Engagement, not Escape (Greater Jihad: Episode 3)

Well, we should maybe talk about the sort of Western misunderstanding or misconception about religion itself. The Western misunderstanding about the function of religion. Because while we are obviously focused upon and concerned with the ultimate judgment and the afterlife, even this focus is meant to improve our navigation of life in this world. You understand? Religion, Dean, is very much designed for this field of our mortal existence, this life.

Proper religion is dunya based. Dunya based for lack of a better term. In other words, it's very specifically and very consciously about defining our function here and now, our role here and now. You know, our relationships with our surroundings and with others and with ourselves here and now in this life. This is why the West's whole whole conception about religion and secularism and so forth is just so utterly foreign and so so strange and only it's peculiar to them.

And again, this comes out of their experience. Their experience with their religion, with their church, with their monarchies and so forth, their feudalism and so on. Their whole conception of religion and what have you. This has nothing to do with us. This has nothing to do with Muslims.

Islam is as secular as it is spiritual. You understand? We deal with worldly matters in Islam. That's the whole point. Islam is not religion as a way of escape.

It's a real it's religion as a way of engagement. We follow Islam not to try to be otherworldly, but precisely to deal with the realities of this life in a successful manner. And we don't belittle our experience, we don't belittle our presence in this world. And we don't seek non participation in the life of this world. We don't negate, human emotions and human qualities as being things that need to be overcome or things that need to be renounced.

They just need to be regulated. That's all. They just need to be regulated and balanced. We don't blame people or stigmatize people for for for normal human desires and normal human urges. The whole point is to try to help you deal with them properly knowing that you have them, you know.

In many other religions, it's almost as if they look at human beings like, they're being blamed for being human beings. There's a there's a kind of underlying disrespect for normal human qualities. You're sinful and you're animalistic by nature is what they sort of want you to believe. And your religion is supposed to purge you of all of that, purge you of all of your, basically, your humanity. You were born wrong and religion is supposed to make you right.

Now this is not correct. This is not our understanding in Islam, not at all. Like I said last time, you were born good. You were born with a natural orientation, your fitra, which is good and it's right. There's nothing wrong with you innately, intrinsically.

There's nothing wrong with you at birth. And all of the things that you love and that you desire and that you enjoy are not immoral and corrupt and and blameworthy. It's fine. Men love women, for example. Women love men, for example.

We love intimacy with one another and that's beautiful. It's a it's a gift from that we get to enjoy with one another and we don't need to guilt trip people about it. But it is something to be respected and something to be handled with proper regard and kept within a context that balances the enjoyment and the pleasure with responsibilities and commitment, with appreciation, with gratitude, with respect, with duty. The wrong thing is not to feel it, the wrong thing is not to want it, the wrong thing is to treat it with disrespect and and indulgence without the the necessary corresponding appreciation and regard, and that's marriage. See?

There's there's nothing wrong with wanting to make money. There's nothing, wrong innately, in inherently with desiring wealth and with desiring to be financially prosperous. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's a right way to go about it, and there's a wrong way to go about it. There is a responsible way and an irresponsible way.

That's all we're saying. It's about regulation, not about renunciation. You don't have to renounce normal human desires. It's about how to how to pursue things that, human beings naturally want to pursue, but pursue them in a way that keeps those pursuits moral and healthy and balanced. And this is all coming from, like I've talked about before, a fundamental respect for human beings as, intrinsically decent, dignified, noble and important creations.

It's not coming from a place where you think human beings are intrinsically evil. Where you think human beings are intrinsically sinful base creatures. You know, who can only come to good by purging themselves of their nature and detaching themselves from this world. Now that's unrealistic and is disrespectful to human beings. There's no monasticism in Islam, for example.

We don't compartmentalize like that. Why should you? You know, like you can only be a spiritual person, you can only be a religious person, you can only be a moral person. If you remove yourself from the world and all the affairs of society, what's the point of that? What's even the point of that?

No participation in the world? No participation in the affairs of society? That's where your religion is supposed to manifest. What good are you as a hermit? Who cares if you're moral as a hermit?

Who cares? Like I said, there is no escapism in Islam. Islam gives you the rules of engagement. You are in this world. You are in this life.

And here's how to manage that. Here's how to proceed with that. Here's how to engage. This is a practical religion. And morality in Islam is a practical morality.

