https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=x7ZlXD7COMU
everything went into a kind of slow motion. And I just, it was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash. And it was, and then I just saw like my inception all the way up to that moment. And I just saw my whole life literally. And it was, it was just this, as if I lived my life a second time, but in a moment. [“The Star Spangled Banner”] Hello everyone. Today I’m going to continue my discussions with Islamic thinkers or thinkers about Islam. I’ve had previous guests included Ayan Hirsi Ali, Mustafa Akil and Mohammed Hizhab. I’m pleased to be speaking today with Hamza Youssef, who serves as president of Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California. He’s a strong advocate of liberal education in the classical sense. He was raised in a religiously eclectic family, attended Orthodox Christian services and Catholic parochial boarding schools. At the age of 18, after studying the major religions of the world, he converted to Islam. He served as translator for the chief Mufti of the UAE and Mauritania Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayo. I’m very pleased today to be talking to Hamza. Welcome, thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. Yeah, thank you. So you had a eclectic upbringing as your bio indicated, you went to Orthodox Christian services, were your family Orthodox Christian? I had two sides of the family. One were Irish Catholics and then my mother was half Irish, half Greek. So my Greek grandfather, who was an archon in the Greek Orthodox Church, he actually had that influence on us. So we were actually raised in his church. But my mother was, she was actually, would have considered herself a Buddhist, most of my upbringing. And her mother, who was an Irish woman, and her brother, my great uncle, were from Georgia. And they actually were interested in Buddhism in the 1920s and moved out to San Francisco. And my great uncle, George Fields, opened Fields Bookstore, which was the first metaphysical bookstore on the West Coast. And it specialized just in a lot of different ways. He actually was the first publisher of Gurgis Works, the fourth way works in the US. And it’s actually still, it’s an online bookstore now, Fields Bookstore. So it’s getting more, it’s getting more metaphysical all the time. It was once a building and now it’s virtual. And yeah, it’s a bad joke. So you add, you were exposed to a lot of different religious ideas by the sounds of things when you grew up. Right. How much did you learn about Orthodox Christianity? Well, I had, my grandfather had a state Greek lessons. I went to Greece. I went to a Greek Orthodox camp when I was 12 years old in Greece. I served the altar and the Orthodox Church. So I was reasonably involved. And then I went to Catholic school. So the Orthodox tradition, the Catholic tradition aren’t that different, even though they split in the 11th century over a diphthong as Gibbon points out. So when you were a kid and you were going to services, do you, how, can you remember well enough to characterize your beliefs at that time? I mean, I started having trouble with the ideas in Christianity, I guess when I was probably around 12. So I’m wondering what your reaction was as a thinker that young. I mean, I really loved the Greek service. I loved the frank incense. They had great, these chants that were quite beautiful. And it was very ritualistic and I enjoyed it. I had no problem going to church. I think like many kids at that age, especially growing up in California during that period, because my formative years were the late 60s and early 70s. So there was a lot of, we’re a transitional generation. There were a lot of radical changes happening in California was kind of at the heart of a lot of those things. But my mother did expose us to a lot of different faith traditions. She actually took me, we went to synagogues, we went to Buddhist song guys, we went to different Christian iterations. She also took me to a mosque when I was 12 years old in Redwood city. And she was of the belief that much of religion is this interesting where you’re born and where you’re brought up. And that’s going to determine and color the way you view the world. And so she had this idea that religions that it’s very dangerous to assume just because you were born into something, that that’s the end all of truth. And so she was eclectic in that way. Yeah, so your mother was of the opinion that, I guess, correct me if I’m wrong. There’s a couple of aspects to religious thinking that are interesting and relevant given what you said. I mean, one is to think of it as a set of philosophies and beliefs that you might hold like you would hold a set of philosophical or even academic beliefs. And another is to become a member of a community, a community of belief. And I guess the argument you might make for the latter point is that there’s something, there has to be something that unites all of us in order for us to be a community. And so that proposition is hard to reconcile with the first one, which is that you should be free to choose your beliefs as you would a philosophy. As if everybody chooses different beliefs, then we have a hell of a time living together and that can be a problem. Well, I think that’s one of the real problems in California. I mean, that’s a very much a this liberal idea that everything we’re free to choose and be whatever we want. And that- And what do you think of that idea? So now you’re much older than you were when your mother was taking you from place of worship to place of worship. I mean, how would you address the problem of, let’s say the conflict between freedom of choice and religion as philosophical belief and religion as a cultural centerpiece that unites people? Well, I think that I raised my children Muslim and I hope that they remain in the Muslim faith, but I have to acknowledge the possibility that that might not be the case given where we live and the environment. So I’m very committed to the Islamic tradition and I believe it to be true. And I think I feel like I’ve acquired clear and compelling evidence for myself of its truth, but I understand the importance of religion as a glue that holds things together. And I think when you lose that glue in any culture, you’re gonna have great problems that emerge out of that phenomenon. The question starts to become very rapidly. If there’s no shared ground that’s sacred, let’s say to unite people, then what in the world are they supposed to unite around? And because if they don’t unite, then they exist in conflict. And so that seems and in confusion and in anxiety, and that seems to be a very meddlesome or what not meddlesome, a very difficult problem. Well, I think part of the problem with modernity is grappling with the fact that a lot of these grand narratives have broken down largely in the 20th century. I mean, the beginnings were happening already in the 17th, 18th century, but by the 20th century, amongst the intelligentsia, there’s a huge problem, particularly in the West, but not only in the West. I think even within the Muslim ethos, you already had these ideas that were going to massively impact the culture. So it’s something we’re all grappling with. 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. Norms, for instance, just cultural norms. 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. In fact, I think James, Charles Taylor has a very interesting book, Revisiting James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He talks about this idea that James looks at people who have religion in this sanguine sense. They simply accept their religion that they’re born into and then they just live and practice that. And very often they have very solid lives in that environment. But then he talks about, and he calls those healthy people, then he talks about the sick people who actually have to grapple with these different phases. He looks at melancholy, religious melancholy, this idea of being in a melancholic state about the alienation of the world, about the trials of the world, the uncanniness of the world, the strangeness of it. And then I think the second, he looks at just the problem of evil, grappling with this problem of evil. And then the third one is the sense of wrongdoing, right? That a lot of people feel. Sinfulness. Yeah, that’s a terrible one right now. I mean, I think part of the reason why our culture is rivened apart by political trouble at the moment is because issues that should be discussed at the level of the sacred have started to be discussed at the level of the political. And so there’s a pervasive accusation against, let’s say Western culture in particular, coming from the more radical side of the left, claiming that our culture, or the Western culture, is a tyrannical patriarchy and an oppressive colonial enterprise. And of course, all cultures are contaminated with catastrophe and atrocity as well. And we actually need to know what to do about that. You know, the Christian doctrine of original sin is some help in that because it makes the fact of the legacy of human evil, let’s say something personal, but also transpersonal at the same time, right? It’s part of the human condition. And it looks to me like without that container, the guilt we have about the arbitrariness of life and the arbitrariness of our privileges can start to become overwhelming. And then it can also become weaponized, which has certainly happened at the present time and to a dangerous degree. So you can go after people for their privilege, let’s say, and they do feel guilty because advantages and disadvantages are sort of parsed out to some degree arbitrarily. And then, you know, they collapse in the face of that onslaught and apologize and retreat. And it just doesn’t look to me like that’s a good thing at all. Well, it’s not a good thing if you don’t have a religious worldview that gives meaning to those situations. For instance, I mean, one of the most important aspects of the Quran, I think, is that it really gives answers to these inequities in the world, but what some have termed the mystery of inequity. And the Quran, one of the hallmarks of a believer is gratefulness, gratitude. In fact, the word in Arabic for disbeliever means ungrateful, an ingrate. And so gratitude for blessings, and then patience for trials and tribulations. 