and see.
01:34:46.140 Because we need to figure out how to tolerate each other and to appreciate each other.
01:34:50.940 And I also think the disunion between Judaism, Christianity and Islam is also one of the sicknesses that besets the West.
01:35:00.240 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.
01:35:09.540 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.
01:35:18.040 So, anyways, discussions like this are some markers on the pathway to peace, let's say.
01:35:25.460 We have an important tradition from our prophet that says, woe unto those who arrogate to themselves the judgment of God.
01:35:33.440 Yeah, that's for sure.
01:35:35.740 And he was asked, how do they do that?
01:35:38.840 And he said, by saying these people are in hell and these people are in paradise.
01:35:42.580 You know, so that's something no Muslim is permitted to death.
01:35:46.940 Like, I could never say you're going to hell or, I mean, some people do that.
01:35:50.920 But it's absolutely prohibited in the Islamic tradition to do that.
01:35:54.820 Yeah, well, the problem with making a judgment like that is it's pretty easily turned upon yourself.
01:36:00.320 Well, exactly.
01:36:02.280 It was really good of you to talk to me today.
01:36:04.580 I appreciate it very much.
01:36:06.820 All right.
01:36:07.400 I have a message here.
01:36:13.760 My camera person who set this up just put a little message.
01:36:20.280 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.
01:36:29.240 So we need deeds, but in the end, we're justified through grace.
01:36:37.400 Thank you very much.
01:36:38.900 I hope we get a chance to speak again.
01:36:40.860 Where are you located?
01:36:42.960 I'm in Berkeley, ground zero for the dissolution of the Western civilization.
01:36:50.000 Yeah.
01:36:51.220 I'm coming to California very soon.
01:36:55.680 Maybe I'll see if you'd like to.
01:36:56.840 Well, if you do.
01:36:57.840 Yeah, sure.
01:36:59.160 And come visit the college.
01:37:01.160 You know, we have a small liberal arts college.
01:37:03.200 Um, and, uh, you know, we're, 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, it really does teach people to, to discern between real and apparent goods.
01:37:28.020 Uh-huh, uh-huh.
01:37:30.200 Well, good luck in that endeavor.
01:37:32.400 Thank you.
01:37:33.280 Yeah.
01:37:34.740 Thank you.
01:37:36.000 Take care, Dr. Peterson.
01:37:37.580 All right.
01:37:37.720 All right.