Like I've said before, show me the morals. You know? Like that, show me the money. Show me the morals. Show me the morals.

Manifest that in the real world. Demonstrate that. Not virtue signaling, not takwa signaling or what have you. No. Show me practical moral engagement with the dunya.

Embody moral character, you know, in your actions, in your, decisions, and in your outcomes. And we don't expect you to try to do right in a vacuum and only in perfect conditions. This is why I talked about before. We emphasize doing, what is better. What's better?

What's purer? What's more fair? What's more just? What's closer to the truth? What's more righteous?

You understand? What's the more moral thing to do between all available options that actually exist? It's not an absolutist mentality. It's not a perfectionist mindset. It's about going for the better option in any given scenario, in any situation, in any conditions.

It's about opting for the better decision in any given scenario, in any situation, any conditions. It's either gonna bring the most improvement or at least, is gonna cause the least damage, cause the least harm. Remember I said before, it's not about perfection. It's about progress. It's not about perfection.

It's about progress. It's not about trying to make things perfect. It's about trying to make things better. That's all. That's practical morality.

And I wanna say, you know, you always wanna separate the spiritual from the temporal. Spirituality is over here. Economics is over there. Politics is over there. You know, business is over here.

Religion is over there and so forth. Worship is in the Masjid. And at work and at home and in the street, it has no place. Well, that's no kind of religion. That's a useless religion.

That's a useless religion. Your religion is supposed to teach you. It's supposed to train you how to be. It's supposed to train you how to behave at work, at home, with your family, in the street, in society, in business, in school, with your friends, with strangers. It's supposed to teach you how to act and how to behave in all situations and scenarios and conditions and environments that you are ever gonna engage in or ever find, find yourself in in this life.

I say Islam is a secular religion. I know that'll sound strange to you, that'll sound very strange to you, but when we talk about secular matters, worldly matters, whether you're talking about relationships or you're talking about, trade and commerce, whether you're talking about politics, whether you're talking about marriage, divorce, raising children, fiscal policy, international relations or what have you. These are the areas of life in which our morality or our immorality or our amorality get actualized. Look, if you're just gonna be moral in the masjid, in the mosque, or in the church, or in your temple, or in your house of worship, or what have you, and you just keep it isolated and contained inside those walls, But then as soon as you emerge from your worship service, your prayer service, and you start interacting with the world without any guidance, without any moral code, without regulating your behavior, regulating your decisions in line with your religion that you preached or that you prayed to in that church, well, it makes no actual practical difference whether you went to a prayer service, whether you went to a mosque or a church or a temple or what have you, or if you went to a massage parlor.

You understand me? It makes no difference practically. And if you're doing that, if you're not following that in real life because your religion does not give you guidance on how to interact with people, on how to interact with the world, and how to behave, and how to make your decisions, if your religion doesn't teach you that, then that's a useless religion. It's a useless religion practically, functionally. That religion cannot train you.

It can't teach you. It can't discipline you. It can't even make you a better person, much less make the world a better place. There's simply no point in it. And that applies to any belief system, any belief belief system.

Whether you wanna call it a religion or you wanna call it an ideology or you call it philosophy or what or anything else, a theory. You need to have principles. Yes. You need to have principles. But those principles have to be connected to practices.

They have to be connected to practices. If you just have the principles without the practices, what good are the principles? The practice is the whole point. How you put the principles into action, that's the whole point. Like, for example, be kind.

Right? Be kind. Be charitable. These are moral principles. These are moral principles.

Or you can say they're general, aspects of a moral character, but it's vague. It's open to interpretation, charitableness. Okay. You give money. That's charity.

But, so is smiling. So is removing, harmful things from the pathways. So is giving directions to someone who's lost. So is reconciling people who are having a dispute. So is spending time with your family.

This is all charity. So is restraining yourself when, when you could say something hurtful, say something mean, or do do something harmful. So is, enjoining, right and forbidding wrong. This is charity. So is feeding an animal.

So is having lawful intimate relations with your spouse. This is charity. So is teaching someone something that they didn't know. Charity is when you do something, practically, to practically relieve someone of a difficulty or a burden of some kind that they're dealing with. It's not just money.