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. What are you going to do with those privileges? How are you gonna respond to those tribulations? 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. Whereas if you remove that, you’re stuck with just Marxist resentment and envy. So, all right, I’m gonna go back to your conversion because I wanna understand how that happened, but I’m happy about the direction this discussion is taking. So it seems to me that when you realize that you’re, when you realize that you’re, let’s say, arbitrarily blessed by a certain set of advantages, now everyone is cursed with a certain set of disadvantages too, so we can take that into account. But so you’re grateful for your privileges, let’s say, you regard them as a gift, or maybe you regard them as something akin to grace. And then it seems to me that the appropriate thing to do is attempt to atone for them, which is that you try to make your advantages work for you and for everyone else to the best of your possible ability. And then in some sense, you pay for having them that way. You’re given a gift and then you do what you can with it. You do the best you can with it and share it with people and don’t try to take narrow advantage of it. You said that there’s Islamic commentary on that kind of idea, and so maybe you could walk me through that a bit. Gratitude, that’s a very interesting one because it does seem to me that it’s certainly easier on people psychologically if they’re grateful for what they have rather than resentful and bitter about what they don’t have. And why is that associated with belief per se, let’s say, in Islam? Well, first of all, the gift of being itself. I’m just, the participation in being is a great gift. And in fact, the German word for guilt is actually a sense of debt. And the word in Arabic for religion is debt. It means debt. So we have this sense of indebtedness because we’ve been given so much. Just the gift of life itself is just such an extraordinary gift. And so religion, in the Islamic understanding, it’s an act of gratitude. You’re showing gratitude for all that you’ve been given. And in fact, when you get reached the highest levels of our tradition, even the tribulations are seen as gifts because they’re actually ways in which we learn. There’s an unveiling that happens and great knowledge comes out of suffering. Great knowledge comes out of trials and tribulations. And so in our tradition, the highest people are those who actually are grateful in trials and tribulations, as well as in blessings and gifts. Because they see it all as a gift. I always think of Nietzsche’s comment on it when that sort of idea comes up, which is whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger because the reverse of that is whatever doesn’t make you stronger kills you. And the problem I think that people face when they’re trying to be grateful, sorry, for tribulations is that you can learn from them, but they can also just grind you into the ground and destroy you. And they do, I mean, people do die, we suffer and die. And so in the final analysis, in some sense, we’re defeated by our mortal vulnerability. And when you- Go ahead. Go ahead, I’m sorry. Oh, well, when it visits you, when a catastrophe visits you, sometimes you recover and you think, well, I learned a lot, but I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how salutary it is in general to make that a general case. You know what I mean, given that people suffer so much and sometimes it seems so pointless. I know what you mean psychologically, you know, if you’re suffering with something catastrophic and you become resentful, that certainly makes it far worse. There’s no doubt about that. And it makes you a danger to people around you. So it’s not helpful, but it’s sure understandable. Well, there’s a very interesting, do you know Jacques Lesseron, that he wrote a book called, And There Was Light? He was a French resistance fighter. And he wrote this very interesting autobiography, but one of the things that happened to him when he was eight years old, he was in school and some kid accidentally bumped into him and he fell onto the desk and he ended up losing both his eyes in that event. One of the things that he said that really struck me when I read that was, he said that he was very grateful to God that that happened to him as a child. And then he gave two reasons. The first reason was he said a child’s body is still supple and they’re still coming into their body. So to lose his sight at that time was very useful because somebody who’s older, if they lose their sight, it’s very difficult for them to readjust to the world. That was the first reason for his gratitude. But the second reason was he said, a child does not question injustice of events. It doesn’t think that events are unjust. It can see injustice from people, but events just happen to children and they don’t really put that valence on it as something, why did God do this to me? And as somebody who worked in pediatrics for a period as a registered nurse, it always struck me, the parents were always devastated, but the children were in these quite extraordinary states. And Lesseron says that it’s only when parents actually give the child that idea of that something’s wrong here, will they do that? But normally children just simply accept that. And I think that has a lot to do with what Christ said that the way you come to God is like children. And I think that’s at the heart of it, is just accepting because the sense of entitlement that human beings have is overwhelming. This idea that we’re all entitled to health, that we’re entitled to wealth, that we’re entitled for things to work out. It’s not the way life is designed, it never was. And it’s something that the ancients really understood. And I think modern people have a really difficult time grappling with this because they’re not well spiritually. And pre-modern people, I think, generally were much healthier spiritually. And certainly all of these pre-modern civilizations understood that life was trial and tribulation, first and foremost. I mean, the Quran actually says that it’s God who created death and life to try to show, to reveal who is the best of you in actions. And so accepting that is a really great gift. And if anything, I mean, that’s the gift of grace. One of the great scholars of our tradition said that he was so burdened. His name was Ibn Ata’ila, he was an Egyptian, but he said he was so burdened with his self. And he went to this teacher, Abbas al-Mursi. And when he came in, he said to him, all of the world is just four conditions and each of those conditions has a response. The first condition is blessing and the response is gratitude. The second condition is tribulation and the response is patience. The third condition is obedience and the response is humility, is to see the grace in that obedience. And the fourth circumstance is sinfulness and the response is repentance. So that’s a taxonomy for life itself. So repentance, that’s an interesting one because one of the things our culture seems to have a difficult time with too is allowing people to repent. Social media in particular seems to have put a lot of advantage in the hands of accusers and attackers and so people are mobbed or canceled or so forth. 