#145 What does Islam say about Justice? - Imam Shayan Parsai

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. in me. Us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of The Malcolm Effect. And I know I say this every episode, but I do genuinely have an amazing guest today. Someone who our friendship is probably approaching a decade at some point sometime soon, actually. Even though we've only met like once or twice in person. Nevertheless, we remain close friends. And more than that, this is someone that I consider a teacher. And I've said this times before, so I don't want to put too much pressure. But I've said this before, that... Oftentimes when people ask me to recommend Islamic speakers, I struggle because what's out there is, I guess I can say nice, but not particularly compelling or critical in the ways in which I would like my faith to be challenged and to understand my faith in a particular way. So joining me today is a good friend, teacher, Imam Cheyenne Pasay. How are you, my brother?

Shayan Parsai: Oh, man, I'm doing great. It's such an honor and privilege to be on with you. And yeah, like you said, we've known each other and been close friends now for almost 10 years. And everything that you said, I'm going to ditto and throw back at you, honestly. Maybe I could be in the host chair asking you these questions really. I appreciate you being so kind and generous. No, of course, man.

Speaker 2: I really appreciate it. So I will post more about Imam Shayan in the comments, in the description of the episode. But what I will say is that he's also a part of the As-Suli Institute, also a student of one of my favorite sheikhs, Sheikh Khalid Abbas al-Fadl, May Allah preserve him, Ameen. But given that the stuff we always talk about, right, oftentimes we find that what is online is an understanding of Islam, in my assessment, which is divorced from questions of social justice. And I know that's something of morality and justice ethics is a lot what Osori Institute is about. So, however, what I, perhaps before we go into more substantive questions, I want to know a bit about your intellectual formation because I think maybe some of my listeners may not be as familiar with the Sully Institute and yourself as an individual, which I think they need to be. So my first question is, how did you come to study on the Shaykh Khalifa al-Fadl and in your understanding, what distinguishes his manhaj from other contemporary Islamic approaches?

Shayan Parsai: Yeah, that's a great question. At the outset, I'll just offer the caveat that I am still a student. I'm a student of knowledge. So I'm speaking from the perspective of a student, not of the ultimate authority and my understanding of the manhaj and of the teaching and the learning that I've done under Sheikh Khaled for the last several years. So, yeah, I mean, my personal journey is, you know, I'm of an Iranian-American background and which comes with complications culturally in terms of our relationship with Islam. Obviously, Iran boasts a very rich Islamic tradition, as many places in the world do, but it's very old, one of the oldest. And obviously, politically, the diaspora kind of has a very complicated relationship with religion and Islam in general. And my household was no exception to that for all kinds of reasons. That's its own topic, probably. So I came to Islam more in my 20s. I didn't grow up particularly Muslim in that sense, kind of like Muslim culturally, but not really in an identity sense to some degree. So I came to it on my own. So I kind of have that experience of the feeling of both reconnecting with Islam and as a member of Muslim diaspora, but also kind of like semi-convert because you kind of really come and connect with it on your own terms. So in that sense, I was open to learning from all of them and from every background. I didn't deprive myself and say, okay, well, I came from a Shia, I guess, country, so to speak. So I kind of was open to all kinds of learning, both Sunni, Sufi, Shia, et cetera, et cetera. But it wasn't until in law school where I really connected with Sheikh Khaled's work, his writing, and by then the Osuli Institute was kind of brand new. That's kind of my story. I mean, I was really kind of looking towards the types of scholars that were really in love with the tradition, because that's what I was interested in. I was interested in someone who was not boxed in, that was not afraid to kind of do the hard work of coming out of yourself and your identity and trying to really find what Islam is about. And I think that's what's really unique about Dr. Khalid. You said in terms of his, yeah, you said in terms of his manhaj and what kind of sets him apart, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Shayan Parsai: You know, I think part of it is that. He is, I mean, Sheikh is a polymath. You know, he's a polymath in every way. You know, he can read. multiple languages. He, you know, he's a jurist, both an American law jurist and a classically trained Islamic jurist. His training is not limited to Sunni Islam. He also studied under Dr. Hossein Moudarisi from Princeton. Both, he was his dissertation advisor and also they studied Shia law together. So, I mean, that approach of really being in love with the tradition, I mean, really, the work at the Osuli Institute and the product of all of the writing of Dr. Khaled is essentially a humanized form of the tradition itself. I mean, he has a hundred thousand book library. I mean, maybe some of your listeners know this and I've spent a lot of time in that library because we moved it from a danger zone in LA where it was in the path of fires. So I spent several years along with some of my colleagues reorganizing that library and putting it together. I mean, and the sources in there are invaluable. Islamic sources, Jewish sources, Christian sources, social thought, everything. I mean, it's an unbelievably massive library and you really get to realize spending time in there and trying to like almost cataloging in your mind, you kind of follow his intellectual work. trajectory and really his rigor. And that's what I would say at the end of the day is what really sets him apart is his rigor. He wants to know everything about everything and then approach answering questions. So I'd say his approach is mastering the epistemologies of the age. That's really his approach. And that's what I love.

