America's Tragedy: An Islamic Perspective

By Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

This is an edited transcript of the talk that Shaykh Hamza Yusuf gave on Sunday, Sept. 30th, 2001 at Zaytuna Academy and Institute in Hayward, California regarding his reflections on the Sept 11th tragedy and his trip to the White House from which he had just returned. In this talk, he distinguishes what the terrorists did from what Islam teaches, addressing several important issues in regards to the tragedy such as the Islamic concept of jihad and martyrdom. Anyone wanting to gain a clear understanding of what the religion of Islam has to say about the calamitous event is sure to find this talk beneficial. If you would like to obtain the audio cassette of this talk, please go to www.alhambraproductions.com.

We should all realize that the outreach has been extraordinary in terms of the numbers of people contacting Muslim organizations and reaching out to the Muslims. I think some of these stories need to be documented because they are very profound and powerful stories, and I think that something very interesting like a book can come out of this. It may be titled, The Best of Americans in the Worst of Times or something similar to that.

A mosque was attacked in Seattle, and a group of Christians started an organization called, "The Peace Keepers" and actually went and guarded the mosque. Also, if you do not have a copy, I would get a copy of the tape the MCA (Muslim Community Association) in Santa Clara made of the love messages that they got. The tape is just of people calling up, and that was very powerful to listen to one after another, messages of love and support. By far, the majority of people who have called have called with those types of responses, and I think what we should see from this is that there are a lot of good people in this country. That in itself is very powerful.

There are a lot of people who do have the right sensibility. They also realize the stupidity of assuming the acts of a statistically insignificant number of people, whoever they were, represent the majority. In this country, there are almost 300,000,000 people; the attackers of Sept 11th are amongst a number of very crazy people that would do very crazy things given the opportunity, and some of them have actually proven that, and they are the Timothy McVeighs of the world. So, I think that in it of itself, this outreach is something that we should all be very optimistic of.

On the other hand, we also should keep in mind that living in the Bay Area gives us a false sense about the pulse in some of the other parts of the country. The outreach we have experienced here is probably from some of the most educated and most tolerant people because this is a very tolerating area. It tends to embrace others and things considered strange, and that is something that people here pride themselves in, so we do have that here. Another aspect of this area is that it is very heavily populated with immigrants, and that in itself is good because those who work with immigrants see the human side which is always important. The immigrants, especially those coming from other countries where the social conditions are difficult, tend to know what these types of incidents mean.

In certain parts of this country, there is a lot of jingoism going on right now. There is a lot of anger. I flew across this country with a friend, who is a tall, dark-skinned Arab, and it was very shocking to see the eyes of others, and this is not paranoia. People looking at him as we were traveling were really frightened. There was real fear. We were in the front of the plane, so every time my friend got up, I looked back, and I noticed people would go into a state of rigor mortis as though they were thinking, "What's he going to do?!" and that is a tragedy. We traveled two weeks earlier, and people did not have those feelings.

Also, I have been across the country now four times in the last ten days, and the planes are empty.There are a lot of economic repercussions to this; 15,000 people have been fired from United Airlines. There are going to be disgruntle people. So, those elements are going to be there; there are hard times ahead.

Now, in terms of what happened in the last week, I think people need to understand. One of the things about many people is that they tend to be very shortsighted in a lot of ways; they do not look at long-term strategy. The Muslims are particularly this way. We have forgotten what strategic thinking is. For example, Suraqa Ibn Malik was attempting to catch the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam to get a reward of 100 camels promised by the Quraysh to whomever brought the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam in. When he met him in the desert, the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "What did they offer you?"

He said, "100 camels."

The Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "Suraqa, what would you think about wearing the bracelets of Khosroes?" and this is something that happened at the time of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam. He always saw way ahead, and that is wisdom. Even his ahadith apply until the end of time. That is the beauty of the ahadith. He was not speaking only to his community.

