October 20th, Ahamdulillah now going on to three years, was the birthday of
Yaqeen Institute for Islamic research, was the official outward launch of
Yaqeen Institute, And when we set out, and obviously there was a lot of work that
went into Yaqeen before we actually launched the Institute. When we set out
to launch this Institute knowing that we would have a difficult time for the
first couple of years just trying to explain what Yaqeen is. Some of you
probably still don't know what it is but Inshallah ta'ala we've done at least a
better job of providing the resources about what it is now if you were to go
online and to get a good understanding and hopefully through this
session Inshallah you'll get a broader understanding of what we're
trying to do also. We set out to study doubt. That was the very first thing. What
causes Muslims themselves to leave faith or to not feel solidified enough in
faith to meaningfully absorb it and practice it as well as contribute
through its lens. And the goal was to take people from doubts to contribution
and not just from doubt to belief but doubt to contribution doubt to belief to
a place of contribution where they feel not just solidified in their faith but
again they feel like it is enabling them to do great things for the world around
them through the lens of Islam as we all know. And because you can only give what
you yourself have, if you don't have peace you can't give peace. You need
peace on the inside in order to be able to give it on the outside or else it's
very much so short-lived and not as substantive as it needs to be for the
society around us. This is going to take a lot of deep research. And so the first
survey that we actually launched was called the doubt survey where we did a
the first analysis through 32 Imams, chaplains, social workers-people that
work hands-on with the Muslim community to identify the sources of doubt. And
doubt in this sense is internal conflict, right, with the faith. How many of you
know someone who has left Islam? Can I see some hands? If I ask, can you raise
your heads again? If I was to ask that question at an Islamic convention ten
years ago it would not have been even 50% of those
hands. Right, I mean if you looked around the room that's a lot of hands to go up.
Right, that people that we actually know that have actively left their faith. How
many of you know someone that is struggling with the faith including, it
could include yourself? How many of you know someone struggling with the faith?
Vulnerability. So when you look at the Pew studies, when you see 23% of
American-born Muslims no longer even identified with Islam that tells
you something. But the statistics could be very telling. Why is it that 80
percent of American Muslims fast, but only 39% pray, when prayer is more
important than fasting in the hierarchy of the pillars of Islam? What does that
say about identity and belonging and different factors that come into play
with our worship? So we launched the doubt survey and most people did not
identify intellectual reasons for their departure from Islam but deeply personal
ones. Because you cannot separate your personal experiences from your belief,
from the way that you would view God, and from the way that you would view the
world around you. We are complex beings but everything is deeply interconnected.
iI the authority in your life has been abusive, then naturally when God is
introduced into your life as an authority, you're going to view him
probably through an abusive lens. Because that's what it was. It was highly
disciplinary. God's, you know, there are triggers and anything that's
disciplinary associated with God in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet
sallallahu alaihi wasallam (peace be upon him). If culture was presented to you packaged as religion and you had an
aversion to that cultural idea, thinking that it was Islam, that might have turned
you off of the religion. If you've been constantly bombarded with this idea that
you are from a backwards way of thinking, an inferior religion, an inferior way of
life, and you went to public school your entire life, and everyone around you, you
know, felt sorry for you, or pitied you, and viewed you as being oppressed and you
naturally started to view yourself as oppressed...All of those things are deeply
interconnected. So there is an intellectual component because what
those things do at the personal level is they expose
our intellectual deficiencies as well, and our spiritual deficiencies as well.
