Assalamualaikum There are many people in South Asia who claim to be Syeds. Whether this claim is true or not is a different thing, but some of them say that it is haraam for a female Syed to marry a non-Syed boy. They say that Syed girls have the status of mothers (and according to some, sisters) of non-Syeds. I believe that Islam doesn't accept caste-based discrimination, but I want proofs from the Quran and Sahih Hadith to correct them.
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
That has no basis in Islam. Syeds claim descent from the grandsons of the Prophet PBUH, and we know that the daughters of these grandsons married people unrelated to the Prophet’s family PBUH. If that was acceptable for them, it should be acceptable for all descendants of the Prophet PBUH. There is nothing in the Quran or Sunna that prevents the descendants of the Prophet PBUH from marrying non-descendants.
There are times when you read a book that completely change your understanding of the world, answering questions you have had for most of your life, and even better, answering questions you did not know you had. This is such a book. Duchesne unites economic analysis, anthropology, history and philosophy in order to make a compelling argument for why Western civilization is truly unique and unlike any other civilization.
Since writing this book, Duchesne has been influenced by white nationalist writers into seeking genetic answers for the uniqueness of the West. But the current book is free from genetic explanations. Duchesne also has a very negative view of Muslims, considering them unassimilable and inherently opposed to Western civilization. But that shouldn’t stop us from benefiting from his work. One of the most hateful fashions in the media and academia today is discarding a person’s valuable work because of their beliefs and motives.
Duchesne’s greatest contribution is his theory that the uniqueness of the West comes from the fact that the ancient Indo-Europeans who took over Europe had a very special feature: their elite was made up of individually sovereign aristocrats. While all societies throughout the world have had aristocratic elites, what was unique about the West was the fact that its aristocrats were individualized and free. This is extremely unusual and as far as I know it was something that never existed anywhere else.
The ancient Middle East never enjoyed the existence of individually sovereign aristocrats. The elite under the pharaohs had no right to compete with each other for renown and prestige because all renown and prestige belonged solely to the pharaoh. The same was true in ancient Mesopotamia and Persia. The king was the only person who had the right to claim personal worth and glory.
But among the Europeans, the Greeks, Romans and the Indo-European barbarians around them, the entire arrangement of society revolved around the competition of its sovereign aristocrats for personal prestige and glory. They had no toleration for kings who reduced the aristocracy to mere minions and slaves as happened throughout the world. They demanded equality and free competition.
Thus in the Greek epic the Iliad, the warrior aristocracy is made up of free individuals who recognized no master above them. Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus were all sovereign individuals. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, on the other hand, is an illustration of the situation outside the European realm. There is only one hero, who is, naturally, a despotic king. There is no room in this epic for other heroes since these societies were organized around the recognition of a single individual in the entire state who could claim personal prestige and glory.
The theory of the presence of a sovereign aristocracy in the West and its absence elsewhere also explains why the Indo-Europeans of Persia and India failed to create civilizations equal to those of Europe. The Indo-Europeans who took over Persia and India quickly embraced the Oriental despotic form of rule that has always existed in these areas. The sovereign aristocracy disappeared to be replaced by all-powerful rulers. The reason for this change appears to be different natural environments. The European climate could support individual farmers who could sustain themselves without any need for complex irrigation systems that required centralization. In the East, however, civilizations were extremely dependent on irrigation systems that made farmers desperately dependent on their chiefs and kings. The king could easily cause the farmers to starve by refusing to provide them with the irrigation systems they were so desperately dependent on.
The Westernization of the World
If we take the ideas in Uniqueness seriously and ignore Duchesne’s recent writings about the genetic uniqueness of Europeans, the conclusion is that the great accomplishments of the West are a matter of culture. The door is open for any culture in the world to embrace the Western system, leading to a similar flowering of creativity and accomplishment. The key is individualism. The culture must recognize the equal dignity, mastery and right to prestige of all citizens, rather than recognizing only one despotic ruler who monopolizes mastery and prestige.
Thus any culture that embraces the Western ideal of the equality of citizens before the law will create a system that will lead to a similar restless drive among citizens for accomplishment. According to the social scientists Santos, Varnum and Grossmann, there has been a significant increase in individualism throughout the world. The world is increasingly adopting the Western ideal of sovereign individuality.
I was surprised to discover that one of the most popular Arabic songs on YouTube (with 154 million views) is a song that preaches strict individualism, titled “Be You”.
The Israeli social scientists Licht, Goldschmid and Schwartz have discovered that there is a very strong correlation between individualism and the rule of law, non-corruption and democratic accountability. As individualism increases throughout the world, we can expect more and more functional democracies to come into existence.
The “Wickedness” of the West
According to the currently fashionable ideology at the sociology departments of Western universities, the West is uniquely evil. It doesn’t matter that the Chinese colonized the lands of ethnic minorities and sometimes massacred them; it is the Western colonization of other lands that is unforgivable. It doesn’t matter that the native Americans slaughtered and enslaved each other, or that the Aztecs practiced mass human sacrifice; it is the intrusion of the West into this utterly evil and inhuman social system that is unforgivable. It doesn’t matter that Africans used to enslave each other by the millions; it is the fact of Westerners buying these slaves that is unforgivable. It doesn’t matter that India has an utterly racist and dehumanizing cast system or that Israel is an apartheid state; it is the racial inequalities in the West that is unforgivable.
The action of the Europeans on the world scene over the past few centuries were clearly motivated by much greed for wealth and power. But a person who does not have an ax to grind against Westerners will see them and their actions as no worse than those of the rest of the peoples of the world. And not just that, but such a person will also appreciate the uniquely positive and humane contributions that the West has made to make the lot of non-Westerners better. It was the British who spent vast amounts of wealth, and large numbers of the lives of their own, to police the seas in the 19th century to put an end to the slave trade. Yes, the British engaged in it before, like almost all other peoples. But it was they, and not the Chinese, Indians, Muslims or Africans who developed an anti-slavery ideology that ensured that slavery would be abolished throughout the world. But to those who are moved by hate against the West, this is irrelevant. The West is evil, and the facts do not matter.
