What We Can All Learn From Islam & The Quran | Hamza Yusuf | EP 255

Everything went into a kind of slow motion, and I just… it was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash. And then I just saw, like, my inception all the way up to that moment. Um, I just saw my whole life, literally. And it was just this… as if I lived my life a second time but in a moment.

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Hello everyone, today I'm going to continue my discussions with Islamic thinkers, or thinkers about Islam. I've had previous guests—Ayan Hirsi Ali, Mustafa Akyol, and Muhammad Hijab. I'm pleased to be speaking today with Hamza Yusuf, who serves as president of Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California. He's a strong advocate of liberal education in the classical sense. He was raised in a religiously eclectic family, attended Orthodox Christian services, and Catholic parochial boarding schools.

At the age of 18, after studying the major religions of the world, he converted to Islam. He served as a translator for the chief mufti of the UAE and Mauritania, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah. I'm very pleased today to be talking to Hamza. Welcome, and thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.

Yeah, thank you. So, you had an eclectic upbringing as your bio indicated. You went to Orthodox Christian services—were your family Orthodox Christian?

I have two sides of the family: one was Irish Catholics, and then my mother was half Irish, half Greek. My Greek grandfather, who was an archon in the Greek Orthodox Church, had that influence on us, so we were actually raised in his church. But my mother was… she would have actually considered herself a Buddhist for most of my upbringing. Her mother, who was an Irish woman, and her brother, my great uncle, were from Georgia and were interested in Buddhism in the 1920s. They moved out to San Francisco, and my great-uncle George Fields opened Fields Bookstore, which was the first metaphysical bookstore on the West Coast, specializing in a lot of different things. He was actually the first publisher of Gurdjieff's works, the Fourth Way works, in the U.S., and it's actually still—it's an online bookstore now, Fields Bookstore.

So, it's getting more metaphysical all the time. It was once a building, and now it's virtual. Yeah, it's a bad joke.

But you were exposed to a lot of different religious ideas by the sounds of things when you grew up, right? How much did you learn about Orthodox Christianity?

Well, my grandfather had us take Greek lessons. I went to Greece; I went to a Greek Orthodox camp when I was 12 years old in Greece. I served at the altar in the Orthodox Church, so I was reasonably involved. Then, I went to Catholic schools, so the Orthodox tradition and the Catholic tradition aren't that different, even though they split in the 11th century over a diphthong, as Gibbon points out.

When you were a kid and you were going to services, can you remember well enough to characterize your beliefs at that time? I mean, I started having trouble with the ideas in Christianity, I guess when I was probably around 12, so I'm wondering what your reaction was as a thinker that young.

I really loved the Greek service. I loved the frankincense; they had great chants that were quite beautiful, and it was very ritualistic. I enjoyed it; I had no problem going to church. I think, like many kids at that age, especially growing up in California during that period—because my formative years were in the late 60s and early 70s—there were a lot of radical changes happening, and California was kind of at the heart of a lot of those things.

But my mother did expose us to a lot of different faith traditions. She actually took me—we went to synagogues; we went to Buddhist Sanghas; we went to different Christian iterations. She also took me to a mosque when I was 12 years old in Redwood City. She was of the belief that much of religion is—it's this interesting where you're born and where you're brought up, and that's going to determine and color the way you view the world. She had this idea that it's very dangerous to assume just because you were born into something that that's the end-all of truth. So she was eclectic in that way.

So your mother was of the opinion that... I guess correct me if I'm wrong—there are a couple of aspects to religious thinking that are interesting and relevant, given what you said. I mean, one is to think of it as a set of philosophies and beliefs that you might hold, like you would hold a set of philosophical or even academic beliefs. And another is to become a member of a community—a community of belief. And I guess the argument you might make for the latter point is that there has to be something that unites all of us in order for us to be a community.

That proposition is hard to reconcile with the first one, which is that you should be free to choose your beliefs as you would a philosophy because if everybody chooses different beliefs, then we have a hell of a time living together, and that can be a problem.

Well, I think that's one of the real problems in California. I mean, that's very much a liberal idea—that everything, we're free to choose and be whatever we want. What do you think of that idea?

So now you're much older than you were when your mother was taking you from a place of worship to place of worship. I mean, how would you address the problem of, let's say, the conflict between freedom of choice and religion as philosophical belief and religion as a cultural centerpiece that unites people?

Well, I raised my children Muslim, and I hope that they remain in the Muslim faith. But I have to acknowledge the possibility that that might not be the case, given where we live and the environment. I'm very committed to the Islamic tradition, and I believe it to be true. I feel like I've acquired clear and compelling evidence for myself of its truth. But I understand the importance of religion as a glue that holds things together, and I think when you lose that glue in any culture, you're going to have great problems that emerge out of that.

Yeah, the question starts to become very rapidly if there's no shared ground that's sacred, let's say, to unite people, then what in the world are they supposed to unite around? Because if they don't unite, then they exist in conflict, and that seems—what not meddlesome. Very… a very difficult problem.

Well, I think part of the problem with modernity is grappling with the fact that a lot of these grand narratives have broken down largely in the 20th century. I mean, the beginnings were happening already in the 17th and 18th centuries, but by the 20th century, there among the intelligentsia, there's a huge problem—particularly in the West, but not only in the West. I think even within the Muslim ethos, you already had these ideas that were going to massively impact the culture. So it's something we're all grappling with.