But at the same time dealing with the personal, and what that particular
personal impact is on my faith which is, you know, which is at the bare minimum
from an Islamic perspective the definition of my life's purpose. And what
the personal means with them. So we started to address a lot of the
misconceptions about Islam. We started to talk about some of those intellectual
attacks on Islam. And a lot of our research initially focused on that. And
of course those intellectual, those intellectual conflicts might stem from
the personal, but we started to do a lot of work on the intellectual and then we
started to do a lot on spiritual, because you know what, there is a way to
spiritually anchor yourself. In a way that Islam and faith would be rooted in
your heart so that when the intellectual and the personal come, they cause your
tree to bend but not break. Because you're, it's deeply anchored in the
heart. There's a spiritual anchor in the heart. There's that that relationship you
have with Allah. That knowledge of the person of the Prophet (sallallaahu
alaihi wasallam) on which personally, I think is one of the greatest ways to solidify
faith in your heart is learning about the seera of the Prophet salallahu alaihi
wa sallam. The person of the messenger sallallahu alaihi wasallam. That all of that, that is based
in the heart and that belief in Allah and knowing Allah and who Allah is and
connecting all of the questions that you have to the attributes of Allah that
render primary concerns about Islam to secondary concerns about Islam, all of
that is extremely important. And so we launched the proofs of prophethood
series and these things about, you know, solidifying the spiritual in the
heart. But how do you then deal with the personal? Now here's one wrong way to
approach this. The wrong way to approach this would be to suggest that there's no
value whatsoever in counseling in therapy that there are no concepts of
depression. Just read "Alam nashra laka sadrak" and everything will just go away. Or, you
know, all that all of these deeply traumatic things that have
in place- have, you know, just a scripture that needs to be recited and
then it's all going to go away. Spiritual bypass, bypass the entire you
know the entire corpus of advancement that we've made in how we personally
take care of ourselves, and how we under, how we and, you know, how we internalize
the experiences around us in a way that's healthy. Not just spiritually
healthy but emotionally healthy that allows us to not, you know, to make
progress in our lives. Whether that purpose is worldly in its nature or as
towards the hereafter. But how do you, you know, deal with everything that's taking
place. So the suggestion can't be that the solution to depression is just
read Quran and bypass at all. And the solution also cannot be to equate
depression with low faith. That connection does not exist in the Quran
and the Sunnah of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam. That's an interpretation that I think is very
faulty but it does not exist in the Quran listener. However, it is very useful
to understand the connections between what happens to me on a personal level
and what that means in terms of my faith and how I can make sense of that in a
way that's productive and in a way that allows me to take the first steps
towards, not just rectifying that chaos in regards to my faith, but that chaos in
regards to life as a whole, and how I start to put that back together. Snd so
Alhamdullilah at that point, you know, we have the blessing of reaching out to
sister Sarah Sultan and Sister Najwa and, you know, really exploring deeply- both of
them have a background in therapy so they have the secular background as well
as being grounded within the tradition of trying to put together a series on
the relationship between trauma and faith. On the relationship between trauma
and faith, and the relationship between our personal, and everything that happens
to us at an experiential level. Because Islam is a lived
faith, it's a lived experience. It's not just sorting out credo concepts. It's a
lived, it is supposed to touch every element of
your life. So I need to better understand how that connection plays out in a
healthy way in my life and Alhamdullilah they did incredible research
over almost the course of an entire year and I've been producing Alhamdulillah
or we've been releasing a chapter of that research on about every four to six
weeks, Alhamdulillah rabbil alamin, on the relationship between trauma and
faith and I can tell you that it's groundbreaking and that I myself have
personally benefited from it in ways that I think any person, any person, that
is either in the position of caregiving in any capacity or any person that is in
need of care, which I think all of us are, we're a deeply traumatized community.
Deeply traumatized community. And we have a lot of issues and one thing I've
realized and a lot of our group sessions recently is, most collective Muslim
gatherings whether it's a halaqa or whether it's a group of people in Hajj
become group therapy sessions, just without calling it that. But you know we
have a lot that's built up inside of us and we don't have healthy
outlets. And Inshallah ta'ala what I hope this can do is this can be the beginning
of embarking on a healthy conversation Inshallah ta'ala about the relationship
between the personal and the trauma and our faith, and, you know, and crafting
healthy solutions Inshallah ta'ala for the community both at the
individual level and at the collective insha'Allah so we can start to move in a
more productive direction bi'ithnillah wa ta'ala and I want to leave you with this one
point Inshallah ta'ala before I hand it over to Sister Najwa
and Sister Sara and I hope you attend both sessions Inshallah and
really benefit from the incredible work that they've done in this regard. A lot
of people think, it's not just equaiting low iman and depression which is the
problem. A lot of people think that if I do something like counseling or start to
try to put these pieces together that that is because I failed to do it all
myself with just what the Quran and the Sunnah gave me. So it's like, why did, you
know, by doing that, by trying to get help, by trying to understand these
things, it means that I put it together myself. It was easy to
recommend it to someone else when I saw them in a bad situation and say, hey look,
maybe you should get counseling. Or maybe you should do this, or maybe that, but for
me, myself I'm gonna be strong and do it all through the Quran and the Sunnah of the
Prophet salallahu alaihi wasallam and I'm just gonna understand it myself and put it all
together myself. We are made up of so many different components as people. And
if any of you have ever taken a tazkiyah class with me you would have heard
the statement-you cannot be disciplined in anything unless you're disciplined
and everything. You cannot be disciplined than anything unless you're disciplined
and everything. Eventually the areas of your life that are not put together are
going to bleed into the other areas. And they're gonna have real impacts on those
other areas of life. So I can't leave one area of my life in shambles and run to
the area of my life that makes me feel better and just focus on that. And I come
back to a statement from Abu Hazim rahimullah ta'ala, one of the tabi'in who was
asked by Sulaiman ibn Abdul Malik rahimullah
who was the khalifa. He said, why do we hate death so much? Why do we hate death
as people? Why does death cause us the apprehension that it causes us? And he
responded, he says, "Li annaka amartum dunyakum wa kharabtum akhiratakum"-
because you have established yourself in life and you have ruined your hereafter.