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. And that means that’s a universal problem as well and it isn’t obvious that we have a mechanism for repentance and reintegration that’s nearly as powerful as the mechanisms we’ve developed for accusation and exclusion. I guess I’m supposed, I guess I should throw a question onto the end of that. No, no, that’s fine. I thought you looked like you were still thinking about it so I didn’t interrupt your thought. I guess what I’m wondering is how would you characterize the Islamic view of repentance? And people talk a lot about the necessity to forgive 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 because if something’s bothering you it’s not that easy to let it go. If you have a problem with someone, there’s a gospel story about that, you’re not supposed to go pray in the church if you have a fight pending with your brother, an unresolved fight with your brother, you straighten that out first. My experience as a clinician has been that for forgiveness to take place, generally speaking, there has to be a discussion between the parties involved or at least a very lengthy session of thought by the person who’s aggravated and offended to take apart the offense, to detail out its characteristics, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to understand exactly what went wrong, to negotiate an agreement moving forward that such things won’t happen. Like there seems to be this continual interplay between judgment and forgiveness in something that really is akin to forgiveness and for you to repent about something that you’ve done, it seems to me that the same process of discrimination has to take place is why did something wrong? Well, exactly what did you do wrong and exactly why did you do it and why do you think it was wrong and what do you think that you should have done better and how are you going to conduct yourself in the future? And two questions then, one is that in keeping with your understanding of what constitutes repentance and second, how would you characterize Islamic thought on that particular matter? Well, the Islamic tradition like the Jewish and Christian before have this idea of repentance. The Greek New Testament word, metanoia is a beautiful word because it’s really the idea of transforming the mind, changing the mind. 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 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. And so this idea of turning back to God is very important and the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he taught us actually to do this at least 70 times a day. So Muslims as a practice actually ask forgiveness, preferably at least 70 times a day, just saying astaghfirullah, it’s something that we do as a spiritual practice and part of the reason why we pray five times a day, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was once asked about a man who lives next to a river and he goes into it and he washes five times a day. He said, do you think that you would see any filth on him? And they said, no. And he said, that’s what prayer is. It’s like bathing in a river five times a day. 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. We actually rinse our mouth with water before we pray. And then we wash our hands, our limbs and then our feet. And the idea is about really turning back to God because these gifts that we’ve been given, these seven limbs that we’ve had been given are gifts from God that should be used in good. And so the idea, 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. The mark, yes, absolutely. And so this idea, 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. 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. And so it’s finding that sweet spot of obedience and being in a state of ritual purity. And then we have condition. So in order for a repentance to be sound, it has to be sincere. The person actually has to have a sincere repentance. It has to be done like if you’re actually engaged in it. Sincere means to recognize the wrongdoing and to strive not to do it again. Would that be a definition of sincerity? Yeah, sincerity, the Arabic word for sincerity is related to the word for purity and untainted. And so it’s done without ulterior motives because sometimes people will ask forgiveness and they just don’t wanna be cut out of the will. Right, that’s an instrumental forgiveness, right? Exactly. Okay, so you talked, this is quite interesting. So you wandered through territory there that linked up physical disgust and contamination with psychological and spiritual disgust and contamination. And it’s my experience with people that a good number of them feel guilty and out of sorts and alienated a good amount of the time. And you say, well, that sin means to miss the mark. And the reason they feel alienated, at least in principle, is because they’re missing the mark. And of course, then the question is, well, what exactly is the mark? And it seems to me that you drew a parallel between prayer and washing. And both of them are to remove disgusting contaminants, let’s say. And one of the signs that someone has a conscience, although conscience can be overactive and that can be a problem, is that they are laboring under a burden of self-disgust and self-contempt. And they do feel their moral transgressions as something contemptuous and beneath them and base. And so this prayer upward, let’s say, to a higher aim and a reminder of that, which in your tradition, you’re doing at least five, you’re doing five times a day. That’s a constant attempt to set yourself on the right track so that your aim can be true. That seems reasonable. It’s a reorientation. Yeah, and 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? Well, I think people do, like you said, and I’m sure you’ve seen this a lot in clinical practice, people do feel unwell and they feel sick. And modern psychology attempts to give them, the antichristic formula is to say, unlike Christ who said, go and sin no more, the antichristic formula is to say, go and there’s no more sin. So I’m just gonna remove that bag of bricks that you’re carrying around called guilt. You absolutely can’t do that as a therapist. It’s not even technically possible, I don’t believe, because sometimes you might see somebody who has an overactive super ego, if you want to speak in a Freudian sense, and there are people who punish themselves extremely harshly. And then you might say their sin is excessive use of force on their self in relationship to their transgressions. And then maybe you help, once you understand that with them, you help them understand how it might be possible to use the lightest touch possible that still serves the purpose, which is a good limit idea with regards to the administration of punishment towards yourself, right? Minimal necessary force, that’s a good common law tradition, it’s a good psychological tradition. But as a therapist certainly can’t alleviate people’s guilt arbitrarily by telling them, well, there’s nothing really there to worry about, they have to do all that thinking through that themselves. And this very interested in this relationship between the physical sense of disgust and the psychological sense of disgust, and the notion that, I mean, it’s one form of prayer, you might say in Christianity is baptism, that’d be in some ways the most fundamental form of prayer, it’s rebirth in the Christian tradition. And it involves, obviously it involves the use of water, sometimes a full body immersement. And so there’s a notion of purification there. It seems to me that in the modern world, people don’t know what to do with the sense they have that they’re bad, right? It implies that there’s a good, because you wouldn’t feel bad if there wasn’t a good, but it isn’t obvious what the good is that should be aimed at. Well, that’s the difference between real and apparent goods. And so, I mean, one of the most important things about any true religious tradition is it has to distinguish between real and apparent goods, because the reason they use that archery term is that people are always looking for a good. It’s just, if you don’t have the discernment to distinguish between a real and an apparent good. And so discernment is very important, what the Quran calls for forkan. In fact, the Quran itself is, it terms itself as a forkan, a discernment, a standard by a criteria, a criterion that you can judge actions. We have a great book in virtue ethics called Mizan al-Amal, the standard or the criterion of action, 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 Puranic theological virtues. I wanted to just add, I forgot to mention the other two necessary conditions for a sound repentance. One of them was that you made a firm intention not to go back to that action. And then the fourth one is that if it involved a wrong of another person, then you had to ask them forgiveness. You had to go and you had to, like if you stole, then you had to actually give the money back. If you didn’t know who you stole it from, you actually give it in charity in that person’s name. Right, so that’s part of discharging that debt. The debt, exactly. Right, and it’s certainly the case that people seem to feel innately, I would say something akin to a psychological debt. And that, well, and that we discussed already the fact that that can be weaponized, you know, by accusations of arbitrary privilege and so forth. And so it isn’t easy to know what to do with that. So let’s go back just for a moment to your religious upbringing. 