Look at the hadith: "If you leave one-tenth of what I have given you, you will be punished, but there is coming a time on my ummah that if they hold to one-tenth, they will go into paradise." Now, think of the strategic planning of that hadith. Think, had he just said to his sahaba, "If you leave one-tenth of what I have given you, you will be punished," what would that mean to us? We know what the sahaba did, but the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam was not speaking just to the sahaba; he was speaking to us. He was speaking to people whom he knew would be in such difficult situations that holding on to their deen would be like holding onto burning coals. That is the beauty of Prophetic wisdom. He spoke to every time and every place, and he certainly spoke to the time and place that we are in because these are the fitan.

Fitin is Arabic. Fatanah means "to test gold." One of the things you can see in this time is that the basic material people are made of becomes apparent. Is it gold, is it silver, is it lead, or is it some kind of toxic element? You see what people are made of. Some people can act, and you are amazed at their humanity. Other people come out, and you are amazed at their inhumanity, but that is what fitnah does. It exposes people, and that is one of the wisdoms of tribulation.

I would like to talk about how people judge situations. Many people often judge a situation with the short-term in mind and without looking at the long-term implications. People who tend to get caught up in the moment of their short-term judgment lose an understanding that every moment is actually part of a continuum. Not only is the moment that we are in right now based on everything that preceded it, but it also will affect what follows it. There is no such thing as an isolated incident. Every incident in your life is related to the totality of your life. You cannot separate any individual life. That is why a human being is not judged for any individual incident, but you must look at the whole spectrum of growth.

One of the things that people do not like to do is allow people to grow. They want to pigeonhole you. However, conditions necessitate different responses: not every condition necessitates the same response. If you give the same response, you are a fool because there is a time for anger, and there is a time for forgiveness. There is a time when you need to get angry, and if you do not get angry, you are not responding appropriately to the situation. Our prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam got angry, so there is a time for anger, but there is never a time for wrath because wrath is excessive anger. There is never a time to lose your reason from anger. I know that some people will judge from outward appearance because that is all we have on which to base our judgments. The Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "I was commanded to judge people according to their outward states," but Allah does not judge by the outward because Allah encompasses everything. "Muhitun bi 'ibaadihi: Allah encompasses his servants" to know their inward and their outward. "Ya'lamu sirrakum wa l'alaaniya: He knows your inward and your outward," and He judges actions by your intentions. Allah gave to his servants a means to maintain harmony for the believers: the idea of having a good opinion-husnu dhann. Having a good opinion of people is the principle upon which our teaching is based. We should look for an excuse for others and not assume the worst. We should always look to say, "perhaps, perhaps, perhaps," and come up with excuses. The hypocrite's nature is that he will always look for a reason to condemn. The munafiq will always say, "he did it because of this; he did it because of that"and try to find fault. That is unfortunate to mention.

In reality, what we have done too little of is build real institutional bases and have engaged in too much empty rhetoric. Now, it is coming back to haunt us. However, the Chinese symbol for crisis is also the symbol for opportunity, and I think this crisis that we are in is an opportunity. The power of the historical moment we are in is extraordinary because we are in an unprecedented situation. For the first time, large numbers of Americans actually want to understand what Islam is. Even the Iranian Revolution did not do this because that was again something that happened far away. Here is a time where it has come home, and people are trying to make sense of it.

I have been getting many calls from people wanting to know the concept of martyrdom. Martyrdom is not an alien concept to the West. The West has a history of martyrdom. The Christian Church honors martyrs. They are the highest people in the Church and are recognized as saints because they are people who died for their beliefs. Some of the people of the Revolutionary War were considered martyrs. Those are words that Westerners use. Martin Luther King Jr. and people like him are considered martyrs, so the concept is not alien to westerners. However, the idea of martyrdom being associated with violence against innocent individuals is such an atrocity to any sane person, and the travesty is when Islam is indicated here to have anything to do with this. That is why we just cannot see this incident in religious terms. It is really important to keep focusing on the fact that this act really does not have anything to do with Islam.