China as the West’s Equal
There is a concerted academic effort aimed at showing that China was equal to the West until the 1800’s when the West discovered the use of coal and gained access to the colonized Americas. The point is to show that Western civilization has nothing to be proud of in being responsible for the intellectual and industrial revolutions that made it the supreme world power by the 19th century. The West simply enjoyed “windfalls” in its easy access to coal and in its access to colonial markets.
We are supposed to believe that the West was stuck in the same position as China in the 19th century, with the population quickly approaching its ecological limits. This truly was the case in China, where a lack of innovation coupled with maximized land use meant that the population could no longer expand beyond its 350 million citizens. It was already producing food at the maximum rate it could, and the only solution for keeping their population under control was widespread female infanticide (something that is supposed to be morally neutral since it wasn’t Westerners doing it).
Britain is supposed to have enjoyed a “windfall” in its acquisition of the Americas, but the historian Kenneth Pomerantz shows no interest in China’s bloody colonization of vast swathes of non-Chinese lands to the west over the centuries. In his distorted worldview “colonization” is something that only Europeans do. Pomerantz also shows no interest in the “windfall” that China enjoyed in possessing lands capable of growing rice; a crop that produces two harvests per year. He also shows no interest in the fact that China greatly benefited from the use of potatoes–a “windfall” crop acquired from the Americas.
The first part of Duchesne’s book is dedicated to refuting the current academic narrative of a China that was a counterpart to the West until the 19th century. He shows that the West was improving its technology and capacity to support its population at a rate that enabled it to continue to support growing populations. This was something China was incapable of due to its lack of innovation.
“Eurocentrics” like Duchesne have been characterized as believing that the West achieved its supremacy without any debts to other cultures. But Duchesne clearly opposes such a view:
By 1200, Europe had recovered much of the scientific and philosophical accomplishment produced within the rest of the world. Persian, Byzantine, Chinese, Indian, African, and Islamic cultures were essential ingredients in Europe’s ascendancy. Affirming the uniqueness of Western civilization in no way implies the idea that Europe can be viewed as a self-contained civilization. A major secret of European creativeness was precisely its multicultural inheritance and its wider geographical linkages with the peoples of the world.
Humans as Passive Animals
One of Duchesne’s major efforts is to refute the popular academic conception of humans as passive actors in world history, controlled by circumstances and environments that made them what they are. Duchesne argues that Westerners were active agents who sought wealth and prestige, not passive agents who couldn’t help doing what they did due to economic circumstances.
The view of humans as passive animals stuck in their circumstances is often associated with Marx, although I believe that we can detect the same strains of thought in many other highly influential 19th and 20th century intellectual movements, almost all of them led by Jewish thinkers.
Marx: Humans are passive animals controlled by economic class conflict.
Freud: Humans are passive animals controlled by sexuality-based conflict within families.
The Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse): Humans are passive animals controlled by social pathologies peculiar to the Western-Christian mentality.
Betty Friedan aka Bettye Naomi Goldstein: Humans are passive animals controlled by sex-based class conflict (Marxism translated into feminism).
Louis Brandeis and Ronald Dworkin: Humans are passive animals who do not know what is good for them; the elite must gain control of the legal system to force upon them what is good for them.
Leo Strauss and his neo-conservative students: Humans (meaning ordinary Christians) are passive animals to be controlled by an atheistic philosophical elite behind the scenes.
Jacques Derrida: Humans are passive animals controlled by dominant discourses that maintain power structures.
Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank: Humans are passive animals controlled by dominant “world systems”.
Jared Diamond: Humans are passive animals controlled by environmental forces.
The only major non-Jewish intellectual who espoused similar ideas is Michel Foucault. It appears that there is something about Jewish culture that makes these intellectuals prefer removing human agency from their explanations of human behavior.
It should go without saying that this view of humans as passive animals controlled by circumstances is wholly foreign to Western civilization, which has always celebrated human agency. The thinking of these intellectuals can therefore be characterized as an importation of a foreign, Jewish view of humans into Western discourse, and the results are as anyone would expect.
All of the above radical movements (the most important today being the mix of cultural Marxism and postmodernism that rules in academia) are pests on intellectual development and scholarship and will ultimately be squashed by the constant, restless, innocent search for truth that continues to characterize many Westerners, and today, non-Westerners. I have high hopes in the increase of Muslim participation in intellectual fields. Muslims who follow Islamic morality will reject the relativization of truth and the reduction of humans to mere animals and will continue the Western tradition of respecting the inviolable dignity of humans.
One minor criticism I have is Duchesne’s lack of knowledge of George Makdisi’s work. Thus Duchesne thinks that the crucial development of doctorates and the “the license to teach” (professorship) were uniquely Western, when Makdisi’s work strongly suggests that these were borrowed from Islam (as I discuss here). Islam did have a doctorate (the taʿliqa) that granted the person professorship. Islam also invented the idea of academic freedom. What Islam failed to do was extend this concept to other fields of inquiry. The doctorate and professorship were strictly limited to Islamic law. This was borrowed by the West, but crucially, the West extended it to all fields of inquiry.
The West learned a great deal from Islam. But its culture of aristocratic egalitarianism meant that Westerners were far more motivated to take these ideas further in competition with each other.
History and Philosophy
Duchesne dedicates a great deal of writing to discussing Hegel’s views on the development of human consciousness out of the conflict between individuals. Duchesne believes that Hegel’s views on history actually only apply to Europeans rather than all humans. Hegel believed that human self-consciousness developed out of a “struggle to the death” with other humans. Hegel believed that a struggle to the death between two humans would end up in one of them enslaving the other. This is an unsatisfactory end because the master cannot accomplish true self-consciousness unless another master recognizes him. Therefore the true development of history requires the presence of multiple masters recognizing each other.
Duchesne rejects common interpretations of Hegel to suggest that this struggle is not just an abstract concept, but a description of the reality of the struggle to the death between barbarian European aristocrats, who accomplished self-consciousness through struggling with each other for prestige. Europeans accomplished self-consciousness before all other peoples because only they had a culture of sovereign aristocrats rather than omnipotent, despotic lords.
Duchesne says that there is an “unbroken link” between the earliest European Indo-Europeans who came out of the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the various Germanic and Scandinavian barbarians, and the culture of medieval Europe to the present day. The process of the struggle to the death between aristocrats led to the development of the concept of equal citizens before the law. Only Europeans could have developed such a concept because only they had a social system defined by the existence of multiple, equal masters, rather than a system defined by the existence of a single master (a Pharaoh, a Persian “king of kings” or a Chinese emperor).