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? Well, I was in a head-on collision and survived a car accident that the California Highway Patrol said I shouldn’t have survived. And I had what they call a near-death experience. I got very interested in what happens after you die. I realized that I was going to die. I realized that what happens after you die, I realized that I could have very easily transitioned. And so I was very interested in what happens after death. I actually went and met with Dr. Raymond Moody, who wrote the books on life after life. And he did a lot of the work with near-death people that had had it. Can I ask you what happened in your near-death experience? I think it was pretty classic. You know, I definitely saw my, I went into a very different spatial temporal state where I just, everything went into a kind of slow motion. And I just, it was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash. And it was, and then I just saw like my inception all the way up to that moment. And I just saw my whole life literally. And it was just this, as if I lived my life a second time, but in a moment. That was the experience. And so I- What did that do for you, that experience? How did it change you? Well, one, it made me, you know, at the time I was a senior in high school, my probably biggest interests were baseball. And other things, but music was certainly a big interest. My family, I come from a family of musicians. So I think what it did is it made me really think about death in a very deep way. And if you’ve ever seen, there’s a film about a man who’s in a plane crash. And then he survives the plane crash. And it’s a man who had a lot of fears, but he comes out of it. Jeff Bridges is the person that, and he’s like looking at his hands and am I alive or am I dead? I was in that state for about two weeks. It was a very strange state to be in. And that got me interested in what religions say about after death. And so I decided to study all the world religions just from that perspective. And the one that really, really resonated and struck me as having a very, very powerful description was the Islamic tradition. And I actually ended up, ironically, I ended up writing in the study of Quran, which was published by Harper. I ended up writing the essay on death in the Quran, which is how I actually became Muslim. So it was a very interesting serendipitous evolution. So walk me through that. So, okay, so you just about died. How old were you? 17. Yeah, so there have been studies showing, for example, that if you have someone, I remember this study, if you have someone jump off a bungee cord watching a digital clock, the clock goes slower for them subjectively. So if you subject people to a tremendous amount of stress, then time slows down. And I suspect the neurophysiological reason for that is that when you’re in a tremendous crisis, your body floods itself with the hormones and neurochemicals, probably mostly dopamine, that are necessary for you to act extraordinarily quickly. And it’s extremely energy intensive to do that. So you can’t do it all the time. But maybe we can snap ourselves into a psychophysiological state where we’re 100 times faster than we would normally be for some very finite amount of time. I’m not trying to, what would you say, reduce this to a physiological explanation. Well, that’s a very common reductionist approach. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you know. An experience that, I mean, you can look at the hard drive aspect of it, but the software is the mystery. Yeah, I’m definitely not trying to remove the phenomenological significance, you know, because that would be foolish. And even those explanations are only attempts at understanding a phenomenon that we really don’t have access to because cause and effect is a very difficult thing to nail down. It certainly is, yeah. And that kind of explanation doesn’t account for all the near death experience phenomena either. But I mean- I mean, you asked me how, you know, that got me thinking a lot about death. Irrespective of whatever the neurochemical phenomena that were happening within my body, that experience, that phenomenological experience had a existential effect on me that was very powerful. And I decided that I really wanted to know if I could have died in that moment, which was very possible, I wanted to know what if anything happens, and if something happens, how do you prepare for that? If we’re genuinely on the doors of infinity, then we should take this time that we have very seriously to prepare to go through that door. And that’s what, existentially, that’s what happened to me. I wanted to know if I can go through that door at any moment as a 17-year-old, I could have done it. Now as a 64-year-old, it’s possible that I could do it today or tomorrow or the next day. What type of preparation do I need? Why did you, why do you think that you derived the conclusion that it was something that you needed to be prepared for? Well, I think that, yeah, I just think that’s a kind of, I just think it’s common sense. You know, like, I mean, preparing for death. Well, it’s interesting because- When I worked, when I worked in critical care, what became very clear to me, some people seem to be ready for death, and other people are definitely not ready for death. And I can see the difference. I saw the difference, you know, both my parents died, I was with both my parents, and I could see, you know, I mean, my mother had an incredible transition, and I think my mother was fully ready to go into the next world. I don’t think a lot of people are ready. I think a lot of people are very afraid of death. And I think that’s something that one of the gifts of religion is it does remove that fear, not necessarily of the act of dying, because obviously that’s a very intense experience, especially for those of us who have seen that in people who die. But the transition into the next world is something, the Quran says it’s something to be looked forward to. It’s not something to fear, but it’s also Islam is not a death cult. The Prophet Muhammad said, don’t desire to die, but ask God for a long life. And he said that none of you should ever desire death. You should desire to have a long life, because you have more time to do more good, and the more good you do, the more you accrue in terms of preparation for that transition. And what do you think it means to be prepared versus not prepared to die? To be in a good state. I think to be like, if you’re in a state of repentance, if whatever you’ve done in the past, if you’ve really repented for any of the wrongs that you’ve done, and there’s major wrongs, there’s minor wrongs, there’s the peccadillos, and then there’s those mortal sins that are recognized for what they are, things that literally will cause death to the soul. The wages of sin is death. So I think being in a good state, being prepared, being ready to make that transition is very important. And I think in many ways, a lot of the practices that we do in our tradition are in preparation for death. In fact, if you look at just the five prayers, the very first prayer that we do when we wake up, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam gave us a prayer that I did this morning when I first came into consciousness, which says, praise be to the one who brought me back to life, because death in the Quran is, sleep in the Quran is seen as a little death. And so it’s every morning we have a resurrection that’s to remind us of the resurrection on the day of judgment. And then the very first thing that we do is we wash and then we pray. That’s the first thing that Muslims do when they wake at dawn, before the sun comes up. And then before we go to bed, that’s the last thing that we do. We make a prayer, oh God, if you take my soul in my sleep, have mercy on it. And if you let me live another day, then make me amongst the righteous and protect me. These are all prayers that our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did every single day. And then on Friday, we have a communal prayer, which is the day of gathering, which is related to the day of judgment, where you all stand before God. And then also in Ramadan, we fast. So we were giving up the pleasures of life during the daylight hours for a month. And then the end of it is a celebration of making it through that month, hopefully, with as little sin as possible. And then we have the poor tax, which is to do good to others from the good that you’ve been given. And then we have the Hajj, which is really a preparation for death, because you’re making this pilgrimage, you get into white clothes, which is to symbolize the shroud. And then you stand on the plane of Arafat, like the day of judgment, which symbolizes that all of humanity is going to stand in a non-spatial, non-temporal sense, is going to stand before their creator and be judged for what they did. So we believe in a day of judgment. So when you were 16 or 17, how old were you when you had the car accident? 