It's an interesting time in that people do have certain abilities to look at things in ways that perhaps growing up in an environment that really dictated to people what they would believe—norms, for instance—cultural norms. I mean, a lot of religion ends up being cultural. It's a practice; it's a cultural practice, and a lot of people don't ever really have to deal with this. In fact, I think James Charles Taylor has a very interesting book revisiting James—the variety of religious experiences. He talks about this idea that James looks at people who have religion in this sanguine sense—they simply accept their religion that they're born into, and then they just live and practice that. Very often, they have very solid lives in that environment. But then he talks about—and he calls those healthy people. Then he talks about the sick people who actually have to grapple with these different phases. He looks at melancholy, religious melancholy—this idea of being in a melancholic state about the alienation of the world, about the trials of the world, the uncanniness of the world, the strangeness of it.

Then, I think the second, he looks at just the problem of evil—the grappling with this problem of evil. And that third one is the sense of wrongdoing, right? That a lot of people feel sin.

Yeah, that's a terrible one right now. I mean, I think part of the reason why our culture is riven apart by political trouble at the moment is because issues that should be discussed at the level of the sacred have started to be discussed at the level of the political. So there's a pervasive accusation against, let's say, Western culture in particular, coming from the more radical side of the left, claiming that our culture—or the Western culture—is a tyrannical patriarchy and an oppressive colonial enterprise. And of course, all cultures are contaminated with catastrophe and atrocity as well. And we actually need to know what to do about that.

You know, the Christian doctrine of original sin is some help in that because it makes the fact of the legacy of human evil—let's say—something personal but also transpersonal at the same time, right? It's part of the human condition. And it looks to me like without that container, the guilt we have about the arbitrariness of life and the arbitrariness of our privileges can start to become overwhelming. And then it can also become weaponized, which has certainly happened at the present time—to a dangerous degree. So you can go after people for their privilege, let's say, and they do feel guilty because advantages and disadvantages are sort of parsed out to some degree arbitrarily. And then, you know, they collapse in the face of that onslaught and apologize and retreat, and it just doesn't look to me like that's a good thing at all.

Well, it's not a good thing if you don't have a religious worldview that gives meaning to those situations. For instance, I mean, one of the most important aspects of the Quran, I think, is that it really gives answers to these inequities in the world—what some term the mystery of iniquity. In the Quran, one of the hallmarks of a believer is gratefulness—gratitude. In fact, the word in Arabic for disbeliever means ungrateful. So gratitude for blessings and then patience for trials and tribulations. There are many verses in the Quran that talk about that we have raised some of you over others in privilege as a test to show who will be the best in action. What are you going to do with those privileges? How are you going to respond to those tribulations?

So if you have a worldview that incorporates all of the problems in the world and gives them meaning, then it enables people to look at them in a very different way. Whereas, if you remove that, you're stuck with just Marxist results.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right, let's—I’m going to go back to your conversion because I want to understand how that happened, but I'm happy about the direction this discussion is taking. So, it seems to me that when you realize that you're, let's say, arbitrarily blessed by a certain set of advantages, everyone is cursed with a certain set of disadvantages too, so we can take that into account. But, so, you're grateful for your privileges—let's say you regard them as a gift, or maybe you regard them as something akin to grace.

And then, it seems to me that the appropriate thing to do is attempt to atone for them, which is that you try to make your advantages work for you and for everyone else to the best of your possible ability. And then, in some sense, you pay for having them. That way, you're given a gift, and then you do what you can with it. You do the best you can with it and share it with people, and don't try to take narrow advantage of it.

You said that there are Islamic commentary on that kind of idea, and so maybe you could walk me through that a bit.

Gratitude—that's a very interesting one because it does seem to me that it's certainly easier on people psychologically if they're grateful for what they have rather than resentful and bitter about what they don't have. And why is that associated with belief, per se, let's say in Islam?

Well, first of all, the gift of being itself—just the participation in being is a great gift. In fact, the German word for guilt is actually a sense of debt. And the word in Arabic for religion is debt. So we have this sense of indebtedness because we've been given so much—just the gift of life itself is just such an extraordinary gift.

In our understanding, religion is an act of gratitude; you're showing gratitude for all that you've been given. In fact, when you reach the highest levels of our tradition, even the tribulations are seen as gifts because they're actually ways in which we learn. There’s an unveiling that happens, and great knowledge comes out of suffering; great knowledge comes out of trials and tribulations.

In our tradition, the highest people are those who actually are grateful in trials and tribulations as well as in blessings and gifts because they see it all as a gift. I always think of Nietzsche's comment on it when that sort of idea comes up, which is: whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Because the reverse of that is whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you.

The problem, I think, that people face when they're trying to be sorry for tribulations is that you can learn from them, but they can also just grind you into the ground and destroy you, and they do. I mean, people do die; we suffer and die. And so, right in the final analysis, in some sense, we're defeated by our mortal vulnerability.

Well, go ahead. I'm sorry.

When it visits you—when a catastrophe visits you—sometimes you recover, and you think, "Well, I learned a lot." But I don't know if it's—I don't know how salutary it is in general to make that a general case. You know what I mean? Given that people suffer so much, and sometimes it seems so pointless.

I know what you mean psychologically. You know, if you're suffering with something catastrophic and you become resentful, that certainly makes it far worse. There's no doubt about that, and it makes you a danger to people around you, so it's not helpful. But it's sure understandable.