The End of Western Uniqueness
As I mentioned earlier, if we accept the theory that the West’s uniqueness comes from its recognition of the dignity and rights of the individual, then the spread of these ideas throughout the world means that the entire world is now part of the same Western system. Gone are the days when only Westerners competed with each other for individual prestige through innovation.
The Westernization of Islamic Studies
A very interesting aspect of the spread of Western aristocratic egalitarianism is the way Muslim intellectuals and scholars today have started to challenge the scholarly tradition of Oriental despotism that characterized Islamic studies in the past. What we have today are thousands of intellectuals and scholars throughout the world who are bravely challenging long-held beliefs in their individualist search for truth. They have, for example, defended women’s right to divorce and the right of Muslims to leave Islam without being molested, not by discarding Islamic teachings out of a desire to live up to Western standards, but by recognizing that Islam actually supports these views.
In the case of Christianity, the individualist search for truth meant that it suffered persistent attacks on its foundations as philologists in the 19th and 20th centuries subjected its texts and beliefs to rigorous scholarly study and debate. The view of many Westerners unfamiliar with Islam is that Islam too will have its foundations weakened as its study becomes more scientific. But the reality as I see it is quite the opposite. If Islam is really “true”, then it will survive the process intact.
And that is what I see all around me. Having benefited from the latest Western studies of Islam, my view of Islam’s validity has only strengthened. Those who look forward to the secularization of the world may take comfort in the history of the weakening of Christianity, believing that Islam will go through a similar process. But my view is that those hopes will never materialize. Western students of Islamic studies such as Jonathan Brown and Umar Wymann-Landgraf, who have subjected the Islamic scriptures (in their case the Hadith literature) to rigorous Western-style analysis have actually ended up converting to Islam.
Joram van Klaveren
We are also seeing a possible trend of anti-Islam activists converting. Joram van Klaveren, a close ally of the anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, in the middle of writing an anti-Islam book, ended up converting. What other religion in the world has such a power? Another far-right convert is Arthur Wagner. Yet another is Arnoud van Doorn.
Why are these lovers and defenders of Western civilization converting to Islam if Islam is inherently opposed to Western values?
It is my view that these activists, feeling embattled by the constant attacks on Western values, and recognizing that Christianity offers no hope, realized the Islam is actually the best hope for the survival of their civilization.
It depends on what is meant by dawah. If what is meant is spreading brochures and pamphlets and intruding into people’s lives to talk to them about Islam (as Jehovah’s Witnesses do for Christianity), then that is not obligatory. What is obligatory is being a good example and calling those who are closest to you to be better. This shouldn’t be done in a harassing way, but as a genuine effort to make them better people and show them what is better. For more on this please see this previous answer.
Assalamualaikum. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to learn Arabic in the Qur’an? I already know how to read the Arabic, but since I want to understand deeply about Qur’an maybe you have learning methods which you can suggest. Jazakallah brother
Learning Arabic properly requires thousands of hours of effort. It doesn’t really matter what book you select or what learning method you choose as long as you continue to read new books and benefit from free online courses such as on YouTube.
The way I learned Arabic was from watching Arabic-dubbed anime cartoons as a child (here is an example). You can also watch Arabic TV series that use standard Arabic, such as the Omar series.
Once you have some understanding of the language, you can move on to reading Arabic-language books, such as novels. Amazon.com actually sells a lot of Arabic books, including the Harry Potter books in Arabic. You can check them out here. Once you have a good knowledge of standard Arabic, reading and understanding the Quran deeply become possible.
I believe that the most important thing in language learning is consistent effort to try to read the language, and reading books in the language is the best way to do that. I learned English from reading hundreds of novels.
I consider it an extremely harmful thing. Political correctness simply means that an unelected elite decide for the rest of society which truths they are allowed to speak and which truths they are not allowed to speak. In the United States this basically means that those who own the major media outlets and publishing houses decide what is allowed to be discussed in public.
An extreme example of harm of political correctness is recent attempts to make discussions of the harms of being overweight and obese politically incorrect. Thus doctors who speak about the science on the dangers of obesity are attacked for discriminating against obese people.
Another example is the fact that discussing the powerful influence of Israel on US politics is politically incorrect. This makes it impossible for intellectuals to discuss the fact that having a foreign country have so much power over one’s own country may not be in the best interests of the home country.
In my view it is a betrayal of God to hide any important truth for political reasons, so I have little respect for those who consider political correctness to be more important than truth. I am a supporter of free speech and believe that an important duty of Muslim intellectuals is for them to be speakers of truth. Recently a scientist was attacked for studying the possibility that the practice of cousin marriage among Muslims in Britain may be responsible for the high incidence of birth defects among certain Muslim-majority ethnicities. I have only contempt for people who attack scientists for studying such politically sensitive issues. If it is true that cousin marriage among Muslims in Britain is leading to increased birth defects, the first step toward a solution is for this to be openly discussed. But the ignorant, narrow-minded media elite of Britain, rather than discussing the actual facts involved, attacked the scientist’s motive for studying the subject. Even if the scientist hated Muslims (and there is no evidence that he did), if what he said is true, then it must be discussed and taken seriously.
As-salamuʿalaykum, I recently i have come across Dr. Shabir Ally's thoughts on the nail polish dilemma on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOpxO_ISJQ4). I'm inclined towards his reasoning for it but would like to know your take on his opinion too if possible.
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
I watched the video but unfortunately he did not say anything new on the issue. I believe that nail polish is at best in a gray area, which means that it should be avoided as part of piety.
He mentioned that oil can be used on the skin, which can be barrier to water. But the human skin naturally produces oil and absorbs it, so it is not directly comparable to nail polish. As for kohl, unlike nail polish it does not create an impermeable barrier to water because as far as I know the skin pores continue to remain open after using it, although I am not sure about the exact science of how it interacts with the skin. The comparison with kohl is interesting and hopefully if the exact science of its interaction with the skin can be determined, a similar substance may be possible to create to use as nail polish, although it will likely not create the “polish” that ordinary nail polish creates.