17. So then you became interested in the issue of death and the meaning of death and the idea of preparation for death. And you read widely throughout the world’s religions and you said that Islam in particular struck your fancy. When did you convert? How old were you? 18. Okay, so that’s, was that a radical move as far as your family was concerned? You know, my dad, the first thing he did, he went to Gibbon and reread the section on the rise of Islam. My dad was a professor of philosophy. So, you know, he was a lapsed Catholic. Probably the most well-read person I’ve ever met in the Western canon. I think he was intrigued. He didn’t really understand it. My mom was fine with it. She thought, great, you know, you found a path. That’s how she viewed it. But both my father, both my parents ended up making the declaration of faith before they died. So my father read Ghazali and ended up becoming Muslim. So what was it about, specifically about the Islamic treatment of death in the afterlife compared to say the Christian or Jewish treatment that attracted you? One, the Quran is, the scent of death is on every page of the Quran. So it’s definitely a very, very, it’s a death reminder and not in a negative way. There’s this tension release that happens in the Quran. I was once in a hotel in London, and there was a guy across from me reading the Quran, English translation, and drinking a Heineken beer, which was very interesting. And so, you know, I was dressed in Western clothes and I just asked him, how are you finding that book? He said, this book is very interesting. And I said, in what way? And he said, you know, it’s just tension release, tension release. And I said, wow, you got that on the first reading. That’s very impressive because it’s, you know, it’ll tell you about all the wages of sin, but then it’ll tell you about the blessings of obedience and turning to God and repenting and answering the call of the prophets, that perennial call that the prophets to shun false idols, including the idol of the self, to turn away from the vanities of life, the vain appetites that are of no use for you in this world. You earlier, you talked about apparent and real goods. And so you’re referring to that in a sense here again, making the presumption that there is a hierarchy of values and that some things should be pursued in preference to others. And this is something that the modern West has great difficulty formalizing and accepting, although people suffer for it, regardless of their understanding of it. When you are thinking about turning your eyes heavenward or getting your aim straight or obedience to God, what do you think, what does that mean to you conceptually and what does it mean practically in your life? Well, I mean, practically it means staying within the, what we call the hadu, the Quran calls the limits that God has set on us. So we have certain limits that are set on us and those limits are to protect us. So everything in the Islamic tradition, according to our al Ghazali and others, everything in our tradition is to protect one of six things, to protect religion itself, to protect human intellect, reason. So like the prohibition of alcohol is to protect human reason, to protect life, sorry, life is the next, to protect life, to protect human reason, to protect property, which is really what Richard Weaver called the last metaphysical right standing, the right to property. And then to protect family and then to protect human dignity. So those six things, there’s no ruling in Islam that isn’t addressing one of those six preservations. And so everything that we do is for, that’s the way in which we try to live our lives. So family, being good to family, taking care of those in need around you first and foremost, charity begins at home and then extending to those closest to you. So Islam is antagonistic to socialism, it’s antagonistic to any kind of collectivist philosophy, but it does recognize that each one of us should be giving something back to- Okay, so sorry, I’m gonna let you go through that again, but you said something there that’s very interesting to me. You said that Islam is antagonistic to a collectivist philosophy. Can you tell me why, either why that’s true or why you believe it to be true? Well, first and foremost, the Quran itself, because the Quran, if you look at it, it’s a book of individuals going against groups that are insane. I mean, every single story in the Quran is an individual who goes up against a group and the group says, burn him, throw him in the fire, stone him. So it’s pretty clear from the Quran that the group is not necessarily a good thing. And the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, master yourself so that you don’t become yes people, that when people do good, you do good, and when they do bad, you do bad. But be so that when people do good, you’re with them, and when they do bad, you refrain from their evil. So it’s very important for, and one of the tragedies obviously is that any group goes into group think. I mean, this is an area you’re much more familiar with than I am, but group think is a huge problem. And I think the Quran addresses that problem constantly by showing that you have to stand up against the group because the group, as Nietzsche pointed out, that insanity or madness is unusual amongst individuals, but it seems to be the norm amongst groups. I mean, I think the Quran- Kierkegaard said that the group was untruth. Said even if a truth, a natural truth, is claimed by a group instantly, it becomes untruth merely because the group has acclaimed it. Because truth for him was individual in the same sense that you’re describing. Do you think that’s akin to the Jewish emphasis on the prophetic tradition? Absolutely, yeah. But I also think that the Islamic tradition does emphasize the importance of community and the importance of sociability. This idea that we are gregarious human beings, that we’re people that we need society to fully realize ourselves. And it’s the rare individual that can be the anchorite. As Aristotle said, it’s either a beast or a God that can live alone, but it’s a very difficult thing. There are people that can do it, and I’ve known a few people like that. And we do have a tradition, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that towards the latter days, it’s better to avoid all the groups. And that’s in a sound tradition because he said the groups would be astray. Okay, so let me ask you a question that’s always put to people who are religious. How do you differentiate religious belief from idolatry, from ideological belief? I don’t personally, I don’t think they’re the same, by the way, but I’m curious about, because it’s pretty easy for someone just to say, well, you talk about standing up against the collective, but you Christians, you Jews, you Islamic types, you’re part of a mob just like everybody else. And why does your particular mob view reign supreme in your view? Why isn’t that just another idol in the desert, just like the rest of them? What makes it different, do you think? Well, I think that you can, as the Bard said, to his ideology, to make the service greater than the God. It’s very easy to turn a religion into an idol. And I think there are many people- I think that’s what the new atheist subject to, right, is that the fact that religious belief can be, maybe it can be hijacked for instrumental and dogmatic purposes extremely- Yeah, as if ideology isn’t, as if anything can’t go wrong. Well, there is that, yes. Yeah, and so, I mean, I don’t know. Like, I think, you know, these great, the 20th century is largely an irreligious century in the Western hemisphere. And just look what these non-religious ideologies, this point has been pointed out by many people. Yes. One of the things about, you know, are you familiar with Errol Kolnoy, K-O-L-N-A-I? No, I’m not, K-O-L-N-I-A. Yeah, N-A-I. So he was a Hungarian Jew who converted to Catholicism, but he wrote a very interesting paper in 1951 called The Three Writers of the Apocalypse. He also wrote a book about Nazi Germany in 1938, and really, I think, really understood- What’s his, tell me his name again? Errol Kolnoy, K-O-L-N-A-I, Errol, A-U-R-E-L, yeah. Oh, A-U-R-A-L. A-U-R-E-L. Okay. Kolnoy, K-O-L-N-A. So anyway, he wrote an essay called The Three Writers of the Apocalypse, and he identified three totalitarian ideologies. He said the first two, fascism and communism, were easy to recognize, but he said the real dangerous one was progressive liberalism, because the seeds of totalitarianism were not seen very easily. It was something that could be missed. So I- Yeah, so, well, so when I think about this, I think- Go ahead. Well, if I had to choose, let’s say, if I had to choose the leader of a country, let’s say an arbitrarily powerful leader, it seems to me that it would be a better choice for me to select someone who believes that he’s beholden to something above and beyond himself than to choose someone who doesn’t have that belief at all. Right. And that seems to me, regardless of what you might say philosophically or even scientifically about the utility of religious belief or the validity of religious belief, the notion that you could be the leader of a powerful country and not be serving something that wasn’t only you seems to be a real problem with a, let’s say, astringently atheistic philosophy, because, well, why wouldn’t you just serve you in a position like that? Well, and you would need, generally, it’s the religious traditions that understand service is for not just the self. I mean, we obviously have to serve ourselves just to live, but service to others. And that’s why political leaders in the pre-modern world, it was always understood that they had the greatest burden of self-discipline, that they had a greater burden of self-discipline than everybody else. Yeah, because they have greater power and greater temptation. And so the religious