Well, there's a very interesting—do you know Jacques Lusseyran? He wrote a book called—And There Was Light. He was a French Resistance fighter, and he wrote this very interesting autobiography. But one of the things that happened to him when he was eight years old, he was in school, and some kid accidentally bumped into him. He fell onto the desk, and he ended up losing both his eyes in that event. One of the things that he said that really struck me when I read that was he said that he was very grateful to God that that happened to him as a child.

And then he gave two reasons. The first reason was he said a child's body is still supple, and they're still coming into their body, so to lose his sight at that time was useful. Because somebody who's older, if they lose their sight, it's very difficult for them to readjust to the world. That was the first reason for his gratitude.

But the second reason was he said a child does not question the injustice of events. It doesn’t think that events are unjust. It can see injustice from people, but events just happen to children, and they don't really put that valence on it as something, "Why did God do this to me?" As somebody who worked in pediatrics for a period as a registered nurse, it always struck me, you know, the parents were always devastated, but the children were in these quite extraordinary states. Lusseyran says that it's only when parents actually give the child that idea of that something's wrong here will they do that. Normally, children just simply accept that.

And I think that has a lot to do with what Christ said—that the way you come to God is like children. I think that's at the heart of it—it's just accepting because the sense of entitlement that human beings have is overwhelming. This idea that we're all entitled to health, that we're entitled to wealth, that we're entitled to— for things to work out—that’s not the way life is designed. It never was. And it's something the ancients really understood.

I think modern people have a really difficult time grappling with this because they're not well spiritually. And pre-modern people, I think, generally were much healthier, spiritually. And certainly, all of these pre-modern civilizations understood that life was trial and tribulation, first and foremost. I mean, the Quran actually says that it's God who created death and life to try you—just to show—to reveal who is the best of you in actions. So accepting that is a really great gift.

And if anything, I mean, that's the gift of grace. One of the great scholars of our tradition said that he was so burdened—his name was Ibn Al-Qayyim; he was an Egyptian. He said he was so burdened with his self, and he went to this teacher, Abraham, and when he came in, he said to him, "All of the world is just four conditions, and each of those conditions has a response."

The first condition is blessing, and the response is gratitude. The second condition is tribulation, and the response is patience. The third condition is obedience, and the response is humility—to see the grace in that obedience. And the fourth circumstance is sinfulness, and the response is repentance. So that's a taxonomy for life itself.

So, repentance—that's an interesting one because one of the things our culture seems to have a difficult time with too is allowing people to repent. This social media, in particular, seems to have put a lot of advantage in the hands of accusers and attackers. People are mobbed or cancelled or so forth, and it's a rare person who doesn't have something in their past, let's say, that might make them the target of such treatment.

But, that means that's a universal problem as well. It isn't obvious that we have a mechanism for repentance and reintegration that's nearly as powerful as the mechanisms we've developed for accusation and exclusion. I guess I should throw a question on to the end of that.

No, no, that's fine. And I thought—well, you look like you were still thinking about it.

Well, I’m just—I guess what I'm wondering is how would you characterize the Islamic view of repentance? You know, people talk a lot about the necessity to forgive. I’ve thought that through fairly thoroughly as a clinical psychologist because forgiveness isn't, in my estimation, just a simple act of letting something go. Because if something's bothering you, it's not that easy to let it go. If you have a problem with someone, there's a gospel story about that: you're not supposed to go pray in the church if you have a fight pending with your brother—an unresolved fight with your brother—you straighten that out first.

My experience as a clinician has been that for forgiveness to take place, generally speaking, there has to be a discussion between the parties involved or at least a very lengthy session of thought by the person who's aggravated and offended—to take apart the offense, to detail out its characteristics, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to understand exactly what went wrong, to negotiate an agreement moving forward.

There seems to be this continual interplay between judgment and forgiveness in something that really is akin to forgiveness. And for you to repent about something that you've done, it seems to me that the same process of discrimination has to take place: "Why did something go wrong? Well, exactly what did you do wrong? And exactly why did you do it? And why do you think it was wrong? And what do you think that you should have done better? And how are you going to conduct yourself in the future?"

Two questions then: One is that in keeping with your understanding of what constitutes repentance. And second, how would you characterize Islamic thought on that particular matter?

Well, the Islamic tradition, like the Jewish and Christian before, has this idea of repentance. In the Greek New Testament word, metanoia, is a beautiful word because it's really, you know, the idea of transforming the mind—changing the mind. In Arabic, it's the idea of turning. And so there's this idea that the heart turns towards disobedience, and then it has to turn back towards obedience.

And so that turning—then one of the names of God is Tawwab in Arabic, which means the Oft-Returning, the One who turns back. When you turn to God, God turns to you. And so this idea of turning back to God is very important. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) taught us actually to do this at least 70 times a day. So Muslims, as a practice, actually ask forgiveness, preferably at least 70 times a day—just saying Astaghfirullah. It's something that we do as a spiritual practice.

Part of the reason why we pray five times a day—the prophetic sunna was once asked about a man who lives next to a river, and he goes into it and he washes five times a day. He said, "Do you think that you would see any filth on him?" And they said no. And he said, "That's what prayer is. It's like washing; it's like bathing in a river five times a day."

I mean, one of the reasons we do lustration with water is a ritual purification, so we wash our face, we purify our eyes and our tongue, we actually rinse our mouth with water before we pray. And then we wash our hands, our limbs, and then our feet. The idea is about really turning back to God because these gifts that we've been given—these seven limbs that we have been given—are gifts from God that should be used for good.