I believe that the possibility of people being turned away from Islam because of the prohibition on nail polish is not significant enough to warrant permitting it.
Another solution would be the development of nail polish stickers that are easy to remove before ablution, although they would be a hassle to use.
I want to take my shahada infront of an imam but my parents do not support me. I tried going to church and I felt like I died inside and I cried for days before going to church( I know it sounds dramatic but my heart only belongs to Allah). My parents are also open to the idea of me marrying a Muslim boy but … I dont want to wait or specifically look for that just to convert. Would it be wrong if I converted without their support ?
You can take your shahada right now and that would be official. There is no need to do it with an imam although that is of course a nice experience.
Welcome to Islam and feel free to ask any questions you may have.
As for converting without their support; it is obligatory in Islam to go against your parents’ wishes if they try to interfere with your faith. The Quran says:
We have advised the human being to be good to his parents. But if they urge you to associate with Me something you have no knowledge of, do not obey them. To Me is your return; and I will inform you of what you used to do. (The Quran, verse 29:8)
You shouldn’t wait for their approval to convert. If you are convinced that Islam is the true religion, then it can be argued that it is actually sinful if you avoid the Islamic duties when you know in your heart that you should be doing them.
There are many organizations that support converts, such as the Muslim Convert Network. Reach out to them and inshaAllah you will get many benefits.
You may also be interested in The New Muslim’s Field Guide, although I haven’t read it, it has many positive reviews.
Salam alaikum. Is it permissible to wipe off our wudu, as in drying the water off our skin with a towel, after taking a wudu before prayer?
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
According to Imām al-Nawawī, all scholars agree that it is permitted. But there is disagreement on whether it is makrūh (“disliked”) thing to dry off the wudu water or whether it is mubāḥ (“permitted and neutral in value, netiher good nor bad”). The fatwa I cite below says that it is sunna to not dry off the water (since the Prophet PBUH never did that), but that doing so has no harm.
This book is a withering criticism of the class of society that Thomas Sowell calls the “intellectuals” (journalists and columnists, public intellectuals, writers, sociologists).
Sowell’s thesis is that intellectuals try to persuade the public to support policies that may do greater harm than good while enjoying complete immunity from the bad consequences of their recommendations. For example in the 1920’s and 1930’s intellectuals widely called for disarmament, making it very difficult for British politicians to order the military to arm itself in response to Nazi Germany’s growing military power. The intellectuals in charge of Britain’s media had created an atmosphere where politicians would have risked their jobs if they had done what they know to be right, since the public had been indoctrinated by the intellectuals to fight rearmament. In this way the intellectuals were responsible for making Britain almost lose World War II to Germany, and yet no intellectual faced any consequences for recommending such a self-defeating policy.
Thomas Sowell is an economist and in this role considers the intellectuals pests in issues of economic policy. They recommend vast changes in economic policy without having the competence to understand the consequences, and without suffering any repercussions when their policy recommendations do great harm to major sections of society.
Intellectuals throughout the 20th century have called for gun control laws, thinking that this would make society safer. They ignore the fact that Switzerland, where gun ownership is extremely high, suffers far less crime than the United States. And when intellectuals in Britain managed to pass strong control laws, this actually lead to a vast increase in crime. Intellectuals also strongly supported weaker punishments of criminals in Britain, which according to Sowell is partly responsible for Britain’s crime crisis. And when conservatives in the United States managed to create strong anti-crime policies in the 1990’s, which lead to a sharp decline in crime, the intellectuals only expressed bewilderment at this “unexplainable” phenomenon when to Sowell the explanation is extremely obvious: keeping more criminals in prison means fewer criminals out there committing crime.
This book should be required reading for all Muslim intellectuals living in the West. It is a great help in creating a critical attitude toward nice-sounding popular doctrines promoted by Western intellectuals.
Sowell belongs to the neoconservative Hoover Institution. He shares the anti-Muslim bias of neoconservatives; almost all mentions of Muslims in his books are negative (while having worked extremely hard to defend the image and rights of Jews while always ignoring the possibility that Jewish behavior may have had something to do with anti-Semitism). In this book he does not disappoint:
The intelligentsia in some European nations have gone further—being apologetic to Muslims at home and abroad, and having acquiesced in the setting up of de facto Muslim enclaves with their own rules and standards within Europe, as well as overlooking their violations of the national laws in the European countries in which Muslim immigrants have settled.
The Hoover Institution is active in promoting the image of Muslims as the West’s new Jews as the Jews were seen in the past: separate, alien, unpatriotic, living in enclaves, and having large numbers of anti-Western radicals among them.
However, Sowell’s anti-Muslim bias should be no obstacle to Muslims to benefit from his expertise and his very important work in promoting a more rational intellectual atmosphere and in defending Western civilization from, ironically, largely Jewish attempts to undermine its pride and patriotism. Jews are heavily over-represented among the intellectuals he criticizes in this book; he comes back again and again to the Jewish Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, who spent his career working to weaken the US Constitution in order to make room for his own elitist agenda. Brandeis was followed in prominence by the Jewish legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, who continued the project of justifying twisting the Constitution and the law in order to make judges and legal scholars the elite who decide what the law should be for the masses. Sowell also reserves much criticism for heavily-Jewish (and extremely elitist) media outlets like The New York Times. He also often criticizes fields of academia heavily influenced by Jewish activists, such as sociology, which was permanently biased against the West in the aftermath of the works of Freud, Franz Boas and the key members of the Frankfurt School, all of whom were Jewish with strong Jewish identities and obvious anti-Western agendas.
In the Quran God calls Himself the mawlā of the believers (8:40 and elsewhere), which is usually translated as “protector”. But it actually also means “friend”, “companion”, “supporter”, “master”, “chief”. So it contains all of these meanings.
However, in modern usage “friend” implies that the person is equal in status to you, which naturally does not apply to God. So God can be a friend in that He is our companion in life, that He supports us and cares for us. But He is not just a friend, He is also a master and a mentor, so focusing only in His being a friend leads to a biased understanding.
Is trading forex and the stock market permitted in Islam?
Selling one type of currency for another and making a profit by this is permitted in Islam. However, what is known as “forex” can contain many practices that are prohibited in Islam, such as interest or futures contracts. So there cannot be a general statement on the permissibility or not of forex until that specific company’s practices are studied.
