Middle Nation Podcast (E:1)-- Find out what you really think

This is gonna be a little bit stream of consciousness, but there are a few things that I wanted to talk about. One of the things I wanted to talk about was what sort of bothers me that we do, these days, especially with all of the social media and the Internet, is that I feel like when there's issues that we are interested in and are maybe confused about or we're not sure where we stand on some particular issue or maybe there's an issue that is controversial, or it's an issue that we're just not sure what we think about it, what makes us uncomfortable. Rather than actually doing the work, the intellectual work to think it through ourselves, what our position is, we can tend to you know, the the normal thing would be to yeah. When you're interested interested in a topic and you wanna know more about it, you wanna help you wanna find a way to help yourself understand it better, you see what other people have said. You read articles, you read books, you listen to podcasts, you listen to lectures, you watch videos on YouTube about it or whatever, you research on the Internet and you find out what people have said, people people who have taken a position on a topic that you're interested in.

You find out what they've said, what their positions are, how they've articulated their arguments. And then what often happens is when you when when there's a topic that you're not sure where you stand on it, and then you watch someone discussing it or you read someone discussing it, and that person is particularly convincing or persuasive or that person is particularly eloquent or articulate, that gives you some measure of comfort in taking their position. Whether you've actually thought through, whether you agree with that position or not actually. It may be that you're just persuaded by their, articulation, by their eloquence, and it's not actually that you agree with them. It's just that they come across very intelligently, and maybe to one extent or another, feel an inclination to agree with them, and then you just like the arguments that they've made.

So then what you do is whenever you discuss this topic with other people, you just repeat the arguments you've heard or read or watched, and it's basically like you are you're mimicking what they've said, and you're trying to reenact the experience of being convinced, you know, the experience of appreciating that person's level of, eloquence. And you want other people to react to you the same way that you reacted to that person. So you just repeat what they said. But the truth is that you haven't actually thought it through. You haven't even analyzed the words that you yourself are saying.

And I think this is a this is a problem. It's intellectual laziness. And you end up you know, even even if you're able to articulate and argue in a really intelligent sounding way, you don't even believe what you're saying because you haven't thought it through. They're not your words, they're not your arguments. It's a it's a charade, so you're not actually any better off than you were before, and that you don't actually still know what your position is.

You just know that you like the way that person argued, and so you're copying them. I think we all do this. I've done it, and I think, loads of people do it. And there's nothing surprising about that. I mean, Rasulullah said that, you know, some of you may come to me with your disputes, and one of you may be more eloquent than the other, and then I will decide the case in favor of that person who's more eloquent, even if they may actually be wrong.

And I may give the rights to the wrong person just on the basis of that person's, superior ability to argue. So I mean, like you could watch a debate and someone is really clever and eloquent and charismatic in their presentation, but they could be wrong. And the other person maybe can't argue as well. Maybe they're not as eloquent. Maybe they're not as comfortable, speaking in public or whatever the case may be, and they lose the debate.

But they may be right. And and, you know, so this is this is the this is the problem is that when you, when you fail to to think things through for yourself, when you fail to do the necessary intellectual work of actually sifting through a topic and analyzing it with your own mind, you can end up spreading the wrong ideas. You may end up spreading ideas that you don't actually even agree with because you haven't even done the work to, look into it and to analyze it enough to know what you what your position is. All you know is that you like the way that person argues, and you wanna argue you wanna use those same arguments. It's just like if you hear a funny joke, someone tells a joke and it's particularly funny, and then you just say the same thing because you're basically just reenacting that moment when you heard a funny joke the way they told it, and you wanna copy them in the way that they told the joke.

It's the same really. When when someone has a a really good way of argumentation, you just start to mimic their style. And you see this with, you know, like on social media. You see people who are big fans of particular pundits like, you know, Ben Shapiro or Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson or, you know, other, you know, people on the left. You just like their arguments, you like their talking points, and then they have their fan base that starts to mimic them in style, starts to mimic the arguments that they make, and you just hear the same the same arguments being repeated by multiple people, and no no one has actually thought it through except maybe the original person who made the argument.