So, the idea—it's interesting that in Old English, in New Testament Greek, in Hebrew, and in Arabic, the word for sin is an archery term, which means to miss the mark. Yes, right. And so this idea—this great basketball player was once asked what he thought about when he missed a shot. He said, "Too far, too short, too much to the left, too much to the right."

That—that's what sin is. It's basically—there's omission or commission. We did too much of something, too little of something—to deviate to the left or the right. So it's finding that sweet spot of obedience, being in a state of ritual purity. And then we have conditions.

So in order for a repentance to be sound, it has to be sincere. The person actually has to have a sincere repentance. It has to be done like—if you're actually right and sincere. Sincere means to recognize the wrongdoing and to strive not to do it again.

With that definition of sincerity, I agree. Sincerity—the Arabic word for sincerity is related to the word for purity and untainted. So it's done without ulterior motives. Because sometimes, people will ask forgiveness, and they just don't want to be cut out of the will.

Right, that’s an instrumental forgiveness. Right, exactly.

Okay, so you talked—this is quite interesting—so you wandered through territory there that linked up physical disgust and contamination with psychological and spiritual disgust and contamination. It's my experience with people that a good number of them feel guilty and out of sorts and alienated a good amount of the time. And you say, "Well, this, that, sin means to miss the mark." And the reason they feel alienated, at least in principle, is because they're missing the mark.

Of course, then the question is, "Well, what exactly is the mark?" And it seems to me that you drew a parallel between prayer and washing, and both of them are to remove disgusting contaminants, let's say. One of the signs that someone has a conscience, although conscience can be overactive, and that can be a problem, is that they are laboring under a burden of self-disgust and self-contempt. They do feel their moral transgressions as something contemptuous and beneath them and base.

And so this prayer upward, let's say to a higher aim and a reminder of that, which in your tradition you're doing at least five—you’re doing five times a day—that's a constant attempt to set yourself on the right track so that your aim can be true. It's a reorientation.

It's a reorientation.

Do you think even physiologically speaking, it seems likely that there's a relationship between the idea of decontaminating yourself by becoming clean and spiritually decontaminating yourself with reference to something, to a higher aim?

Well, I think people do, like you said, and I'm sure you've seen this a lot in clinical practice—people do feel unwell and they feel sick. Modern psychology attempts to give them— you know, the anti-Christic formula is to say, unlike Christ, who said go and sin no more, you know, the anti-Christic formula is to say go, and there's no more sin.

So, I'm just going to remove that bag of bricks that you're—you're right; you absolutely can't do that. As a therapist, you know, it's not even technically possible, I don't believe, because sometimes you might see somebody who has an overactive superego, you know, if you want to speak in a Freudian sense.

And there are people who punish themselves extremely harshly, and then you might say their sin is excessive use of force on their self in relationship to their transgressions. And then maybe you help—once you understand that with them—you help them understand how it might be possible to use the lightest touch possible that still serves the purpose, which is a good limit idea with regards to the administration of punishment towards yourself, right? Minimal necessary force—that's a good common-law tradition; it's a good psychological tradition.

But, as a therapist, I certainly can't alleviate people's guilt arbitrarily by telling them, "You know, well, there’s nothing really there to worry about." They have to do all that thinking through that themselves.

And this is very interesting, this relationship between disgust—physical, the physical sense of disgust—and the psychological sense of disgust, and the notion that—I mean, one form of prayer, you might say, in Christianity is baptism. That'd be, in some ways, the most fundamental form of prayer. It's rebirth in the Christian tradition, and it involves, obviously, it involves the use of water, sometimes a full body immersion.

And so there's a notion of purification there. It seems to me that in the modern world, people don't know what to do with the sense they have that they're bad, right? It implies that there's a good because you wouldn't feel bad if there wasn't a good. But it isn't obvious what the good is that should be aimed at.

Well, that's the difference between real and apparent goods. And so, I mean, one of the most important things about any true religious tradition is it has to distinguish between real and apparent goods, because the reason they use that archery term is that people are always looking for a good. It's just if you don't have the discernment to distinguish between a real and an apparent good. And so discernment is very important.

What the Quran calls for—in fact, the Quran itself terms itself as a Furqan, a discernment, a standard, a criterion—that you can judge actions.

We have a great book in virtue ethics called Mizan al-Amal, the Standard, or the Criterion of Action, which uses definitely some of the motifs that are in the Nicomachean Ethics, but it's this interesting amalgam between that Hellenistic tradition and then infused with the Quranic theological virtues.

You know, I wanted to just add—I forgot to mention that the other two necessary conditions for a sound repentance—one of them was that you made a firm intention not to go back to that action. And then the fourth one is that if it involved a wrong of another person, then you had to ask them forgiveness. You had to go and you had to, like, if you stole, then you had to actually give the money back, right?

If you could—if you didn't know who you stole it from, you actually give it in charity in that person's name, right? So that's part of discharging that debt.

The debt, exactly right. And it's certainly the case that people seem to feel innately, I would say, something akin to a psychological debt. And that—we discussed already the fact that that can be weaponized, you know, by accusations of arbitrary privilege and so forth.

And it isn't easy to know what to do with that. So let's go back just for a moment to your religious upbringing. Tell me what led up to your conversion, if you would, and why did you move away from Christianity or Buddhism or all the things that you were exposed to when you were—?