traditions, I mean, the pre-modern world understood very well in whatever civilization you were in, they understood very well that the central problem that human beings are confronted with is their self. And the modern world has completely lost that idea that you had to master yourself. Hence, one of the things that Confucius said is that, that study without thinking is blindness, but thinking without study is dangerous, right? And so if you don’t study those things that will equip you to deal with the self, and that’s why in our tradition and in all the great traditions, but in the Islamic tradition, the study of the self, psychology, ilm al-nafs, it’s termed in Arabic, it was central to our tradition, to understanding the nature of the self, to understanding the machinations of the self, the tricks of the self, and to understand those things so that you could learn to discipline them. I mean, this gets back to, Imam al-Ghazali uses the idea of the sage, the dog and the pig, which obviously, Plato would have said the charioteer and the two horses, it’s the same idea, but the pig is the concupiscent soul, the dog is the irascible soul, and then the sage is the rational soul. If the sage is in charge, then things will turn out well, but if you allow the pig or the dog to take over, in our culture, the pig has definitely, the pig seems to really be having a field day, right? The pig is doing very well. The dog is not doing too bad either. Well, it’s interesting because, exactly, and I think the world is split, Willy Brandt back in the 70s saw this North-South problem of, I mean, he didn’t term it like this, but I see it as the pig and the dog. I mean, if you have affluence on one spectrum and you have real, just diminution of goods, just of human goods on the other, you’re gonna create a lot of resentment. And so that’s a huge problem that we have. So this idea, Frost talked about fire and ice. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. He was talking about this, the dog and the pig. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire, right? In other words, the world’s end will come from the pig, just wreaking havoc. But then he said, but if it happens twice, I think of that for destruction. Ice is life. Yeah. Sorry, please finish that. Ice is- Yeah, yeah. That hate is also great and will suffice. That the irascible can do it as well. It’s one or the other. It’s either gonna be fire or ice. But that’s in the absence of the sage. It’s in the absence of wisdom. And wisdom is a word that’s not often heard. Yes, well, I’ve had a lot of discussions with people who regard themselves as explicitly atheistic. And it seems to me that a lot of the discussion about religious belief in atheism misses the mark. Let’s put it that way. I tend to think of God if I’m thinking about the idea of God psychologically. I tend to think about something akin to a hierarchy of values. And that’s very much similar to the proposition that you’re putting forward with the metaphor of the pig and the dog and the sage. That there are some values that are higher than others. And so I would say, I think that’s psychologically true that there are some values higher than others. I mean, we tend to put our families before ourselves, for example. And we tend to have a sense that we would, we would like to be good people. I use this illustration of the relationship between values. Imagine that you’re making a meal. You might ask yourself, well, what are you doing? Say you’re cutting up vegetables. Okay, so you’re moving your hand back and forth. That’s not abstract at all. That’s where the mind meets the body. You’re moving your hand back and forth to cut the vegetables, to put them in the pot, to cook a good dinner, to be a good father, to be a good husband, to be a good citizen, to be a good person. So you’re doing all those things at the same time, right? And each of the more particular things nests in the broader value. And the broader a value is, the more other values depend on it. And also maybe the broader value is the more other people can be united within it. And so I think you can come to a technical understanding of something like depth of value. And then it seems to me that the religious proposition is that there is an ultimate value that’s either at the pinnacle or at the base, depending on how you conceptualize the metaphor. And that that ultimate value is expressed in religious terminology as the absolute, the ineffable absolute, as the God that’s supposed to be served. And in some sense, it has to remain ineffable and beyond comprehension, because otherwise it turns into an idol. And so what you do in a religious sense is posit an ultimate ideal, subordinate yourself to it, regarded as something that you can only ever approximate to even in principle, and organize all the other virtues and defeat the faults in relationship to that highest order of value. And that’s more like, I think part of the reason that religious traditions insist upon faith isn’t, it’s not the faith that the scientists, the scientists types criticize, which is sort of like an empirical statement about the structure of objective reality. It’s more like the notion that there is a hierarchy of values and that there’s something that has to be absolute, ineffable and ultimately uniting at the apex that we should be subservient to, that we should consider all our behaviors in relationship to. And so that’s, there’s not a metaphysics there in some sense, because I’m not saying anything about the final nature of that absolute value, right? That’s an ontological question. I don’t feel qualified to answer it, but I can’t see how there can be an absence of an absolute unifying value that’s superordinate to all other values without society degenerating into conflict, without people becoming anxious and confused and aimless without the consequences being that we all miss the mark. So I guess I’d like your comments about that idea. Yeah, I don’t think God’s something that we posit. I think, and I also certainly don’t think God is a value. I think that God, that we respond to God and that God makes a call and that call is through these intermediaries and the prophets, the Quran says in the chapter called the B that there’s no nation that hasn’t been given warners that say shun idols and worship God. And so- I wasn’t trying to, what would you say, reduce God to a human value? Because I do- But a lot of people do. I mean, that’s a very common modern way of viewing God. Yeah. Well, that’s why I insisted upon the ineffability. Well, yeah, however you wanna state that, I mean, for us, for Abrahamic people in particular, God, that we respond to God, God makes a call and that calls through the prophets and the prophets are surprisingly consistent unlike philosophers who the student invariably rejects the master. Plato is a friend, but the truth is a greater friend. Whereas the prophets are extraordinarily consistent in their messaging that there is a God, that that God demands that you live within the limits that God has set as your creator. I mean, one of the things that atheists, to me, the atheist, you know, there’s a definition of health, which looks at the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. George Vithoulkas, a great health practitioner from Greece said that atheism is really one of the most serious signs of ill health because it’s a denial of your creativeness and that you have to really be unhealthy to do that. So he saw it as a deep spiritual sickness to deny your creator. Whether that creator is a personal creator is the next stage that you’re going to have to ask yourself. But to deny your creativeness is something quite extraordinary by saying there’s no creator. So how do you deal with the challenges, the hypothetical challenges presented to the notion of created human beings, the conflict between that and modern evolutionary theory as a modern thinker? I mean, the Catholics have accepted evolutionary theory, but that’s my understanding of the situation. Yeah, guided evolution, guided evolution, not this idea of randomness. The best response to that is, I think Robert Frost poem called accidentally on purpose. That would be my answer. Somebody can, if they’re interested, can Google it and look at it. But this idea that randomness that created this, I won’t buy that. And if they wanna say it’s because I don’t understand evolution, that’s fine. I’ll accept that. Well, I talked to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins recently. I’m going to release the discussion I had with Dawkins. And the randomness arguments an interesting one because it’s the variability between people that’s in some sense random, but sexual selection plays an awfully powerful force in evolutionary biology. And sexual selection is anything but random. And so to me, I see the action of consciousness perhaps in the ultimate sense operating, not least through the mechanism of sexual selection. So the selection mechanisms aren’t random, even if the variation might be generated in part randomly. It seems to me that there’s something there that would reconcile the relationship in modern biology between the spirit and the matter, spirit and matter, let’s say. So, because consciousness calls