If you have a tongue, if you have hands, if you have strength, if you have knowledge, if you have time, then you have wealth with which you can be charitable. That's practical morality. Then you're supposed to know how to deal with your how to how to interact in all situations, in all scenarios and so forth. So for example, at work. Are you supposed to be at work, is where most people spend most of their time?

Well, the prophet Muhammad told us that loves the servant who when he performs a task, perfects it. Meaning, he or she does it with excellence. You perform that task with excellence to the best of their ability. You don't cut corners, you don't phone it in, you don't get AI to do it, you don't do the minimum. You understand?

Professionalism and excellence are religiously stipulated in Islam. And if you're if you're an employer, well Rasulullah told us that you should pay the worker before his sweat dries. Be prompt, be fair in wages, be fair in remuneration. Allah said that you have to give people their due and never give them less than their due. And contracts and job descriptions and so forth should be clear and the workload should be reasonable.

This is in Islam, this is in the religion, this is practical morality. It's clearly outlined. It's clearly explained both in principle and in practice. You understand me? You're supposed to know how to interact with your spouse, with your family, with your children.

You're supposed to know how to interact with your neighbors, with your colleagues, with your employees, with your boss, with your teachers, with your students, with your, workers, with strangers. You're supposed to know how to interact with those in authority, with those who are in need. You're even supposed to know how to interact with animals. You're supposed to know how to choose your friends, how to choose your friend group, and how to act with them once they have become your friends. How to maintain friendships, friendships and so forth.

You're even supposed to know how to deal with your enemies, how to deal with people that you have disputes with, how to deal with people that you owe money to and who owe you money. You're supposed to know how to deal with people who antagonize you in principle and in practice. That's a practical religion. Because if you wanna just, you know, go into all of these interactions in your life without any principled and without any practical guidelines, without any practical guidance, without any regulations, then you're just gonna follow whatever you feel in the moment, whatever you feel in the moment, and you're gonna let your nest just run amok. Well, you and I both know how that's gonna turn out.

We both know how that's gonna turn out. You know very well how that turns out because for most of you, that's what your life looks like. That's what your life looks like or at least different areas in your life, maybe in your work life, maybe in your, private life. You know, you deal with your girlfriend or your boyfriend, it's not even a spouse, your girlfriend or your boyfriend, you have no clear sense of of of what you owe them or what they owe you, what the boundaries are supposed to be, what respect actually is supposed to look like in practice between you, what love and appreciation is supposed to look like in action, you have no idea. You just wing it.

You just go off of feelings. You just go off of mood or you go off of what whatever you saw, when you were growing up, which was also probably a mess or what you saw in the movies, or what you heard on some talk show, or what you saw on social media. But nothing's actually clarified. There's no structure. There's no duties.

There's no responsibilities. It's volatile, and it's unstable by nature. Because the truth of the matter is that you're already in a situation where both of you are in fact violating each other's rights and each other's dignity. I know you don't think so, but it is the case. You're both already cheapening each other's value to each other.

And that's not gonna work. That can't work. And then you wonder why the the the same arguments keep happening. Right? You wonder why there's this slow, steady accumulation of resentment between the two of you, building up in your relationship like water damage in the walls of a house.

You can't see it but it's there. And then one day the whole thing collapses. Because you never built with sound materials in the first place. You never built that relationship with sound materials. There's no structure.

There's no architectural blueprint. And this this is the same thing that goes through all different areas of life, this ad hoc morality, this randomness. Like I say, at work, you have no real principle guiding how you how you show up at work, how hard you work, what you owe your employer, what your employer owes you. You know, it's not clear to you when you should speak, when you should stay quiet, when you should pull back, when you should push back, when to let go or just react or not react. You know?

You do the minimum when no one is watching. You cut corners when you're under pressure. You resent your boss without having a principal framework to assess whether that resentment is even justified. Or you resent your coworkers, not necessarily just your boss. You talk behind people's backs because you never learned that backbiting is a form of corruption and that you're accountable for every every word that you speak.

Your your your tongue is gonna be questioned about how you used it. And then you wonder why your career maybe goes stagnant or you get keep getting passed over for promotions and whatnot. Why the the relationships that you build up at work just get get sour or they turn on you or it fizzles out or what have you. Why you never really feel respected at work. Because you go into work with that secular mindset instead of approaching a secular matter with a religious mindset, with a moral mindset, a moral mentality, a religious mentality.