Speaker 2: I really appreciate the answer because I think as someone who has been a Muslim in the Western Academy, right? And you can oftentimes come across thinkers, scholars, writers who put forward or propose progressive ideals or progressive ways of interpreting the tradition. But as someone who is classically trained, I'm like, I can agree with your conclusion, but I know the way in which you got there, no mainstream Muslim will accept it, right? Because again, for better or for worse, we have an epistemology, right? And that has been concretized and that has been crystallized, you know, ways of usur, you know, if you're from, for example, in the Maliki Madhab, you're going to have Quran and Sunnah, but the Sunnah is going to be defined as the living, had like one hadith right so all these things right and the Amal Ahl al-Madinah practice of the people of Madinah I'm just saying we have an epistemology we have a way in which we do this thing about bringing out rulings and applying them as you can imagine you find people in the academy who have not had that classical training so whilst they can probably be celebrated within niche academic circles they're not going to be was something I always appreciated about Sheikh Khalid al-Fadl and the Rasooli Institute was that work was done so yes you're bringing out what people will call progressive ideas or understandings or the door of independent reasoning and is open and Sheikh Khalid engages in that but he engages it from the vantage point of still within the tradition And I think that's invaluable. And that's one of the reasons why I also am highly appreciative of Chef. So I guess before we move on, what do you think or what do you think are the problems his scholarship is trying to solve? And I guess also by extension, what is the point of the scholarship you want to produce? Yeah, this is a great question.