Unfortunately, in the past, we have had people whom we have been plagued with called the Khawarij. They emerged early on and were the first people who split from the rightly guided khulafa. They emerged from the time of Sayyiduna Uthman. These are the people who surrounded his house and actually killed him. One of the things about these people that is very problematic is that they are very "religious," and this is where the real crisis comes. These people display a religiosity about which our Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "You will hold your own prayer in contempt when you see their prayer." In other words, they will be praying so much, you will feel that you do not pray enough. Similarly, he sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam went on to say, "You will see them fast, and you will feel like you do not fast." They fast every other day or on Mondays and Thursdays, and you will feel contempt for yourself when you compare your fasts to theirs. He sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "They read the Qur'an, but it does not go past their throats." The 'ulama say this means that they read the words, but they do not know the meanings. There are verses in the Qur'an that if read outwardly, you will think they are a license to kill people, but that is not what the verses actually mean. The verse in Sura Tawbah was in clear reference to a group of people that broke the treaty with Muslims. The Muslims were commanded to fight them wherever they found them. They were a specific group of people, and that verse is not a generalized verse. It applies only to that time of treachery.

Allah does not prevent you from being good to those who have not fought you or chased you out of your home. Be good to them, and share in your wealth with them. You can interact with and help non-Muslims. This is permitted in Islam. The Qur'an is a holistic body of guidance, and if you take parts of the Qur'an without understanding the holistic body, you will go astray. For this reason, Buddah Al-Jakany in Mauritania wrote a book, and in it, he said that every single group that has gone astray has used part of the Qur'an to prove their error. There is not a sect in the history of Islam that did not use the Qur'an as a foundation for their misguidance, not one. They all proved their points from the Qur'an.

When Ibn Abbas went to the Khawarij to try to speak with them, the Khawarij said that one of the reasons they rebelled against Sayyiduna Ali is because Sayyiduna Ali asked that a hakim be brought from Mu'awiya's group to sit with a hakim from his own group so that they would as arbitrators come to a decision on the particular matter. To this idea, the Khawarij said that the Qur'an says, "La hukma illa lillah: There is no judgment except Allah." Allah is the only one that can judge, and so they said, "What you have done is going against the book of Allah, Imam Ali." They said, "You do not understand the Qur'an. The Qur'an says, 'La hukma illa lillah.'" That was their slogan, literally: There is no judgment except Allah's. What did Imam Ali do? He sent Ibn Abbas to go and debate with them. He advised Ibn Abbas: If they debate with the Qur'an, debate with the other parts of the Qur'an; if they do not agree, then go to the hadiths. So, Ibn Abbas went, and he argued with them. There were about 30,000 of them originally, and about 3,000 of those went over to the other side and joined Ibn Abbas because he convinced them. He said, "Does not Allah allow arbitration between a man and a wife? Does not Allah allow arbitration on hajj? You bring a hakim to decide what the penalty is." So, the point is that these people have been a plague on the Muslim ummah from early time, and, I think out of 1.3 billion people in this ummah, there are some people, unfortunately, who are misguided enough to think that they could have been doing something good. That is the reality of it. Whatever it was and whoever was behind the recent events, the people that benefit from it are the enemies of Islam. There is no doubt about that. The people that benefit from this are enemies of Islam.

On the other hand, Allah says, "Maybe you hate a thing, but in it is much good for you."The reality of the situation is that immense good can come out of the tragedy. US News and Report, which is one of the major news journals, had an article on jihad that I could not have done a better job writing. I was amazed. It was an excellent article explaining the rules of jihad. My God, millions of people are going to read this and have to confirm that these are very human rulings. They mentioned not poisoning wells, not killing livestock, not cutting down fruit trees; that is Islam. I think an intelligent person is going to have to reason that if that is their reason in war, then the attacks on September 11th certainly have nothing to do with Islam. Unfortunately, we have other elements in the media that have a very serious agenda, and this is evident to anyone who has been watching some of the media, particularly, Fox. They are hardliners. I think what they did to Muzammil Siddiqi was a horrific thing to do to him because it just does not represent Muzammil Siddiqi. You have Muslims that were supporting what they believe to be a legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people in their fight.

