– Cancel culture is a useful tool in de-platforming
and silencing those who have committed wrongs in the past
or those who further hate speech.
Is there space for cancel culture in islam?
– I think what happens with cancel culture,
is that it emboldens those who are being cancelled
because it shows that you do not have,
at least that's the message that it sends to them,
you don't have the tools to respond to what they're saying.
I'm excluding from this people who are just vitriolic
and they have nothing to say and you're just as a society are deciding we don't want you around.
But if somebody is coming up with.. they had some mistakes in the past
to bring that up especially if they're not transgressive mistakes
in the sense that they did not harm other people
and to use that to judge them today, the person that they are today,
that is utterly un-islamic.
It erases the idea of Tawba completely from the tradition.
So, no. There is no space for that.
"..."
in Surah At-Tawbah.
Three of the companions backed out from a battle.
The Prophet ﷺ was going and they just stayed back.
They were concerned about their wealth.
And so they came and Prophet ﷺ asked the people who stayed back.
The hypocrites came up with all kinds of excuses,
and Prothet ﷺ said: "All right, fine, whatever"
But then these three, they had no excuse
and they came and they just faced up to it.
They said: "We made an error, this is what we did.."
And Prothet ﷺ said: "You are basically excluded from the community,
nobody even gives you Salam until Allah gives His ruling on you"
Allah.
This is such a beautiful story because..
the name escapes me, the name of this companion escaped me and it shouldn't,
but one of them was sitting on his rooftop
and Allah Subhana Wa Ta'la sends down these verses that He's given Tawba to these three.
And one of the companions comes through running to him
and he says to him: "You're free!"
And he said: "I've never forgotten it for him,
of all the companions he's the one who came and hugged me the first"
We don't have cancel culture in Islam because somebody did something wrong in the past.
And this idea is completely foreign to our tradition.
In deeply problematic ways because it says there's no Rahmah.
And whoever does not show Rahmah (Mercy) to people,
that person is not going to get mercy.
So as a community we have to actually combat that,
that somebody did something in the wrong..
that's another thing, if Allah gave that person sitr,
they covered them up and then you come up and you expose them to the world,
then you frame it in your particular way
and then you say this person has to be deleted,
erased completely, excluded.
For something that when you look into it it's like, did they do something islamically problematic even
or is it just some Western social construct thing that they just aesthetically was not becoming?
Because I don't know what this is.
And then they're being cancelled.
Man, Yawm al-Qiyāmah is going to be a very interesting day,
because there's going to come people who are going to be begging for forgiveness
and probably what they're going to be asked is like well,
what'd you do with your twitter account and your facebook posts
about that individual that you just kept going and haranguing
and beating up and doing all that just to get them excluded from the community?
There are people that make careers now out of this,
who just go after Muslims.
So if you want to go canceling people,
you're going to have some questions to answer on Yawm al-Qiyāmah
about your own conduct because nobody is free from fault,
nobody is free from blemishes
and Allah is closer to you than your jugular vein,
so He knows what's up with you.
So when you point the finger at one person, remember you got three others coming back at you.
Allahu Alim.