And it's the same way, like I say, in all the different areas of life, in your finances, for example. You don't have any real principles or practices, means you probably spend impulsively and then you justify it later. You borrow money without any clear intention or without any plan even necessarily to pay it back. Means that you lend money to people, lend money to your friends or what have you, and then you quietly seethe about it until the money comes back. Means you make, vague deals with your friends and that will end up ending your friendship.

You make vague agreements that then become vicious disputes because you never outlined the terms of what what that agreement is supposed to be. You're generous when you feel like it and you're tight when you don't feel like it. There's no real consistency. There's no real principle. And inevitably money will just end up becoming a source of stress and a source of conflict in your relationships and a source of depression and anxiety and hostility towards others and towards yourself.

And in terms of your own purpose, own sense of purpose in life, your own sense of your own direction. Well, you don't have one. You don't have a sense of direction, where you're going, what you're building, what your life is actually for, what your life is actually about. Without any sort of a framework, without any sort of principle guidance that's connected to real, real world practices, you just drift. You follow whatever feels urgent or exciting or comfortable at the moment, in the moment.

You make big declarations about, you know, big plans and what have you, but very little follow through. You start things and you abandon them. You have a whole graveyard of half finished projects, half finished or or or half built habits, half realized dreams. And the thing about living like this, living like this without guidance, with just following the nerves, it's not it's not dramatic. Most of the time, it's not even dramatic.

This is something that people don't realize. We're not talking about you having a nervous breakdown or something, you know, some big moment of reckoning. It's mostly just slow. It's a slow erosion. Your life just becomes gradually smaller and smaller and more cluttered.

Relationships that slowly become transactional over time or resentful or just completely broken or distant, remote. Your reputation quietly decays because you've let too many people down too many times. You've broken too many promises or you've said too many careless things. You haven't been careful in your speech. You burned bridges that you didn't even necessarily know that you did burn until you need to cross it, and then you find that it's gone because you didn't take care of it.

You didn't maintain it. Of course, eventually, over the course of time, you develop a lot of secrets because you don't have an internalized structure, a disciplined moral code that you follow whether people are watching or not. So you accumulate secrets because, like I say, you're not morally consistent. There's the public you, there's the private you, there's the the there's who you are with one person and who you are with another person and then there's who you are when you're by yourself. And they don't even know each other.

There's there's dissonance that you create for yourself because of this lack of moral guidance. You understand how much energy it it takes to try to maintain a life like that that has no moral, coherent moral architecture underneath it? How to maintain that? Because you have no real principles guiding your choices. You end up making choices that you need to hide, that you want other people to not know that you made those choices.

Then you end up living a double life or triple life or quadruple life, Trying to manage what this person knows versus what that person knows. Managing the version that you are at work versus the version you are at home versus versus the version you are online. It's exhausting. It has to be exhausting. And the tragedy is that the person who is the most confused and who is the most oppressed by all of these contradictions is no one but yourself.

You lose track of who you actually are because you've been so many things to so many different people, and you act so many different ways in so many different situations, guided by nothing but what the situation or the feeling or the moment is itself. It's miserable. But that's freedom. Right? That's individuality.

Right? That's the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Isn't it? And it's making you miserable, and it's making you self loathing, and it's making you depressed, this this pursuit of happiness. And you inevitably start accumulating lies.

You know, some of them are gonna be big lies, deliberate lies, but most of them are small, tiny even. You you say you'll be there when you don't show up. You you say that you agree with something that you don't agree with. You say that you're fine when you're not fine. You say you'll do it and you don't do it.

You know? And individually, none of them feel like much. It's fine. But they accumulate. And after a while, stop trusting you.

People stop trusting you. Not because some big betrayal that you committed, but because of a thousand small betrayals. And then you wonder why you feel alone, why you are alone, why people keep their distance, why your relationships are all surface level. You know, you talk about this loneliness epidemic as if it doesn't have a cause, as if you're not causing it yourself by your own dysfunction. This is what life without practical moral guidance looks like.

This is what it actually looks like. I'm not talking about you being evil and villainous. That's a false dichotomy that people use, you know, like, oh, I don't need a religion to know it's wrong to rob and steal and kill people. Congratulations. You're not Hitler.