So I I don't wanna be like that. I wanna I wanna know what my position is. I wanna I wanna think it through for myself and be able to reach my own conclusions. Those may those may or may not agree with, what's popular or what's, accepted or what's commonly, commonly accepted. But at least it'll be something that I've thought through, and then I'll actually know what I think.

And I encourage everyone to do that. And I think it's a real problem for us as Muslims because I think that there's a lot of things that we just don't think through. There's a lot of our religion that we just take by rote, and there's a lot in our religion that we don't question. There's a lot in our religion that we don't analyze. There's a lot in our religion that is uncomfortable for us, but we don't confront it.

We don't wanna talk about it. We don't wanna think about it. We don't wanna think it through. And no one wants to answer the questions when you do ask a question. When you when you do go to someone with knowledge and ask them a question.

And then usually what will happen, like say you take a controversial topic like the marriage of Rasulullah to Aisha when she was at a very young age. If you take that question to a scholar, even he will not give you an answer that he has thought through. He'll give you an answer that he has received from other scholars or from other from other people who have explained it. And and there's so much of our knowledge that is just memorization and repetition and rote in because we have this respect for our early scholarship. We just repeat what they say.

We just mimic what they say. We just, imitate it, again, without without actually intellectually owning it and and understanding it. We just accept. And there's some positives about that. There's some kinds of knowledge that has to be done that way, but then there's other types of knowledge that requires you to do the inter intellectual work to understand it.

And I just think that as a community, I think we've gotten very negligent about doing that. And I think that there are a number of topics in Islam that we don't want to think about. There are a number of topics in Islam that are awkward and uncomfortable for us to confront. And I I listened recently. This last week, I was listening to a couple of lectures by Jonathan a c Brown.

And I really first of all, wanna say I really appreciate this brother. I appreciate his intelligence. I appreciate his intellect. I appreciate the meticulousness with which he analyzes things and his objectivity. And one of the things that I really appreciate about him is that he's his lack of pretension, his lack of, you know, the sort of pompous self righteousness that we find among so many Muslim speakers, this this virtue signaling that we see so much among Muslim speakers.

He doesn't really do that, and that's very refreshing. But I listened to two lectures by him. One was about slavery, and the other one was discussing the ayah in the Quran that talks about beating one's wife. The first lecture I thought was superior to the second. I thought that his discussion about slavery and Islam, it's based on a book that he's written, which I hope to get and read.

I thought I there there was almost nothing that he said I didn't agree with. I thought it was an excellent lecture and very well presented and very well researched and very well argued. The the second lecture, the one about the ayah, about beating the wife, I felt like it was a little a little less, frank, a little, more, more reticent to take a an unpopular position. And this is the thing. I really think that these topics, these ayahs in the Quran or these hadiths that sort of fly in the face of political correctness and a lot of the modern ideologies that we have, modern sort of so called enlightened thinking of this era, provide us an opportunity to be honest with ourselves about who we are and what we are and how we are.

And I think that we need to be able to to deal with them honestly and think about them honestly and analyze them and understand them properly so that we can understand ourselves. Because, I mean, the basic concept is when you find something in the Quran or in the Sunnah that makes you uncomfortable, the problem is with you. The problem isn't with the Quran or the sunnah. The problem is with you. And you have to find a way to reconcile it because you this is a problem inside your own mind and inside your own perspective that needs to be fixed, that you need to fix.

And I'm not I'm not saying someone needs to brainwash you and, you know, coerce this discomfort out of you and, desensitize you or, you know, indoctrinate you. I mean, you need to confront it yourself and think it through and find your own way of understanding it as honestly as you possibly can. And if you can't, then you have to find a way to deal with that. You if you can't reconcile it in some way intellectually, then you're gonna have to come you then you have to confront that there are aspects in Islam that you cannot reconcile yourself with intellectually. So there's no way around this struggle.

Either you have to struggle to find a way to reconcile it, or you have to find a way to struggle to reconcile the fact that there are things in your religion that you cannot reconcile. But either way, there's a there's an intellectual struggle that we have to go through if and when we encounter things in the religion that make us uncomfortable or that are awkward or that conflict with things that we you know, with with morals or principles or values that we hold. So