Shayan Parsai: I mean, I think I can kind of wrap them together. I think we have kind of the same project. I'm kind of an offspring of his own project. The question goes back to colonialism. Unfortunately, this question always keeps going back to colonialism. I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. But the point is that colonialism had a very massive social and psychological interruption in our lives, intellectually, spiritually speaking. Culturally, it uprooted us from our tradition. It uprooted us geographically. It threw us into a diaspora. It opened the door for an alien despotic system that kind of took root in all of our Islamic lands, to borrow, I guess, academic language. And that kind of really, you know, turned everything on its head and, and, and kind of froze us, you know, like kind of the natural reaction of a people to, who are under such intense siege, so to speak, cultural and physical siege, is to become very conservative. You know, you're trying to kind of like gather your items, hold on to what you know, reject anything that seems to put you on tilt and kind of like just survive. And then kind of like your worldview and your religious view kind of kind of shoots off of that as a tangent. And I think that that kind of has that kind of like effect where today, now when that gets imported to the United States or to Britain or to the West in general, and even, you know, in Eastern lands, the thought is that this is how Islam has always been. We're always very careful about not interrupting the way things have always been this way. And that's just... It's just a historically inaccurate way, an inaccurate description of Muslims and Islamic history. I was reading a book recently. I think it's very interesting. It's not a new book, but the book essentially details the history of Shia scholars who studied majority Shafi'i law under Shafi'i professors. And many of them ended up becoming Shafi'i professors, despite being, you know, Shiite Muslims. And even in Subki's Tabakat, like some of these really big scholars, he knew that they were Shia, but he would include them as Shafi'i jurists. It's just really fascinating, this idea that, like, these sects are, like, completely apart and they've always been at odds with one another and, like, all of this stuff. And, of course, don't get me wrong, I don't want to sugarcoat it. There was a lot of persecution, a lot of, you know, heat going back and forth in pre-modernity. But the point is that even in those circumstances... Sunni and Shia Islam and Islam in general developed in a very porous, amorphous kind of process that produced a really rich, discursive tradition. And now we're kind of like in this block, right? And I think part of the project here is to get back to that, to... kind of like reattach the chain to that kind of culture where we have this porous back and forth where you know there's a rich and lively discussion the issue is that there's not a lot of people who have the bravery to engage the tradition and engage the issues that people have now and i think this kind of goes back to your question about the project the project is We have problems that are emerging. No, problems emerge not just in modernity. They emerge as time goes on. I mean, this is something that we can see charted in the Qur'an. Things, incidents, eventualities, contingencies come up. and the Qur'an responds to it. And it's been this way since the time of the Prophet, since the time of the Khulafa, his successors, and onwards. That's not a unique phenomenon. That's just normal life. So what you need is a system that's going to be able to answer ethical questions that arise, needs for the people, you know, that is blocking them or whatever they're facing, you know, whatever injustice they're facing, they need some sort of ethical way out and an ethical cure to their ailment, so to speak. And that's really what the overall idea is. How do we think about this? And I think just to cap off the answer, You mentioned istinbat and istikhraj and all of these kind of like exacting or extracting law from the sources. This is a very interesting thing. I mean, I think we're moving towards an age where the jurist is, first of all, the jurists are a little bit handicapped. Second, the relationship towards the jurists is not the same way between the average Muslim to the jurist. It's not the same kind of connection that we had in the past. And there's the wealth of knowledge and the democratization of knowledge where kind of like more is being asked from the jurist today than the jurist is prepared to offer sometimes. You know, there's more of a challenge. So that's a positive, honestly. But it's a negative if the jurists don't rise to the challenge because it requires more education. You can't just... When a child asks you a question, you can give them a basic answer and that'll be enough. But when someone more sophisticated comes and asks you a question, then it kind of exposes your actual knowledge and your commitment. So I think that we're moving into an age where people kind of need more of an ethical backbone than they need an extraction of law in that typically jurists will say Islamic law is this kind of like ocean of reality and the jurist's job is to come and whenever a question comes up, in every eventuality, you can do istimbadh. In every actuality of life, you can produce or extract from the Qur'an and the Sunnah and from Aql al-Qiyas and from consensus a particular legal prescription that is Islamic, that God had in mind, you know. And whether that's true or not is a different conversation. But we're moving in a time where people need an ethical background and framework where they are able to carry out some of this work themselves. Otherwise, you become completely dependent on this, you know, I don't know what to do. What should I put my left foot first? Should I put my right foot first? Can I go to work? Can I have stocks? Can I, you know, like all kinds of questions every single day can pop up. And it's like, well, I can't think for myself. I have to Google the jurist or email the jurist and ask him the question. So it's kind of like we're in a situation where we need the ethicist to help the average Muslim get to a place where they know how to fish themselves for the ethics that they need.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that. Because again, we hear in Maliki Usul books, this notion of faqih al-nafs, the scholar of yourself, or scholar of yourself, or soul, self. But it's important, right? Because again, I've always said it's a great tragedy that there has been a reconstitution of Allah in the image of the jurist. And what I mean by that, perhaps more specifically or precisely, is that there's this pedantry. And I wonder to myself, when Allah says, Glory be to He who is above all and beyond all and beyond what they ascribe to Him. And I'm thinking, I remember one of my sheikhs in West Africa said to me, some of my Western friends were asking him some questions. I forget the exact question now. And his reply was, And they were asking if something's haram. And his reply was, why have you turned Allah into an angry husband whose wife didn't make the food right or something? Like he was half joking, but he was saying that it's kind of pedantry in, I don't want to say fiqh is like, Fiqh is unimportant. Anyone who knows me, I love Fiqh. That's always been my bread and butter. Fiqh and usul have been my bread and butter. I love that. But I can also recognize that these were practitioners of law who either by way of had to deal with actual issues that people came with and given fatwa and hukums, or they were doing iftar al-yak, as you said, if this happens then. that that is the work of a scholar and not necessarily divine in every instance, right? So I think it's unfortunate. That's why I once again, like, thank you for that answer. And just to circle back, absolutely agree with you when you say it's this question of modernity, right? We're all trying to reckon with modernity. We're all trying to reckon with the traumatic experience that is modernity. I will call it capitalist modernity. You can call it Christian modernity. Calvinist, whatever you want to call it, right? I don't think you can separate the two anyway between the theology and capitalist processes anyway, which can be a conversation for another time. But what I'm saying is that we know we Muslim lands were colonized, right? We know this history. But it seems to me that there is an unwillingness or inability to reckon with this truthfully and what impact it had on our beings and what impact it had on the way in which we even understand tradition. And what we have, unfortunately, are all people trying to reckon with this. And they'll say it's because there's a metaphysical hierarchy that exists in existence between men and women. We all have all the problems we have today, right? And again, I give that just a throwaway example, which I hear all too often. But let's go into a bit about the way in which, I know recently, As-Suli Institute went through the Quran, and I'm waiting, every day I'm checking when the book is going to be released, when is the tafsir going to be released, because I think it was such a rich set of lessons in which it incorporated Quran. early notions, early interpretations, whilst also understanding and giving commentary for today. One thing that Usul Institute and Sheikh Khalid and yourself also kind of emphasize a lot is this moral trajectory, right? Some people call it trajectory hermeneutics, but essentially for the listeners, what does it mean to say that the Quran has a moral trajectory rather than just fixed rulings?