As for stock trading, this too is permitted technically as long as there is no interest or futures is involved, and as long as the stock being traded does not make its profit largely by a practice that is forbidden in Islam, such as bank stocks that make most of their money through interest. But investing in a stock such as Microsoft that makes some money through interest but that makes most of its money through permissible means is permitted, however, the amount of profit it makes through interest must be deducted and donated from the value of the stock annually.
Also note that any money invested in currency or stock trading is annually zakatable. So if a person has a million dollars invested in currency or stock trading (or real estate trading), they are required to pay 2.5% of this money annually for zakat whether they make a profit or loss. The principle is that all speculatively invested wealth is zakatable.
I am fond of drawing fictional characters (fan arts) up until recently. After some research, I've learned that there are some people in various fan communities who would build tiny shrines dedicated to their favorite characters (whether it be joking or sincere) and/or call them their "god(dess)"/"lord and savior" for simply being admirable or breathtaking. How should I react to this? Should I stop drawing the characters I like, even if my sentiments are innocent? Should I dispose my old fan arts, too?
The behavior of other artists has no bearing on what you do. You are only responsible for your own art and behavior. So I wouldn’t worry about that.
If a mentally unstable person committed suicide would they still be punished by Allah?
God judges each person according to their own circumstances and limitations. So if a person commits suicide when they are mentally disturbed and not responsible for their actions, then God would judge that differently from someone who chooses to do it in cold blood.
What we know for certain is that God is more fair and just than any human, so there is never any need to worry about God being unjust to someone; it is God Himself who invented the very idea of justice by creating a universe in which such concepts make sense. We can trust God to be more just and kind than the most just and kind humans in history.
Arabic Grammar in Context (2016) by professor Mohammad T. Alhawary is an enjoyable and beneficial resource for learners of Arabic. It features excerpts from actual Arabic books and articles and uses them to illustrate grammatical points.
The book is not for complete beginners and should be used either after studying a basic grammar book or alongside one.
As is typical for books published by academic publishers, it is somewhat overpriced at over $40 on Amazon.
On most days of Ramadan, fasting makes it impossible for me to do my usual programming and writing work. For this reason I spent most of the daytime hours of this Ramadan reading books, finishing over 20 books (mainly audiobooks).
For years I have been aware of Thomas Sowell as perhaps the greatest living African American intellectual, and this Ramadan I finally got around to reading many of his books.
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is a very unique intellectual, a type that is very rare both among whites and blacks, and among blacks others like him are almost non-existent. He rejects the popular liberal ideology that presently rules in Western academia and media, and his status as a black person has enabled him to say things about racial and ethnic issues that most whites would likely not be able to get away with without being charged with racism. Sowell is, or at least tries to be, an empiricist, making him a man after my own heart. He rejects nice-sounding, feel-good political ideas for ideas that actually have merit and have been tested in the real world for their efficacy. Thus, for example, he rejects affirmative action (the practice among universities to allow blacks with lower qualifications to enter in preference to better-qualified whites), considering it harmful to blacks by making them think they should live up to lower standards than whites (among various other reasons). He also rejects the common narrative that many common problems of blacks today (such as father absenteeism and low economic status) are directly traceable to slavery, mentioning the fact that blacks in the early 20th century had much better social characteristics (such as male dedication to their families) than blacks in the second half of the 20th century.
Thomas Sowell is not, however, entirely free from bias. He sometimes strongly reflects the neoconservative bias of the Hoover Institution that he works for, for example considering free trade a highly positive thing and ignoring the technological servitude that results from it. He is also strongly invested in the Frankfurt School ideology that there are no interesting genetic-behavioral differences between different populations despite the existence of the vast literature of behavioral genetics. He also has a very strong pro-Israel stance (neoconservatism’s foreign policy views mirror Israel’s interests so exactly that they might as well have been written directly in Tel Aviv), naively thinking that the Muslim hostility toward Israel is merely anti-Semitism. He also entirely ignores the possibility that historical anti-Semitism may have had anything to do with Jewish behavior, again perfectly reflecting the Frankfurt School / neoconservative ideology.
However, Sowell has worked tirelessly to fight the pathologization of Western civilization that has been a major focus of the works of the members of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals who later emerged as the neoconservatives. Sowell has always maintained a certain independence and empiricism in spite of the influence of his milieu and his powerful intellect has enabled him to break out of important aspects of his intellectual conditioning.
I started by reading his autobiography A Personal Odyssey, one of the most enjoyable and enlightening autobiographies I have read. I went on to read his economics books Basic Economics, Applied Economics and Economic Facts and Fallacies. I then read his 1981 book Ethnic America: A History, a historical and economic analysis of the various ethnicities that make up America (the British, the Germans, the Italians, Jews, etc.). Next I read his trilogy on race and culture: Race and Culture: A World View (1995), Migrations and Cultures: A World View (1996), and Conquests and Cultures: An International History (1998).
I recently finished Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), a collection of essays on various issues. The most interesting aspect of this work is his study of “redneck” culture. According to Sowell, redneck culture originated in Britain and was characterized by high criminality and violence, a lack of interest in education, pride, grandiosity and sexual promiscuity. Redneck migrants from England brought their culture with them and established themselves in the American South, repeating the same behaviors that they were famous for in Britain.
Since nine tenth of black slaves lived in the South, they had the unfortunate fate of being acculturated to this redneck culture. Therefore according to Sowell, things that we consider to be “black” culture today (such as gangster rap and a low opinion of education) are actually the redneck culture of Britain that blacks took in. Blacks that were freed in the 19th century and lived in the North abandoned this redneck culture and took in New England’s extremely different (and far more productive) culture, so that these blacks were far more prosperous and educated and suffered far less from the problems that plagued both the whites and blacks of the South. He mentions that once “redneck” Southern blacks started to migrate en masse to the North, the New England blacks looked down on them and would do their best to move out of neighborhoods that these newly arrived blacks lived in, just as the whites did.