I have never and I will never agree with suicide bombings. That has never sat right with me, ever. I think it is just so antithetical to the truth of Islam, and I have always had that problem with it. No one can ever find anywhere, in the last 13 or 14 years of my public speaking, where I have condoned that. I have never been comfortable with that or comfortable with any types of terror because my understanding of Islam is that it is a chivalrous religion. It is a religion that demands honor in engagement, and my belief is that I would rather die than reduce myself to the level of these types of people because I know they certainly use it against us. They do. However, as Umar Mukhtar pointed out, when they wanted to kill the Italian prisoners and he refused to let them, they said, "Well, they do it to our prisoners," and he replied, "But they are not our teachers."

These people are not our teachers. They did not teach us how to fight. We have laws and rules, and those are our principles. On 60 Minutes the other night, four of us were interviewed, and they interviewed us for three hours. They give you enough rope to hang yourself, and then they kind of edit from that. It is very tricky business talking to these people. During the three-hour interview, I was asked, "Where does this idea come from if it is not from Islam?" I replied that it is an old idea called The End Justifies the Means, and it is a philosophy alien to Islam because we believe that if the ends are noble, the means have to be consistent with the ends. We believe in noble ends, and therefore our means have to be consistent with those ends because if you say the ends justify the means, what you are saying is you can use ignoble means to achieve noble ends, and that is inconsistent logically. That is the philosophy here, and it is not from Islam.

I think that we have a lot of work to do. In chemistry, there is something known as dissipated structures. Prigogine got a nobel prize for showing that when massive turbulence is created in a system of chemical bonds that breaks all those bonds, what happens is they re-bond at a more complex level than the initial. It goes to a higher level, and this is consistent also with nuclear fusion. The point is that these types of things should actually force us to go to a higher level of understanding and operation, not to a lower level. This should literally force us to raise the level of our discourse, to raise the level of our understanding, and to do a lot more than we were doing before because there is no room for sleep anymore. Get your sleep that you need for your body, but the rest of the time, you have to be awake, and if this does not do it to wake us up, nothing is going to do it, really, because we are now in danger. We hope for the best, but the danger is repeated incidents and more blame because even if a White Supremacist group does anything, who is everybody going to blame when it happens? They are going to blame Muslims, right?

This is the time now to reach out and build bridges as fast as we can with as many people as we can, to get out there, to extend hands to anybody who is offering hands of friendship and understanding right now; we have to reach out to them and really try to create some understanding. Part of what we really have to focus on and what I want you to understand is that Islam's word for calling others to Islam is da'wah, which in the Arabic language means "invitation to a banquet." What we have to remember is what Muhammad Zakariya said, "An invitation is only real if it's open to rejection," and that is the beauty of our Lord: He has given an invitation and is not forcing anybody to go to the banquet.

When we look at the people out there, they have every right to believe what they believe, to be doing what they are doing because it is consistent with where they are. Our job is only to present Islam in the best way, and there are two responses that we hope for: either somebody sees it as the beauty that it is and the truth that it is and is welcome to join us or a person gains a heightened appreciation for this incredible, human tradition because it is part of the tapestry of human civilization, and we have, I think, the greatest contribution. That is something we are all proud of, and it is something they need to find out about and learn about so that at least they can appreciate it. There will always be the disgruntled few who are going to hate you anyway, and Allah mentioned that in the Qur'an; there is always going to be that, but I do not think that represents a majority of people, yet the majority can be manipulated by that minority, unfortunately, especially with the means that they have in their hands. You can see: they can paint day night and night day, black white and white black. They can call war "peace" and peace "war," and people start believing it. They can call murder "collateral damage," and it sounds a lot nicer. "Collateral damage" sounds a lot nicer than slaughtering innocent civilians. It has got a nicer ring to it, and that is called a euphemism: "kicked the bucket" – he did not kick the bucket; he dropped dead. It is just a euphemism like, "retired to the farm." That is how they say in idiomatic English, "he died": "he retired to the farm." He did not retire to the farm; he stopped breathing.