"Fatakh ruhoonal khurooj minal imran illal farakh. So naturally a person hates
to leave an area that they feel well established in, to an area of uncertainty
in a place that's in shambles. If you apply that methodology to the things
that take place in our lives then you'll also find it to be true. A lot of times
if things are not put together in one area of life I'm not going to try to fix
that. I'm just gonna continue to to indulge disproportionately the area that
makes me feel good about myself. The area where I feel fulfilled and hope
that I can continue to bleed into that and just focus on that. But that's not
sustainable and it's not healthy and it's not Islamic. Islamically speaking
whatever you do for yourself to make yourself a more capable abd of Allah,
a more capable slave of Allah, and a more capable Qadam, a more capable
servant to the people, is rewardable in and of itself. So all those notions of self
care and emotional health and taking a break
Inshallah ta'ala make things better for us in that regard. I will just
continue on this on this note and I'll just end with something which i think is
very important about the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalaam and who he is
and what we can take as a lesson from him. You know you look at the Messenger
sallallaahu alaihi wasalaam, you always see this perfect balance that he had in
his life that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam was who he was inside
the house. outside the house. His excellence in worship was represented in
his excellence in his work ethic. His being a community leader was also tied
to his being, you know, a good father, a good husband, someone that was
considerate. So those qualities that you see that led to the excellence of the
Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalaam in those different areas of his life were not
circumstantial. So the quality of empathy, for example, was something that impacted
the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalaam's dua, and impacted the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalaam, how he dealt
with his family, and impacted the Prophet salallahu alaihi wasalaam, how he dealt
with his community. That quality of seeing things through, the perfection of
an action, making sure that an action is done right, was something that manifested
itself in every aspect of life of the Prophet salallahu alaihi wasalaam. The way that he
did his wudu to, you know, the very famous, a beautiful hadith, one that
really moved me from Abdullah bin rabiouf radiallahu ta'ala anhu
that describing the Prophet salallahu alaihi wasalaam
in -- Muhammediya, he said that the Prophet salallahu alaihi wasalaam was not too proud
"wa la ya'nafu" he was not too proud and "yamshir amarati wa misqeen"
to be seen constantly walking with an orphan or with someone who was poor
or a widow, "wa hata haqdi lakum haji" until the Prophet salallahu alaihi wasalaam made sure that
they saw the end of what they were seeking, so he wouldn't just touch
something, he would see it through, right, so it's a quality that the Prophet salallahu
alaihi wasalaam, developed that he could take, intentionally. to every single aspect of
his life. And so when we're talking about adopting these qualities of the Prophet
salallahu alaihi wasalaam in our different aspects of life it's to help put us together in the
most wholesome way possible, in a way that benefits our Deen and our dunya, in a way
that benefits our careers and our family lives, in a way that benefits
productive role as community servants as well as not being sloppy with our acts
of worship with Allah subhana wa ta'ala, so it's to develop those frameworks, those
qualities, that balance, and on that note Inshallah ta'ala, you cannot expect
religion to be put together for you if you don't give it its time. Anything in
life, you've got to give it it's time. So you got to be attentive to it. If you
want it to come together in a way that's healthy, you have to be willing to give
it its time. So if you want things, if you're in a turbulent marriage, you need
to be willing to give it time to reduce that turbulence, right, and you have to be
willing to take the necessary steps. The same thing with faith. This isn't
something that just comes to you when it's in shambles, like I'm just gonna
make dua, why isn't it happening for me? Giving it its time and taking the
necessary steps to put it together. And if this is our priority, to have our
purpose in line, to have our faith in line, then we have to be willing to be
extremely intentional about doing whatever it is that's necessary to keep
it put together and streamlined bithnilahi ta'ala, so with that Inshallah
ta,ala i'm going to hand it over Inshallah ta'ala
to Sister Najwa, Sister Sarah, to talk about their research Inshallah and
how we can benefit from that. Jazakallahu khayr wasallamu alaikum wa rehmatullah a barakatuhu.