Well, I had—a I was in a head-on collision and survived a car accident that the California Highway Patrol said I shouldn't have survived. I had what they call a near-death experience. I got very interested in what happens after you die. I realized that I could have very easily transitioned, and so I was very interested in what happens after death.

I actually went and met with Dr. Raymond Moody, who wrote the books on Life After Life, and he did a lot of the work with near-death people that had had—can I ask you what happened in your near-death experience?

I think it was pretty classic. You know, I definitely saw my—I went into a very different spatial-temporal state where I just—everything went into a kind of slow motion. And I just thought it was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash. And then I just saw my inception all the way up to that moment, and I just saw my whole life literally.

That was the experience.

What did that do for you, that experience? Well, one, it made me—you know, at the time I was a senior in high school, my probably biggest interests were baseball, and other things. But music was certainly a big interest; my family—I come from a family of musicians.

So, I think what it did is it made me really think about death in a very deep way. And if you've ever seen— there’s a film about a man who was in a—a plane crash. And then he survives the plane crash, and it’s a man who had a lot of fears. But he comes out of it—Jeff Bridges is the person—and he’s like looking at his hands and asking, “Am I alive, or am I dead?” I was in that state for about two weeks.

It was a very strange state to be in, and that got me interested in what religions say about after death. So, I decided to study all the world religions just from that perspective, and the one that really, really resonated and struck me as having a very, very powerful description was the Islamic tradition.

Ironically, I ended up writing—in the study of the Quran, which was published by Harper, I ended up writing the essay on death in the Quran, which is how I actually became Muslim. So, it was a very interesting serendipitous—

So walk me through that.

So, okay, so you just about died. How old were you?

Yeah, so there have been studies showing, for example, that if you have someone—I remember this study—if you have someone jump off a bungee cord, watching a digital clock, the clock goes slower for them subjectively. So if you subject people to a tremendous amount of stress, then time slows down.

I suspect the neurophysiological reason for that is that when you're in a tremendous crisis, your body floods itself with the hormones and neurochemicals—probably mostly dopamine—that are necessary for you to act extraordinarily quickly. It’s extremely energy-intensive to do that, so you can't do it all the time.

But maybe we can snap ourselves into a psychophysiological state where we're a hundred times faster than we would normally be for some very finite amount of time. I'm not trying to reduce this to a physiological—

Well, that's a very common reductionist approach.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s an experience, an experience that—I mean, you can look at the soft— the hard drive aspect of it, but the software’s the mystery.

Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to remove the phenomenological significance, you know, because that would be foolish. And even those explanations are only attempts at understanding phenomena that we really don't have access to because cause and effect is a very difficult thing to—it certainly is.

And that kind of explanation doesn't account for all the near-death experience phenomena either. But, I mean, you asked me how, you know, that got me thinking a lot about death, irrespective of whatever the neurochemical phenomena that were happening within my body.

That experience, that phenomenological experience had an existential effect on me that was very powerful. And I decided that I really wanted to know if I could have died in that moment, which was very possible. I wanted to know what—if anything happens. And if something happens, how do you prepare for that?

Like, what—you know, if we’re on—if we’re genuinely on the doors of infinity, then we should take this time that we have very seriously to prepare to go through that door. And that's what—existentially, that's what happened to me. I wanted to know if I can go through that door at any moment.

As a 17-year-old, I could have done it. Now, as a 64-year-old, it's possible that I could do it today or tomorrow or the next day.

What type of preparation do I need?

Why did you—why do you think that you derived the conclusion that it was something that you needed to be prepared for?

Well, I think that—I just think that's a kind of—I just think it's common sense, you know? Preparing for dinner… It's interesting—when I worked in critical care, what became very clear to me was some people seemed to be ready for death and other people were definitely not ready for death. And I could see the difference; I saw the difference.

You know, my both my parents died; I was with both my parents, and I could see. You know, my mother had an incredible transition, and I think my mother was fully ready to go into the next world. I don't think a lot of people are ready.

I think a lot of people are very afraid of death, and I think that's something that one of the gifts of religion is—it does remove that fear, not necessarily the act of dying, because obviously, that's a very intense experience, especially for those of us who have seen that in people who die.

But the transition into the next world is something the Quran says—it's something to be looked forward to; it's not something to fear. But Islam is not a death cult; the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: "Don't desire to die," but "ask God for a long life."

And he said that none of you should ever desire death; you should desire to have a long life because you have more time to do more good. And the more good you do, the more you accrue in terms of preparation for that transition.

And what do you think it means to be prepared versus not prepared to die?

To be in a good state. I think to be—like if you’re in a state of repentance, if you've really repented for any of the wrongs that you've done—there are major wrongs, there are minor wrongs.

There’s the peccadillos, and then there are those mortal sins that are recognized for what they are. Things that literally will cause death to the soul—the wages of sin is death. So I think being in a good state, being prepared, being ready to make that transition is very important.

And I think in many ways a lot of the practices that we do in our tradition are in preparation for death. In fact, if you look at just the five prayers—the very first prayer that we do when we wake up—the prophetic gave us a prayer that I did this morning when I first came into consciousness, which says, "Praise be to the one who brought me back to life because death in the Quran is sleep, and the Quran is seen as a little death."

So it's—every morning we have a resurrection—that's to remind us of the resurrection on the Day of Judgment. The very first thing that we do is wash and then we pray. That’s the first thing that Muslims do when they wake at dawn, before the sun comes up.