I mentioned what happened in the last week, and I will just tell you, it was a very difficult trip. I was asked by somebody I know, and whom people probably know, who works in the White House. He is a Muslim, the son of a very prominent Muslim, and he called me up and said, "They're asking for somebody to come to talk to the President and represent the Muslims, and I thought that you would be the best person in my estimation to do that. So could you come?" So, I talked to Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and he said that it was a fard on me. He said, "You have to go." I went, and I was part of I think about 30 religious leaders there. The Head of the Mormon Church, the Head of Billy Graham Ministries, his son Franklin Graham, the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Archbishop of the Catholic Church in America, and a lot of other very prominent religious leaders were there. There were also a Tibetan Lama, one of the heads of a national Sikh organization, and Methodist Bishops. A lot of different people were present.

From that group, a handful, six of us were asked to meet with President Bush in the Oval Office. So, I put forth four points, and we were given quite a bit of time. I was allowed to say everything I wanted to say. I gave a copy of The Essential Koran to the President, and the night before, I spent a couple hours going through the book and putting Post-Its on all of the verses that I thought were most pertinent. I said, "I know you're very busy, so I put these in so that if you don't have time to read the whole book, you can read these verses." I also gave him a book called Thunder in the Sky which is a book Thomas Cleary translated on the humanistic use of power. In other words, it is about how to use power to benefit humans and not to harm them. I also gave him a piece of calligraphy done by Muhammad Zakariya, who did the Eid stamp.

When I called Muhammad Zakariya, he was in Virginia; he lives a few miles away from the Pentagon, and he was writing what is called a hilyah in calligraphy from the Shifa' of Qadi Iyaad. He was writing a description of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam from Umar ibn Al-Aws. Muhammad Zakariya told me what was the sentence he was writing when he heard the explosion. The beauty of this is that only Allah can do this. That was for Muhammad Zakariya because Allah is the Author of this; Allah is the One who has decreed all of this, and that moment was for Muhammad Zakariya, and then it was related to the President because it ended up going there. Muhammad Zakariya told me that the sentence he was writing when he heard the explosions was "Wa kana salla llahu 'alayhi wa sallam la yadfa'u sayyi'ah bi sayyi'ah, wa lakin wa ya'fu wa yaghfiru: He would never repel an evil with another evil, but he forgave, and he condoned." Allahumma salli 'alayh. And that is our teaching.

That is his description of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam, and that is how we know that no matter what America has done to Muslims anywhere, our teaching is that we do not repay evil with evil, and that is Islam. It is not all this rage and anger that is out there. That is Islam, and it is a hard thing to do except when you remember that this is dunya, and you are looking at infinity; you are not looking at dunya; you are not looking at 50, 60, 70 years; you are looking at infinity, and you want Allah to forgive you for your own evil. Is not that what we all want? We just want forgiveness on yaum al-qiyaamah because we are all guilty. We think that we are independent from Allah. We are all guilty from that perspective. The point is, here he was writing that, and I told the President that. I said, "When the Pentagon was struck, Muhammad Zakariya was writing that the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam did not repel an evil with an evil." Similar incidents occur, and that is the beauty of our deen. This is a true story; it is not made up. Muhammad Zakariya is saadiq. He is truthful; he does not lie, and I believe him. I do not need any witnesses – the angels were the witnesses. Those are our two just witnesses.