matter into being in some real sense. Well, consciousness also for us is a spiritual phenomenon. It’s not a material phenomenon. And the ancients said that the one who denies the soul that you’d have to determine him an idiot. They really saw it as a kind of absurdity to deny the existence of a soul. Because it’s so clear if anybody’s ever seen a corpse that something’s very profoundly missing. So let’s go back to practicalities with regards to Islam and also I’d be interested in, you said that you chose, so I wanna know what following the Islamic faith has done for your life personally. How has it helped you put yourself together? And also I’m interested in again, why you found the Islamic tradition preferable, let’s say to the Orthodox tradition that you did enjoy the rituals that were part of that at least. So let’s deal with practical issues first. Well, yeah. In terms of why I chose Islam, I mean, I’m not completely convinced that I chose Islam. I mean, in some ways Islam chose me as well. So guidance is a very strange thing for people. Like I saw an inevitability when I look back on what happened, I saw an inevitability of my embracing Islam. I had some very interesting experiences that could be termed mystical or however you wanna determine them. But the tradition itself, what struck me was one, I got to keep all of the prophets that I believed in already. And I added in addition what we consider to be the final prophet. And just as very often Christians marvel at how Jews miss Jesus, Muslims also marvel at how Christians and Jews miss Muhammad. Although to be fair to the Jews, they do acknowledge the prophet as a providential force. And they do acknowledge him as a Noah Hiddick messenger preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah. So they do recognize that he was a providential force, at least the great, to read George Kohler’s book on Jewish theology as a chapter on Judaism and Islam. And certainly the great father of Orientalism, Ibn Az-Gholzahir, he actually said that he felt that Islam was the only religion that somebody of a philosophical bent could actually accept. And he wanted to really bring in the gift of philosophy into Judaism that had been, that the Muslims had so richly participated in. In fact, there’s an argument that just as Judaism prepared the way for Christianity, it was Islam that prepared the way for a philosophical Western Christendom. Because if you look at the transmission of all of that knowledge that comes into Europe, it’s quite extraordinary. I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas, who’s 13th century, he dies in 1274, and yet he’s the doctor of the church. Just look at the number of times he quotes Muslims. I mean, he calls Averroes the commentator. So I think Islam, you know, one of the beauties of the religion to me is that you’ll find whatever you’re looking for in it. I mean, Islam, it has a very simple theology that anybody can understand in Surah Al-Ikhlas, the chapter that says, say, God is unique, God is completely independent, God neither gives birth nor was God born, and there’s nothing like God. So it gives you a very simple theology that anybody can understand. And yet embedded in that simplicity is an extraordinary complexity that actually created a metaphysical tradition that Western scholars have spent their lifetime studying. People like Henri Corleone or somebody, it’s like Maxime Rodinson, not Maxime Rodinson, but the great Catholic theologian and metaphysician, Jacques Mérétain, you know, recognized the genius of people like Al-Halaj and things. So within the Islamic tradition, there’s just an extraordinary spectrum. You can spend your entire life and have a satisfying life, and I know people that have done this, just mastering the recensions of the Quran and the qira’at, the actual oral expression of the Quran through the rules of tajweed. You can spend your life studying exegesis, you can spend your life studying prophetic tradition, you can spend your life studying the great mystics of Islam. We have the best poets in the world. We also have the best architecture. I mean, there’s nothing like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra Palace. And even Western architecture, if you read Stealing from the Saracens, she shows how some of the finest Western architecture was basically taken from the Islamic civilization, including Notre Dame in Paris. So you can find incredible, I know people that just came to Islam through music. I mean, I know some really professional musicians that fell in love with Arabic music, which led them into Muslim culture. People that love just, I mean, one of the most interesting things about Islam is it is a truly universal religion in that you can go from Indonesia to California and find all of these different expressions of the same central truths of Islam with their own local colorings. So the West African Muslims are not like the Middle Eastern Muslims. The Middle Eastern Muslims are not like the Indian Muslims. And you have people like, one of the great impressionist painters of Sweden. I think he’s actually considered a national treasure in Sweden, but his paintings hang in the museum there. He became Muslim in jail for actually, he shot a matador because he was raised by, his father was a veterinarian and he shot a matador because he was so horrified that they were bringing bullfighting into France. And there was such an uproar that they actually released him. But when he was in jail, he befriended an Algerian who used to recite Quran all the time. And he ended up becoming Muslim and then studying in Egypt and then going back to his native land. He died in Spain, but extraordinary individual. So you have people like that. You have people that anybody can find what they’re looking for. And that is the power of the faith, I think, is that it is truly a universal faith. And I think one of the things that Western people tend to do, one, they don’t recognize that it’s a Western faith because it is, it’s part of the Abrahamic faith. It was in Spain for centuries. It’s been in Eastern Europe for centuries. And even Istanbul, which is the great capital of Islam for centuries is half in Europe and half in the East. And that’s why it really bridges these two worlds. And so there’s so much, I mean, why did all- 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. We could start by trying to make some peace between us if we’re going to consort ourselves reasonably as religious individuals. Right. And I commend you for trying to do some bridge building because, 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. And it’s quite tragic. 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. He also translated the Quran. He’s one of the brilliant translators of our lifetime. But he wrote a book called Zen Koans. And in the introduction of that book, he actually says that the purpose of a koan is to snap people out of sloppy thinking. I think I read that book. Yeah. 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. And if you ask them, have you ever read the Quran? No. Do you know anything about the Prophet Muhammad? No. Other than maybe something they read in a newspaper article or in Time or Newsweek or the Atlantic Monthly, something like that. 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. Yeah, it’s not that hard, especially for an educated person. You’re obviously a highly educated person. It’s not that hard. Islam, one of the things Gibbon said is that Islam spread because it was a very easy religion to understand. So this idea that I can’t understand it, I’m having a hard time, it’s not that hard to understand. I mean, Islam is actually a very straightforward. Okay, then give me a five minute summary of the core beliefs. I don’t wanna put you on the spot. It’s not a question. No, no, no, that’s not hard at all. So lay it out. That would be very helpful. 