And then before we go to bed, that’s the last thing we do—we make a prayer: "Oh God, if you take my soul in my sleep, have mercy on it, and if you let me live another day, then make me amongst the righteous and protect me."

These are all prayers that our Prophet (peace be upon him) did every single day.

And then on Friday, we have a communal prayer, which is the day of gathering, which is related to the Day of Judgment, where you all stand before God. And then also in Ramadan, we fast. So we're giving up the pleasures of life during the daylight hours for a month.

The end of it is a celebration of making it through that month, hopefully with as little sin as possible. And then we have the—the poor tax, which is to do good to others from the good that you've been given.

And then we have the hajj, which is really a preparation for death because you’re making this pilgrimage—you get into white clothes, which symbolize the shroud. And then you stand on the plane of Arafat like the Day of Judgment, which symbolizes that all of humanity is going to stand—in a non-spatial, non-temporal sense—is going to stand before their Creator and be judged for what they did.

So, when you were 16 or 17, how old were you when you had the crash?

I think it's important to note that you became interested in the issue of death and the meaning of death and the idea of preparation for death, and you read widely throughout the world's religions. I also want to know—why did you find the Islamic tradition preferable, let’s say, to the Orthodox tradition that you did enjoy the rituals that were part of that, at least?

So, let's deal with practical issues first.

So, yeah, in terms of why I chose Islam, I mean, I'm not completely convinced that I chose Islam. I mean, in some ways, Islam chose me as well. So it's—guidance is a very strange thing for people.

Like I saw an inevitability when I look back on what happened. I saw an inevitability of my embracing Islam. I had some very interesting experiences that could be termed mystical or however you want to determine them.

But the tradition itself—what struck me was, one, I got to keep all of the prophets that I believed in already and I added, in addition, what we consider to be the final prophet. Just as very often Christians marvel at how Jews miss Jesus, Muslims also marvel at how Christians and Jews miss Muhammad.

Although to be fair to the Jews, they do acknowledge the Prophet as a providential force, and they do acknowledge him as a Noahide messenger preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah, so they do recognize that he was a providential force.

At least the great—if you read George Kohler's book on Jewish theology, he has a chapter on Judaism in Islam. Certainly, the great father of Orientalism—Ignaz Goldziher—he actually said that he felt that Islam was the only religion that somebody of a philosophical bent could actually accept.

And he wanted to bring in the gift of philosophy into Judaism that had been—that the Muslims had so richly participated in. In fact, there's an argument that just as Judaism prepared the way for Christianity, it was Islam that prepared the way for a philosophical Western Christendom.

Because, if you look at the transmission of all of that knowledge that comes into Europe—it's quite extraordinary. I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas, who's 13th century—he dies in 1274, and yet he's the Doctor of the Church. Just look at the number of times he quotes Muslims. I mean, he calls Averroes the commentator.

So, I think Islam—one of the beauties of the religion to me is that you'll find whatever you're looking for in it. I mean, Islam—you can find a very simple theology that anybody can understand, in sort of the chapter that says, “Say, God is unique; God is completely independent; God neither gives birth nor was God born; and there’s nothing like God.”

So it gives you a very simple theology that anybody can understand, and yet embedded in that simplicity is an extraordinary complexity that actually created a metaphysical tradition that Western scholars have spent their lifetime studying.

People like al-Ghazali and—somebody—it's like Maxine Rodinson and not Maxine Rodinson but the great Catholic theologian and metaphysician, Jacques Maritain—recognize the genius of people like al-Hallaj and things.

So, within the Islamic tradition, there’s just an extraordinary spectrum. You can spend your entire life and have a satisfying life, and I know people that have done this—just mastering their ascensions of the Quran, the actual oral expression of the Quran through the rules of tajweed. You can spend your life studying exegesis; you can spend your life studying prophetic tradition; you can spend your life studying the great mystics of Islam.

We have the best poets in the world. We also have the best architecture. I mean, there's nothing like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra Palace. And even Western architecture—if you read Stealing from the Saracens, she shows how some of the finest Western architecture was basically taken from the Islamic civilization, including Notre Dame in Paris.

So you can find incredible—I know people that just came to Islam through music. I mean, I know some really professional musicians that fell in love with Arabic music, which led them into Muslim culture. People that love—
I mean, one of the most interesting things about Islam is it's a truly universal religion in that you can go from Indonesia to California and find all of these different expressions of the same central truths of Islam with their own local colorings.

So the West African Muslims are not like the Middle Eastern Muslims; the Middle Eastern Muslims are not like the Indian Muslims. And you have people like—you know, one of the great impressionist painters of Sweden, I think. He’s actually considered a national treasure in Sweden, but his paintings hang in the museum there. He became Muslim in jail; he was—for actually shooting a matador because he was so horrified that they were bringing bull fighting into France.

There was such an uproar that they actually released him. But when he was in jail, he befriended an Algerian who used to recite Quran all the time, and he ended up becoming Muslim, and then studying in Egypt and then going back to his native land.

He died in Spain, but extraordinary individuals—so you have people like that. You have people that—anybody can find what they're looking for, and that is the power of the faith, I think, is that it is truly a universal faith.

And I think one of the things that Western people tend to do—one, they don't recognize that it's a Western faith because it is. It's part of the Abrahamic phase; it was in Spain for centuries; it's been in Eastern Europe for centuries.