The points that I made at the White House were four. The first was emphasizing, and it had to be reiterated again and again, that Islam does not have anything to do with this, that this is not the teaching of Islam. It is a religion that teaches mercy and compassion, and when it uses martial force, it uses it with just laws, and non-combatants are never involved. It is based on legitimate authority, not on vigilantism. We do not believe in vigilantism; we do not believe in outlaws; we do not believe in Robin Hood. It is kind of interesting that in this culture, Robin Hood is a hero because he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and even more bizarre is the story of Samson. I told them on 60 Minutes, which I doubt they will air, that Samson is the first suicide bomber, and he is in the Bible. If you do not know the story of Shamshun, Samson was in the temple of the Philistine, and he was an Israeli. He asked where the pillars that hold up the temple were, and he went in chains, and he pushed them, killing himself and everybody else as revenge for the Israelis against the wrongs of their enemies. That story is in the Bible, and I was taught that as a child. Samson was presented as a hero. That story is not in the Qur'an; it is conspicuously absent from the Qur'an.

The second point I made to the President was the danger of polarization. I said that this could polarize the world, and we could get a self-fulfilling prophecy of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, such as China and Islam versus the West. Nobody wants that; there is no benefit in that, except for warmongers: people who make money off of the death of other people.

I also spoke about the idea of a consensus. I had already spoken to Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and I had also conveyed that to some Arab Ambassadors. I told them that I felt there should be a summit meeting of the most prominent Muslim 'ulama in the Muslim world to declare terrorism as inconsistent with the teachings of Islam and that it is prohibited by ijma', consensus of the scholars. I said the attacks should be just rejected by an ijma'. I also suggested that there should be one done by the Abrahamic religions in someplace like Rome or Jerusalem, where there is a declaration that the taking of innocent lives is not consistent with the teachings of the prophets, whether it is state terrorism or individual terrorism. Both forms of terrorism are rejected by religion, and let them be seen as what they are: as political means to political ends because that is what they are. They are political means to political ends, and that is not what the prophets came to teach. They came to teach prophetic means to prophetic ends.

Then the last point I made to the President was about oppression. I said that this country had a responsibility in creating just regimes because of the power that this country has and that we have to recognize that the oppression and the extreme circumstances in the Muslim world breed the type of extremism that exists in some parts of the Muslim world.

I think that the Muslims are incredibly moderate. The Iraqis have displayed incredible patience, perseverance, and lack of animosity and hatred. Muslims are a testimony to patience at times of adversity. Ismail Faruqi was in a debate once, and I heard this from a man who was present at that debate. He said that someone was saying how terrible the Muslims were, and Ismail Faruqi said that you see the Muslims now with their corruption, and you go to the countries, and you can laugh at how corrupt these countries are, but have you seen us suffer? He asked, have you seen what happens to us when we get afflicted with pain and suffering? He said, then you will know who we are because when we lose all our money, we do not jump out of buildings. We say, "Ma sha' Allah; la quwwata illa billah: Whatever Allah wills happens; there is no power except by Allah," and that is the truth. The Muslims have been incredibly patient in the light of all this, and that is because we do have hope, and we know that despair is Iblis, and we know that ya'as is prohibited in Islam. We do not despair. "La tay'asu min rawhillah : Do not despair from this spirit that God sends." Do not despair of it, and that is why in the worst of times, Allah sends that madad (help), and you should all know that. It is Allah who sends that. It is Allah who gives people that strength to get through even the most horrific times because if He did not send that, we would all go crazy; we would lose our minds; we would go totally insane.

That was the gist of what I said to the President. Then I was asked to be the guest that night of the First Lady, and I was told that there was going to be a speech. I had no idea that it was going to be the way it was; I really did not, but that is the situation I was in, and my intentions in it were trying to do what I could do in this type of a crisis. You have to do what you think is the right thing and the best thing for the overall benefit, I would say not just for Muslims but for everybody: Al-maslaha al-'amma. I think we have a concern for humanity in general and certainly for the Muslims in particular. Always the ummah is paramount, but we are also supposed to be caretakers of humanity. That is a task that we were given by Allah, so we should not act without the rest of humanity in our considerations.