Another interesting topic that he covers in his highly unique way is slavery. Rejecting the common Western narrative that the West was somehow uniquely evil in its practice of slavery, Sowell says that slavery was a global phenomenon, and that Western civilization was actually the one that was almost entirely responsible for abolishing it. In the 18th and 19th century the British developed the idea that slavery was morally wrong and unacceptable, and they started to spend vast resources fighting it. The British started to patrol the seas with their ships, fighting slave traders around the world. This British crusade against slavery has been largely forgotten.
Islam and slavery
It was the British who forced the Ottoman Empire to ban slavery. Despite Islam’s humane attitude toward slaves and its strong encouragement for freeing them, it is a fact of history that slavery in the Islamic world represents one of the greatest moral failings of our civilization. We now realize, thanks mainly to Western civilization, that the most Islamic attitude toward slavery is tolerating it with the explicit goal of working to eradicate it. But throughout the centuries, Muslims failed to put this program into practice, instead representing one of the greatest forces supporting slavery throughout the world by creating a strong demand for it. Muslims happily purchased slaves without worrying about how these slaves were created in the first place: the extremely inhuman process by which African, Arab and European slave-raiders acquired slaves to be sold in the Islamic world.
It is not much to be proud of that Islam had very important protections for slave rights when it had nothing to say about how these slaves were acquired in the first place. By creating a vast market for slaves, the Muslims encouraged mass slaughter of Africans and Europeans by cruel slave-raiders. It is amazing to think that all of these Muslims, despite the high morality that the Quran and hadith taught them, did almost nothing about this incredibly unjust and oppressive system until the British came along to civilize them.
Islam and interest
As an economist, Thomas Sowell considers the charging of interest an essential part of the functioning of any well-developed economic system. To him, therefore, the fact that Islam forbids interest is just an ignorant and foolish prejudice that misunderstands the function of interest. Interest makes it possible to mobilize the wealth of society by encouraging the wealthy to use their money to fund economic growth. If people place their savings in the bank, and the bank lends this money to corporations that can invest the money in various economic projects, this makes it possible to mobilize a vast amount of society’s wealth in the service of economic projects.
What Sowell does not realize is that it is perfectly possible to do this without interest. It is, however, true that the ban on interest was a great limiting factor on economic growth in the Islamic world until Muslims learned in the 20th century that it is possible to create the Western pattern of wealth mobilization without interest by creating Islamic banks.
But now that the system is in place, the ban of interest is no longer a limiting factor on economic growth. Islamic finance makes it possible to mobilize society’s wealth without the use of interest through the ṣukūk system, enabling the creation of a financial world that is far more humane and borrower-friendly than the current, usurious Western financial system. For example, in an Islamic home mortgage, no loan is involved, and in the case of default, the home buyer always gets money back. Compare this to the Western system where default means not only losing the home, but sometimes owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the bank. This incredibly unjust usurious system of the West makes it practically certain that the wealth of the bankers will continuously grow at a faster rate than the wealth of society, making the bankers the richest and most powerful people in the country, as has happened in the West. See my essay: Why the Banks are So Powerful and Why the Bible and the Quran Forbid Usury: Charting How Interest Creates Obscene Wealth Inequality.
Middleman minorities
A big focus of Thomas Sowell’s work is on so-called “middleman minorities”. These are ethnicities such as the Jews in the West, the Chinese in Malaysia, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, and the Lebanese and Indians in Africa. Middleman minorities all share certain attributes:
They are generally wealthier than the native population.
They are clannish and keep to themselves, maintaining a separate culture from the native population.
They keep ties with their home countries and build international trade and financial networks with their co-ethnics.
They are often involved in money-lending.
They often monopolize entire sectors of the economy.
Middleman minorities have invariably been resented by the native population, who envy the wealth, success and power of the middleman minorities and dislike their separate, clannish existence.
According to Sowell, it is only prejudice and envy that makes native populations dislike middleman minorities since these minorities serve essential functions in their economies. For example, the Chinese in Malaysia are responsible for developing various sectors of the Malaysian economy, sectors that would have been far less developed, and perhaps even non-existent, if the Chinese had not been there. According to Sowell the middleman minorities create the wealth they enjoy. They do not exploit the native population and do not steal their wealth.
So why do natives dislike middlemen? Why were Jews so universally hated in Europe when they served such “essential” economic functions? Why did the Ugandans expel the Indian and Pakistanis who had helped build up so much of their economies? Why do Malaysians and Indonesians so dislike the Chinese among them?
Genetic-cultural altruism
Thomas Sowell’s unsatisfactory answers to the above questions are a very good illustration of the way specialization limits the intellectual horizons of specialists. Being an economist, he thinks of middleman minorities largely in economic terms and sees their positive contributions as more than justifying whatever else the presence of these middleman minorities may entail.
But an evolutionist is going to have a very different view of the clash between natives and middlemen. From an evolutionary perspective, ideally everyone you do business with will be your father. Genetic relatedness makes people more kind toward their own kin than towards strangers. And this behavior comes out on a daily basis in the interactions between the natives and the genetically separate middlemen.
When you need a loan from a bank, rather than going to someone from a strange land and culture who probably dislikes you and has no love for you, you would much rather go to the bank that is run by your father. You know you will be treated with much more sympathy, love and respect.
When you are desperate for employment, you know that your father will be much more likely to employ you than a random stranger who only thinks of you in economic terms.
Middleman minorities are a jarring element in the social fabric of the natives’ society. The natives want to be treated as kin, as humans, by their fellow humans. But middleman minorities only think of the natives in economic terms, dehumanizing them into mere tools of economics. This is an incredibly disorienting, degrading and alienating experience for a native. By being an impermeable, non-kin group, we know that middlemen deal with us only according to the harsh, cold laws of economics, rather than dealing with us as family.
The clannishness of middleman minorities only exacerbates the problem. By creating an impermeable group that deals with its own members charitably while dealing with natives as excluded aliens, they make the population feel as aliens in their own hometowns and countries. This is highly disconcerting. To go from the loving atmosphere of your own kin and ethnicity to the cold atmosphere of the alien middleman is never a pleasant experience.