And even Istanbul, which is the great capital of Islam for centuries, is half in Europe and half in the East. That's why it really bridges these two worlds.

And so there's so much—I mean, part of the reason why I think it makes sense for religious people, Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike to focus on their commonalities in the face of the things that are disintegrating our cultures—we could start by trying to make some peace between us. If we're going to consort ourselves reasonably as religious individuals.

Right. And I commend you for trying to do some bridge-building because, you know, arguably, there’s been so much negativity around this faith and around its adherents that there’s an almost instantaneous association with the most negative aspects of humanity with the religion, and it's quite tragic.

So just as an exercise, a kind of bracketing for a second, I try to think about things—a mentor of mine and a friend of mine, Dr. Thomas Cleary, wrote a book called Zen Koans. He also translated the Quran; he’s one of the brilliant translators of our lifetime.

But he wrote a book called Zen Koans, and in the introduction of that book, he actually says that the purpose of a koan is to snap people out of selection. But he says in there, "But you don't need a koan to do that—just ask an educated Western person what they think about Islam, and they'll start expressing all of these prejudices."

And if you ask them, "Have you ever read the Quran?" No. "Do you know anything about the Prophet Muhammad?" No. Other than maybe something they read in a newspaper article or in Time or Newsweek or The Atlantic Monthly—something.

Yeah, well, it’s not an easy thing to try to get a toehold in a different tradition, especially since it’s not that I don’t even have a toehold in your own.

Yeah, it's not that hard, especially for an educated person; you’re obviously a highly educated person. It’s not that hard to understand Islam. One of the things Gibbon said is that Islam spread because it was a very easy religion to understand.

So this idea that I can't understand it, I can't—I’m having a hard time—it's not that hard to understand. I mean, Islam is actually a very straightforward—

Okay, then give me a five-minute summary of the core beliefs.

I don’t want to put you on the spot; I'm—it's not a question.

No, no, that’s not hard at all.

So lay it out; that would be very—

So we have a famous hadith in which we’re told that the angel Gabriel came in the form of a man and asked the Prophet, "Tell me about faith." And the Prophet Muhammad said faith is to believe that there’s only one God and that Muhammad—which includes all the previous messengers—is a messenger of God.

To believe in angels, to believe in the books that God has revealed, to believe in the last day—the Day of Judgment—and to believe in the measuring out of good and evil—that good and evil is part of life.

And then he said, "Tell me about Islam."

And he said, "Islam is that you make the testimony of faith, that you pray five times a day, that you fast Ramadan, that you pay zakat—the two point five percent of your standing wealth at the end—not your income tax, but your standing wealth at the end of the year. There are eight categories that are given in the Quran.

And that you, if you're able to, make a pilgrimage once in your lifetime to Mecca."

And then he said, "Tell me about Ihsan," which is the third dimension of Islam. He said—and this is the dimension of virtuous being—by being a person of ikhlas, of excellence in the world.

He said it is to worship God as if you see God. And if you don’t see Him, at least you know that He sees you. You have an awareness of that—that there is a divine presence and you should be in a state of awareness in your behavior.

I mean, one of the things about—you know if you’re driving, and everybody's speeding, and then somebody sees a cop, they all suddenly slow down. You know? I have a friend once who just zoomed past the cop when everybody slowed down, and he pulled him over.

He said, "Why didn't you slow down?" He said, "I felt like a hypocrite."

So the guy, he let him go, but you know, that’s—people, when they're in the presence of authority, they tend to behave well unless they're an utter rebel. I mean, there are those people, I’m trying to figure out how to be a Jew and a Christian and a Muslim at the same time, but become Muslim. That’s the best way.

Because the beauty of Islam is you get the Old Testament, the New Testament, the last testament. I mean, that really is for me. Even the Jews acknowledge this, because Islam in many ways is a universalized Judaism; it's Judaism for the Gentiles.

We have the mikvah, you know, they do khaser; we have wudhu, which is the ritual baptism—a total immersion in water, ritually to purify yourself—which is done at least once a week.

Okay, so let me ask you—maybe I’ll ask you because we're going to run out of time. I want to ask you a final question, and then you can maybe help me in my aim: I've been trying to understand the Christian doctrine of the Word and its relationship to the Jewish prophetic tradition for a long time.

I know that Christ is a central figure in Islam as well. I mean, the Christians make the claim that Christ is the Son of God, right? He’s the Messiah himself, and it’s very difficult if you're going to be a Christian not to accept that claim.

I think I understand the claim in some sense psychologically, and I think the notion that the free Word, the free, truthful word is the fundamental redeeming force—I believe that's true. I think it's true literally, and I think it’s true metaphorically.

I suspect it might be true religiously, although I'm not exactly sure what that means. And I think part of the stumbling block for me in relationship to Islam is—I can understand Christianity in relationship to Judaism, but I can't understand Islam in relationship to Christ.

Because I understand the Christian idea that Christ was a, what would you say... a transcendent consequence of the prophetic tradition.

And the Christian insistence that his life is associated with the divinity of the Word and that that is in some sense a final statement. And so I don't understand how Islam moves beyond that and still places Christ in a place of centrality.

Well, I mean the Jews don't accept Christ at all. Like the best of the Jews will say he was a rabbi, but many of the rabbis considered him to be a charlatan, a magician.

And Jesus in the Talmud—which was printed by Princeton University Press—makes that argument that the Talmudic views of Christ, which he argues in that book, that was understandable given that the Jews were so persecuted by the Christians.