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. And the prophet Muhammad said, faith is to believe that there’s only one God and that Muhammad, which includes all the previous messengers is a messenger of God, to believe in angels, to believe in the books that God has revealed, to believe in the last day, the day of judgment, and to believe in the measuring out of good and evil, that good and evil is part of life. And then he said, tell me about Islam. And he said, Islam is that you make the testimony of faith that you pray five times a day, that you fast Ramadan, that you pay zakat, that 2.5% of your standing wealth at the end, not your income tax, but your standing wealth at the end of a year, that’s a whole year, 1.4 is given to poor people. There’s eight categories that are given in the Quran. And that if you’re able to, you make a pilgrimage once in your lifetime to Mecca. And then he said, tell me about Ihsan, which is the third dimension of Islam. And he said, and this is the dimension of virtuous being, like being a person of arity, of excellence in the world. And he said, Ihsan is to worship God as if you see God. And if you don’t see him, at least you know that he sees you. So you have an awareness of that there is a difference divine presence, and you should be in a state of awareness in your behavior. I mean, one of the things about, if you’re driving and everybody’s speeding and then somebody sees a cop, they all suddenly slow down. I have a friend once who just zoom past the cop when everybody slowed down and he pulled him over. And he said, why didn’t you slow down? He said, I felt like a hypocrite. So the guy, he let him go. But that’s people when they’re in the presence of authority, they tend to behave well, unless they’re an utter rebel. I mean, there are those people. I’m trying to figure out how to be a Jew and a Christian and a Muslim at the same time. But become Muslim, that’s the best way, because the beauty of Islam is you get the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Last Testament. I mean, that really is for me, even the Jews acknowledge this, because Islam in many ways is a universalized Judaism. It’s Judaism for the Gentiles. We have the Nikvah, they do hustle, we have hustle, I mean, which is the ritual, the baptism, a total immersion in water ritually to purify yourself, which is done at least once a week. And- Okay, so let me ask you, maybe I’ll ask you, because we’re gonna run out of time. I wanna ask you a final question, and you can maybe help me in my aim. I’ve been trying to understand the Christian doctrine of the word and its relationship to the Jewish prophetic tradition for a long time. And I know that Christ is a central figure in Islam as well. I mean, the Christians make the claim that Christ is the Son of God, right? He’s the Messiah himself. And it’s very difficult if you’re going to be a Christian not to accept that claim. And I think I understand the claim in some sense psychologically. And I think the notion that the free word, the free truthful word is the fundamental redeeming force. I believe that’s true. I think it’s true literally, and I think it’s true metaphorically. And I suspect it might be true religiously, although I’m not exactly sure what that means. And I think part of the stumbling block for me in relationship to Islam, you can understand Christianity in relationship to Judaism, but I can’t understand Islam in relationship to Christ. 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. And so I don’t understand how Islam moves beyond that and still places Christ in a place of centrality. Well, I mean, the Jews don’t accept Christ at all. Like the best of the Jews will say he was a rabbi, but many of the rabbis considered him to be a charlatan, a magician. And Jesus in the Talmud is, 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. But the Muslim theology is, it is a, I think it’s a radical monotheism that even I think it transcends the monotheism of Judaism, which has some anthropomorphic elements in it that the Muslims would not accept. But generally the Jews and the Christians agree on the theology. Rabbis, I’ve had many talks with rabbis and they see Islam. In fact, Kohler says that Muslims were always seen as full proselytites of the Noahitic laws, whereas Christians were not because of the Trinity. So the Trinity is, you know, the principle of the triad as Plato in the Timaeus talks about that. So the principle of the triad is a very powerful principle and there are many, many Trinities in the world that we see. So it is- I guess I don’t understand exactly why that constitutes such a stumbling block. I mean, again, I’m trying to speak at least to some degree psychologically. Well, if you read, uh-huh, sorry. It seems to me that the idea of the Holy Ghost is allied with the idea of conscience. You know, that voice that speaks from within. And then the idea of the sun element of the Trinity, that’s the fact that divinity can reveal itself within a personality. Well, I think- And then the idea of God himself, the God the Father, that seems to me to be the idea that’s most tightly associated with the Jewish idea of the absolute and the Islamic idea of Allah. Well, I don’t think so, because if you read Meister Eckhart or even Aquinas on Trinity, you know, but Eckhart, the Godhead, you know, is infinite, cannot be embodied, is simple, there’s no parts. So I think if you get into deep Catholic theology, you’ll find that in the end, it is a type of unity. So the personas, and they are called personas in Latin, means mask in Latin. It’s a mask, right. And so for Muslims, Christ is a central figure, and Muslims do believe in a second coming of Christ, born of the virgin birth, but Christ is not divine, Christ is human. And you’ll find that in the dual nature, not in the monophysic or the die-physic traditions of Christianity that you find like in Coptic Christianity, and some of the monophysites that believed in, that Christ was purely divine, but in this idea that Christ is of a dual nature. So the logos in here, and that’s a mystery. But I don’t, this idea, Catholics never set call like evangelicals, they don’t call on Christ as, you know, when they pray, they call on God, the Father, through an intercession of Christ, which is, I think, very different from worshiping Christ as the Godhead. And I think it becomes very confusing, even for a lot of Christians. I think it is confusing, 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. Well, we can agree on a lot of things. I mean, we certainly agree that there is a God that he created us. We agree that the prophets were sent to warn people and to give them good news, and we agree that there’s a day of judgment and people are gonna be resurrected. I mean, those are some pretty strong things to base a sense of shared concern on. We certainly agree on family. We agree on the importance of raising children healthy. We all share the liberal arts tradition. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all share the tradition of the liberal arts, which is very, very important. Maybe we could start in our efforts to move forward by concentrating on those things that unite us. Well, also virtue, like virtue ethics. I mean, all three of our religions share virtue ethics, all three, and we all really acknowledge and really have benefited greatly from the Nicomachean ethics. All three traditions recognize the Nicomachean ethics and its importance, and that’s why our ethical tradition, our great treatises reflect many of the truths that Aristotle articulated in the Nicomachean ethics. Well, I think we should probably call that a day. I would like to keep talking to you. I think it’s very useful to outline, I think it was very useful to outline the central tenets of Islamic faith. I think it’s very useful to begin a 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. I mean, we could start by assuming that perhaps our differences are in some sense apparent and a consequence of our ignorance. You know what I mean? It’s not like any of us can claim to be omniscient interpreters even of our own faith tradition. And so we could say, well, there’s a lot of confusion that reigns and that disunites us and we’ll be a little careful about making any authoritative claims on behalf of our own faith and see, because we need to figure out how to tolerate each other and to appreciate each other. And I also think the disunion between Judaism, Christianity and Islam is also one of the sicknesses that besets the West. The fact that that disunity exists makes it more difficult for people who are searching for something akin to a tradition to believe that there’s something solid there because even those who are staunch adherents of their own traditions don’t seem to be able to get along with those who are staunch traditions holders of others. So anyways, discussions like this are some markers on the pathway to peace, let’s say. We have an important tradition from our prophet that says, woe unto those who arrogate to themselves the judgment of God. Yeah, that’s for sure. And he was asked, how do they do that? And he said, by saying these people are in hell and these people are in paradise. So that’s something no Muslim is permitted to, like I could never say you’re going to hell or, I mean, some people do that, but it’s absolutely prohibited in the Islamic tradition to do that. Yeah, well the problem with making a judgment like that is it’s pretty easily turned upon yourself. Well, exactly. It was really good of you to talk to me today. I appreciate it very much. All right. I have a message here. My camera person who set this up just put a little message. He wanted me to mention the Hadith of the prophet in which he said, none of you will enter paradise by your actions, but by the grace of God alone. So we need deeds, but in the end, we’re justified through grace. Thank you very much. I hope we get a chance to speak again. Where are you located? I’m in Berkeley, ground zero for the dissolution of the Western civilization. Yeah. I’m coming to California very soon. Maybe I’ll see if you’d like to come. Well, if you do, yeah, sure. And come visit the college. We have a small liberal arts college and we’re trying to revive a tradition that’s fallen on hard times in both the West and the East, but it’s an important tradition. And it’s the greatest bulwark against a lot of the things that we’re up against because it really does teach people to discern between real and apparent goods. Well, good luck in that endeavor, truly. Thank you. Thank you. Take care, Dr. Peterson.