The solution, the only solution, is for the middleman minority to go native by making their group permeable. Middleman populations such as historical Jews that are stringent about preventing intermarriage and cultural exchange are guaranteed to provoke extreme hostility by making the native population feel like aliens in their own lands. On the other hand, middleman groups that intermarry and become part of the native population both genetically and culturally will end all possible hostilities within a few generations, as happened with the Arab settlers in Southeast Asia (compare with the hostility that the Chinese provoke there nowadays). The Arabs intermarried and became part of the population. Despite their great economic success and their maintenance of familial and economic ties with the Yemeni coastal areas that they came from, they provoked no hostility that I can discover.
While middleman minorities may make the economy more efficient by their activities, they also make it less human by remaining alien, impermeable and clannish and having an us vs. them mentality toward the native population. The various expulsions of middleman minorities throughout history show that people would much rather enjoy a less efficient but more humane economy run by natives than a more efficient but less humane economy run by middleman minorities.
An economist like Thomas Sowell thinks that the natives should simply swallow their pride and their desire to be treated with the dignity that kin treat them for the sake of having clannish middleman minorities make their economies more efficient. This may make sense economically, but it makes no sense from a wider, human perspective.
The indignity of separatism
Middleman minorities, by the very fact of refusing to intermarry and assimilate with the natives, tell the natives on a daily basis that they consider themselves superior: the natives are simply not worth marrying. This is incredibly degrading to the natives. By considering themselves a superior genetic-cultural stock, the middleman minorities constantly stress the inferiority of the natives upon their psyches. It is highly naive to expect the natives to be content with this state of things. To the natives this is an itch that cannot be scratched. And the increasing success and prominence of the middlemen only serve to remind the natives of their own inferiority.
The main problem with middleman minorities is not that they are genetically different from the natives, but that they work to maintain this genetic difference. A native does not need to be an intellectual to realize that this maintenance of genetic separatism is a judgment on his or her ethnicity. They know that they are treated as not being good enough. And that, in turn, leads to their developing a group identity of superiority over the middlemen: if you treat me as inferior, I will treat you as inferior. This leads to the stressing and exaggeration of the negative qualities of the middlemen among the natives. They are avaricious, uncharitable, selfish, lacking common decency, inhuman. The natives develop an ideology of ethnic pride that justifies to themselves their right to fight back against being treated as inferior, and this in turn leads to the natives calling for laws discriminating against the middlemen, boycotts, and even violence.
So the question is this: do middleman minorities have a moral right to practice business in an alien nation while maintaining genetic and cultural separatism? I believe this is a question that only the natives can decide for themselves. If the value that the middlemen offer is so great as to be worth the indignity of tolerating them, then the natives can choose to do so. And if the value they offer is not that great, they can choose to expel them. While economically the second choice may not make “sense”, from a psychological and evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense.
While we can feel sorry for the many innocent people who have been harmed in riots and expulsions, we cannot ignore the reality that their separatism is directly responsible for this treatment.
To put it another way, the natives have a moral right to demand to be treated as equally worthy by the middleman minority, and that, above all, means that the middleman minority must cease its clannishness and separatism and must start to intermarry with the natives. Middleman minorities that have gone this route, such as the Japanese in the United States, have completely ceased to be an issue, while middleman minorities such as the Jews in the United States, who have continued to work hard to fight intermarriage, continue to provoke some hostility. The Koreans working in black ghettos in the United States also provoke hostility due to their maintenance of genetic separatism from the blacks they serve.
Sowell may say that the middleman minority has a good reason to remain separate: the natives have an inferior culture. The Chinese, for example, say that the Malays are lazy and less reliable. But the Chinese could marry the Malays and attempt to fuse their supposedly superior culture with that of the Malays. Even if this involves sacrificing aspects of their superior culture, it may be the only reasonable way forward to end the conflict
The solution for the ethnic conflicts that have plagued Southeast Asia is for the governments of these countries to strongly promote intermarriage. In Thailand, due to the fact that the Chinese and the Thais share the same religion, intermarriage has been more common and with it the hostility toward the Chinese has been less pronounced. But in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Buddhist-Muslim difference is a significant barrier to intermarriage, hostility has been much more pronounced. These countries can greatly reduce the conflict by passing laws that treat the Chinese as natives if they are married to a native.
A significant new middleman minority population are the Chinese in Africa. It is essential for African countries to instate policies requiring intermarriage in order to prevent the same sordid story of riots, pogroms and expulsions that have plagued the history of middleman minorities throughout the world. Unfortunately African nationalist ideas in some countries make the officials of these governments (such as in Uganda) hostile to the idea of intermarriage, a very unconstructive attitude that will only set up the stage for ethnic conflict.
Arabic: An Essential Grammar by Faruk Abu-Chacra (2018) is a fair guide for beginners to Arabic grammar, although it is extremely overpriced ($48 USD on Amazon right now) for the value that it offers.
Learners wishing to master Arabic grammar should content themselves with the fact that they should read at least half a dozen Arabic grammar books before they can gain a reasonable handle on the highly intricate and confusing system that is Arabic grammar. This book would be a reasonable choice among others.
The book suffers from many errors in its Arabic orthography. It also suffers from the fact that lines that contain Arabic mixed with English have a much wider line-spacing compared to lines that contain only English, giving the text a very uneven look. Below is an example taken from the book preview on Google Books:
Another issue is that the section hints on the right (the text in the gray box shown above) seem to be entirely misplaced and have no relationship with the actual text.
The book, like many other grammar books, also suffers from using an unsatisfactory transliteration system. I wish all English books dealing with Arabic would start using the Brill system.
Additionally, on page 265 an Arabic phrase is erroneously said to be in the Quran:
The phrase la-ʿaḍīm actually never occurs in the Quran.
I disagree, consider this, it was stated that man is born to desire. Separating ourselves from desires brings us closer to Allah. A man born with the interest to murder is different than a homosexual. A homosexual isn't taking anyones life whereas a psychopath is hurting others. I think intention is very important. If ur intent isn't to harm others you aren't immoral. Ur denying people love. A man desiring a woman is still desire and he shouldn't do that either. The mere act of life is desire
The argument that “no one is being harmed” is false on two counts:
1. Homosexual relationships lead to “hookup cultures”, which lead to the disintegration of traditional marriage and family relations, as discussed in this essay. Understanding these harms requires thinking in terms of generations and centuries rather than individual lifetimes, which is something that most people cannot do unfortunately. Any society that approves of homosexual relationships will immediately see a large increase in heterosexual relationships outside of marriage. This is something we see throughout the world. I challenge you to find a society where homosexual relationships are common but where heterosexual relationships outside of marriage are uncommon. Such a thing cannot exist because the approval of homosexual relationships require a complete change in the attitude of the population toward marriage and sexuality.