But the Muslim theology is, I think, it's a radical monotheism that even transcends the monotheism of Judaism, which has some anthropomorphic elements in it that the Muslims would not accept.

But generally, the Jews and the Christians agree on the theology. Rabbis—I’ve had many talks with rabbis, and they see Islam in fact. Kohler says that Muslims were always seen as full proselytes of the Noahide laws, whereas Christians were not because of the Trinity.

So the Trinity is, you know, the principle of the triad is—you know, in Plato and the Timaeus talks about that. The principle of the triad is a very powerful principle, and there are many, many trinities in the world that we see.

So, I don’t know; I don't understand exactly why that constitutes such a stumbling block. I mean, again, I’m trying to speak at least to some degree psychologically.

Well, if you read—

Uh-huh.

Well, sorry, it seems to me that the idea of the Holy Ghost is allied with the idea of conscience. That voice that speaks from within.

And then the idea of the Son element of the Trinity—that’s the fact that divinity can reveal itself within a personality. Well, I think—and then the idea of God himself—the God, the Father—that seems to me to be the idea that's most tightly associated with the Jewish idea of the absolute and the Islamic idea of Allah.

Well, I don’t think so because if you read Meister Eckhart or even Aquinas on the Trinity, you know, but Eckhart, the Godhead, you know, is infinite, cannot be embodied, is simple—there's no parts.

So I think if you get into deep Catholic theology, you'll find that in the end it is a type of unity. So the personas—and they are called personas in Latin—means mask in Latin—it’s a mask.

Right, and so for Muslims, Christ is a central figure, and Muslims do believe in a second coming of Christ—born of the virgin birth.

But Christ is not divine; Christ is human. And you’ll find that in the dual nature, not in the monophysit or the diaphysis traditions of Christianity that you find like in Coptic Christianity and some of the monophysites that believed in—that Christ was purely divine.

But in this idea that Christ is of a dual nature. So the Logos—that’s a huge—there's a mystery. But I don't—I think it becomes very confusing, even for—I think it is; I think it is confusing. And the fact that it is one of the stumbling blocks to something approximating a union of the great Abrahamic traditions is quite a problem.

And, well, we can agree on a lot of things. I mean, we certainly agree on—we agree that there is a God, that he created us; we agree that the prophets were sent to warn people and to give them good news. We agree that there’s a Day of Judgment and people are going to be resurrected.

I mean, those are some pretty strong things to base a sense of shared concern on. We certainly agree on family; we agree on the importance of raising children healthy. We all share the liberal arts tradition.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews share the tradition of the liberal arts, which is—well, maybe we could start in our efforts to move forward by concentrating on those things that unite us?

Well, also virtue, like virtue ethics. I mean, all three of our religions share virtue ethics. All three.

And we all really acknowledge and really have benefited greatly from the Nicomachean Ethics. All three traditions recognize the Nicomachean Ethics and its importance.

Well, I think we should probably call that a day. I would like to keep talking to you; I think it's very useful to outline. I think it was very useful to outline the central tenets of Islamic faith.

I think it’s very useful to begin a reconceptualization in some sense in the intellectual sphere that it might be useful for all the people of the Abrahamic traditions to recognize their similarities moving forward rather than concentrating on their differences.

I mean, we could start by assuming that perhaps our differences are, in some sense, apparent and a consequence of our ignorance. You know what I mean? It’s not like any of us can claim to be omniscient interpreters—even of our own faith tradition.

And so we could say, "Well, there's a lot of confusion that reigns," and that disunites us. And we’ll be a little careful about making any authoritarian authoritative claims on behalf of our own faith and see because we need to figure out how to tolerate each other and to appreciate each other.

And I also think the disunion between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is also one of the sicknesses that besets the West. The fact that disunity exists makes it more difficult for people who are searching for something akin to a tradition to believe that there's something solid there, because even those who are staunch adherents of their own traditions don't seem to be able to get along with those who are staunch tradition holders of others.

So anyways, discussions like this are some markers on the pathway to peace, let's say.

We have an important tradition from our Prophet that says, "Woe unto those who arrogate to themselves the judgment of God."

Yeah, that’s for sure.

He was asked how do they do that, and he said by saying: “These people are in hell, and these people are in paradise.” You know, so that's something no Muslim is permitted to do— like I could never say you're going to hell or—I mean, some people do that, but it's absolutely prohibited in the Islamic tradition.

Yeah, well, the problem with making a judgment like that is it's pretty easily turned upon yourself.

Well, exactly. It was really good of you to talk to me today; I appreciate it very much.

All right. I have a message here. My camera person, who set this up, just put a little message. He wanted me to mention the hadith of the Prophet in which he said, “None of you will enter paradise by your actions but by the grace of God alone.”

So we need deeds, but in the end, we're justified through grace.

Thank you very much; I hope we get a chance to speak again. Where are you located?

I'm in Berkeley—ground zero for the dissolution of Western civilization.

Yeah, mm-hmm.

I'm coming to California very soon. Maybe I'll see if you’d like to come.

Well, if you do, yeah, sure.

And come visit the college. You know, we have a small liberal arts college, and, you know, we're trying to revive a tradition that's fallen on hard times in both the West and the East. But it's an important tradition, and it's the greatest bulwark against a lot of the things that we're up against, because it really does teach people to discern between real and apparent goods.

Well, good luck in that endeavor, truly.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Take care.