I would like to emphasize something here. I thought that the most profound person and the one who seemed to be the most genuine person of all those people that I met was Rabbi Joshua Haberman. He defended Islam when he spoke to President Bush. At one point, I looked over at him when we were in the Roosevelt room or some other room. Mayor Giuliani, the Governor of New York, and the Chief of Staff were also present, and Rabbi Joshua was sitting in the corner reading something in Hebrew. Everybody else was 'schmoozing,' so I went over to the Rabbi, and I asked, "What are you reading?"

He said, "Well, I'm reading the Psalms," and he was. He seemed like a genuine person, and we spoke quite a bit. He said that the tragedy of this is that Americans are so ignorant of Islam; they do not know the greatness of its civilization; they do not know the history, and they really think that this represents Islam, and this is the real tragedy. He also said that as somebody who has studied Islam, he knows that the easiest religion for a Jewish person to convert to is Islam. Wallahi, that is what he said. He said, "Your shari'a is not that different from what Musa was given." There are good people out there. That person was genuine, and that is what I got from him. I asked him, "Are you a student of Martin Buber?" and he said, "Yes." That is what Martin Buber was about-just having real regard for other human beings, and I think that, as Muslims, we need to inculcate that in our relations with other people. When some of the Muslims say "kuffar," there is this disdain and contempt for people. Listen to those love messages to MCA, and see if you can say "kuffar" with the same kind of contempt and disdain. Those are good human beings. The disdain and contempt we should have is for ourselves for not reaching out to those people, for not being true representatives of Islam because Allah teaches us a du'ah in the Qur'an: "Rabbana la taj'alna fitnatan liladhina kafaru : O our Lord! Do not make us a tribulation for those who do not believe in this religion," and in a lot of ways, we have become the biggest barrier.

I think we have an immense opportunity, and this is a time when we really need to reach out and go out there with respect, recognizing that they have their ways. What we need to have is some mutual understanding of each other, of our communities, and of their communities. I got a call from the head of the Christian Businessmen's Association – they're all CEOs of business – and he called me and said that he read the interview I had done in the San Jose Mercury and that he would really like me to come and address their business association. We continued talking, and he said, "The thing that troubles me most is the arrogance of our country." He also said, "If you do not have humility in your heart when you have power, God will destroy you." This is what he said to me. We often forget that they have truth in their Books, yet we believe in the Bible; we believe in the Injil, and there is truth in there, and there are people who do read those truthful things. One of the Bishops said to the President in the Oval Office, "You have to remind people what the Bible says: "Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord." That is what he said: "Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord." He advised the President not to take vengeance because that is what people want when they get hurt, and vengeance is not from any of the prophetic traditions.

Another thing that happened in the White House was that I told the President that Infinite Justice is an attribute of God and that by using that name, it is like saying that you are God, and the President was shocked. He said, "You know, we don't have any theologians down in the Pentagon, and they name this stuff," and so they changed the name. Alhamdulillah. A friend of mine told me that during the sixties, somebody used the term in a speech, "a hail-Mary play," and he said that he read an article in the Egyptian newspaper that was trying to prove that this was a crusading conspiracy because this politician had used the phrase, "a hail-Mary play." He explained that Egyptian scholars do not know American football, and the writer was simply using a sports metaphor. That is what we find when we demystify power. A lot of it is just our own ignorance here. People need to hear the truth, but if you are harsh or hard-hearted, people will not listen to you. They will just flee from you. I think that we have allowed too much harshness into our discourse, and I can say that for my own self in some of the past talks I have given. We need to really rethink a lot about what we say in our discourses.

Visit Question & Answer session