2. If God exists and if He does not approve of homosexual relationships, then engaging in this lifestyle and promoting it does the greatest possible harm, because it may doom its adherents to the Hellfire for eternity. What greater harm is possible? Additionally, God may punish those who approve of homosexual relationships and their societies in this life as well as the next, so even if homosexual relationships had no direct influence on society, God’s displeasure and His possible punishment are a very great harm indeed.
As for your statement “If [your] intent isn’t to harm others you aren’t immoral”, that has no basis in moral philosophy. An action can lead to harm and to immoral results regardless of the intention of the person.
Assalamualaikum, i was wondering if you have any productivity tips regarding reading and doing our daily work?
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
I used to read many articles and follow many websites that were dedicated to increasing personal productivity. But I realized at some point that it was all irrelevant to me. For example having a clean desk and working in a quiet environment is recommended by many productivity-related sources, but in my case my productivity had nothing to do with these things.
So instead I developed an empirical program where I kept track of my habits to determine what increased my productivity and what decreased it. For example I discovered that having caffeine (such as a strong coffee) in the afternoon made me less productive the next day, so I stopped doing that. I also realized that having a large breakfast or lunch reduced my ability to work, so these days I only have one major meal per day at around 4 PM or after. Before that I only have small amounts of food, such as an apple in the morning.
The most important productivity thing you can do is to keep track of how many hours you worked, and how many hours you read, every day, and to keep track of how the things you do affects these things (the meals you eat and their size, where you spent your work, what hobbies you engaged in). You can keep track of these things in an Excel spreadsheet, and eventually you may notice some patterns and find out how to best maximize your productivity. Without having empirical data on your performance it may be very difficult to find out what is benefiting and what is harming your productivity, since we are not naturally inclined to take into account what we did yesterday when we think about why we are not productive today.
What is your opinion on separation of church and state. Is such thing possible in Muslim countries?
Separation of church and state only matters if one envisions the state as an authority that forces certain behaviors on the population. This is mainly a concern for elitist intellectuals who think that a small number of intellectuals in the government should have the right to dictate to the rest of the population how to manage their lives. And since most of these intellectuals (in countries like the US) are secular, anti-Christian, highly elitist, and highly hostile toward ordinary citizens, they believe that the separation of church and state should be promoted because they do not want the values of ordinary citizens to affect their plans for managing the country according to their own ideologies.
In other words, these elitist intellectuals have a top-down view of government: they think they should be the moral authorities over the population. They do not want the population’s own morality to seep into the government.
But if we envision government in a non-elitist way, as merely a reflection of the will of the people, then the idea of the separation of church and state becomes irrelevant. A government is merely a tool for making life more stable and manageable, it is similar to the management of a business. The way that the people of a village can come together to manage their village’s affairs, the people of a country can come together to manage their country’s affairs. A government should not be a force from the top forcing certain behaviors on the people, it should simply be a reflection of the people themselves and their values and desires.
The smallest unit of government is a family, as the philosopher Hegel recognized. The idea of separating church and state within the family is absurd because the way the family manages its affairs is guided by its values, which naturally means its religious values among others. These values are not forced on them, it is their own democratically chosen values. And if we get a large number of families in a community, we have a government.
If by the separation of church what is meant is that a small number of religious authorities should not dictate to the rest of the population how they should live their lives, then I fully support that. But I reject the idea of anyone forcing a way of life on any other, so this should not be a problem to begin with. It is not the separation of church and state that is the problem, it is the forcing of the values of a minority over a majority.
In my view an ideal Islamic society would be a truly federalist version of the way the United States is today: each state, and even each city, would democratically choose its own laws. In this way the government of each city would simply be the desires and values of the people of that city reflected in their laws. Separation of church and state is completely irrelevant here because it is the people themselves choosing their own laws. No one is forcing it on them.
So the crucial value for ensuring a lack of oppression is not separation of church and state, it is this: a lack of the use of force by one group in the country to change the way of life of another group. This is the higher issue. Separation of church and state is simply a sub-category of this concern. The higher concern is non-domination.
As Treebeard said to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers:
‘I am not going to do anything with you: not if you mean by that ‘‘do something to you’’ without your leave. We might do some things together.
In a perfectly harmonious society, no one would to use force on others. When people talk about the separation of church and state what they mean is that they worry about religious authorities controlling people’s ways of life. But if we reject the very idea of control from the state, if we say that the government should be nothing more or less than a reflection of the people’s desires and values, then there is no control involved. The secular would not control the religious, and the religious would not control the secular. People would respect each other’s rights to have different laws. A city with a religious majority can choose to have more religious values reflected in their laws, while a city with a secular minority can have secular values reflected in their laws.
But to elitist intellectuals this is unacceptable since what they really want is to force secularism on all to prevent the possibility of any community making its own moral choices. The moral choices, in their view, should all be made at the top by those who control the government.
So a skeptical thinker would realize that “separation of church and state” is merely another way of referring to the domination of the secular over the religious. I reject all domination, whether of the secular over the religious, or the religious over the secular. If both types of domination are ended, then there remains nothing to “separate”.
So what we should call for is not the separation of church and state, but non-domination. If non-domination is made law, then that automatically includes what separation of church and state is supposed to accomplish (a lack of the use of force in religious matters).
But non-domination also includes the destruction of the power of the intellectual elite to control the population’s ways of life. So rather than accepting the terms of the argument chosen by them (“separation of church and state”), we must instead move the terms to a higher plane: non-domination. In this way we give these elitist intellectuals a taste of their own medicine: taking away their power to dominate others.
As Muslims, we must seek a humanist, consensual community where we deal with non-Muslims as equally valued humans, never wanting to do things to them, but wanting to do things with them. And as for those who call for the separation of church and state, they either belong to the class of elitist intellectuals who know exactly what they are doing (they are calling for the domination of the elite over the average citizen), or they have naively bought into the ideology of the elite without fully analyzing its intentions and implications.