That's not what we're talking about. I'm talking about a person just stumbling through their days, stumbling through their life, following their feelings and hurting people that they love, hurting themselves, disappointing people they love, disappointing themselves, making the same mistakes on a loop, and wondering why nothing ever seems to come together the way that they imagined it would. You know? Morality is not reducible to just not being evil. That's not the definition of moral.

It doesn't mean just not being an unspeakable villain. It means having a meaningful, fruitful, fulfilling, purposeful existence. It means being functional. Being a functional human being, being consistent, having integrity. And this goes for Muslims as well as non Muslims.

Like I said before, just because you possess the guidance, just because you possess the moral code, that doesn't replace actually following it. Whether you're Muslim or non Muslim. If you're not following it, well, you're gonna suffer the same as if you never possessed that guidance in the first place. The whole point is the implementation. That's the whole point.

If you're not implementing it, if you're not following it, you're not benefiting from it. The whole point is the implementation and the adherence. And that adherence is entirely for your own benefit. And you can't have any of that if your nefs is running amok. And that's what it looks like in real life when your nefs is running amok.

And that's the whole point of religion. That's the whole point of religion in in Islam, our understanding. It gives you something to work with. It gives you something to stand on, it gives you a way to navigate in the world. Not just good intentions, but an actual framework, actual principles with the practices attached.

You understand? A clear account of what you owe and what you are owed in every single relationship and in every single context of your life. What is expected of you, what you have a right to expect. This is a framework that can train you and discipline you and refine you and make your world and the world of all the people around you a better place, a genuinely better place because of you. You understand?

The funny thing is that you know this. In the West, you actually do know this. This is why the self help books, you know, the the the guides to life, all the life coaches, all the motivational speakers, all the gurus and this and that and so on. This is why this is a huge multi billion dollar industry. Tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions of dollars that you all spend on trying to get some kind of guidance.

So there's no point in trying to pretend that you're not lost and wandering. There's no point in trying to pretend that you don't know that you're lost and wandering. You're looking for guidance all the time from every which direction. Not to mention therapy, not to mention counseling and so forth. You know that you're a ship at sea.

You're a ship at sea without a sail, without a rudder and without a steering wheel and you know this. You know it perfectly well. But most of the time, this is the thing, most of the time, even the guidance that you're looking for is NEPS driven. It's a NEPS driven search for guidance. Meaning, what you want.

The guidance that you want is how to get rich. How to get girls. How to outsmart the system. Basically, how to be successful without really trying. Or how to how to justify and how to feel at peace with yourself no matter how immoral you are, no matter how amoral you are, no matter how indulgent you are, no matter how selfish you are, no matter how cruel you might be.

And not to mention the fact that it's an industry after all. At the end of the day, it's an industry. The people who are doing it are doing it for money. They're doing it to get paid. They want you to give them your money.

And their whole business model depends upon multiplying dysfunction, not solving it. So they are rarely, if ever, gonna actually try to give people any kind of a way to be morally disciplined and to get their lives under control because that doesn't make them any money. But let me bring it back to where I began. Religion, Islam. Yes.

We are looking towards the Akhira. We're looking towards the day of judgment. We're thinking about heaven. We're thinking about paradise. Yes.

But this is not a pie in the sky religion. We don't teach renunciation of the world. We don't teach render unto Caesar. There's no compartmentalization like that. And the the compartmentalization of the spiritual realm and the temporal realm.

Islam is not an escapist religion. It is a religion of engagement. It's not an opiate of the masses, it cures addiction. We cure that addiction. You don't need to escape.

We teach you to see the world the way it is, we teach you to see life the way it is, and we teach you how to operate in the world and in life the way it is, in both a realistic and a moral way. We don't separate the dunya from the dunya, the way that other belief systems, that you call religion, the way that they do it. The dunya is the field in which religion operates and dunya is designed for the dunya. You know, if you take that that famous soliloquy of Hamlet, to be or not to be, but Hamlet, Shakespeare, he's talking about basically the western existential crisis in miniature and even complete with the binary framing of the West. To be, to live in suffering and confusion, or to not be, meaning to die, to end your life, to escape.

Well, it's the third option that I'm talking about. Islam shows you how to deal with all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Islam teaches you how to deal with a thousand natural shocks that flesh his air too. It doesn't have to be so dramatic. No.

If Hamlet was a Muslim, that story wouldn't have been a tragedy.