Shayan Parsai: It's a brilliant question. Before I answer it, I want to also give a shout out to Mufti Abu Laith, who I think is another big proponent of this. And I'm a big fan of his. I've followed him for years. Really valuable work that he does. Yeah, this is a question that's near and dear to my heart. I mean, I think... It's really important to answer this in a way that is faithful to the truth. And the truth is that the Qur'an is all about trajectory hermeneutics, if you really look closely. And I think this is part of the big project of the tafsir is allowing the Qur'an to speak for itself, in a sense, you know, not pose on the text itself. but to kind of like, you know, distill and de-factor a lot of the readings on the Qur'an and kind of allow it to speak for itself. And that's part of the work that needs to be done and is being done here, specifically in terms of understanding the context in which the Qur'an was revealed and the seerah. And, you know, what's interesting is that we're currently going through the seerah. We finished the Qur'an tafsir after two and a half years ago. And now we're doing the seerah, which is kind of like a part two. And what sticks out to people who have listened to both the tafsirah and the seerah is what's really important is to zero in. What was it that attracted Muslims to this message to begin with? You know, it's like what we in modernity, we kind of have this commodified approach towards what we'll invest in and what we won't invest in. Right. It's very kind of buy and sell kind of logic. It's like, you know, you're going to talk to me about Islam. Prove to me why I should, you know, come to this religion, sell it to me. And, you know, this kind of approach is kind of it puts a barrier between you and the text and learning. But in the past, what Islam was about for people was it was about relieving the hierarchies of inequality in the time. And that is what drove and drew people to the message. It's like if we're going to talk about a God, what kind of God makes sense? What kind of God is a rational God? you know, conception of God that makes sense. A God that wants you to be subservient to hierarchies of exploitation or a God that wishes to liberate you from these hierarchies of exploitation and allow you to determine your future based on your moral, you know, and principled conceptions of human flourishing. That is really what's at the core of the message. And we see these examples left, right, and center. And this is part of the thing of like, when you kind of free yourself from some of the baggage of, of dogma, you can kind of start to even look at concepts like law within the Quran being a means of alleviation for systems of exploitation. So you think about, you know, it's one way to think about, okay, divine command theory style thinking. God said, wear a hijab. God said women do this and men do this. Okay, let's just assume that those are segregation of genders is actually a prescription. And let's assume that wearing the hijab is in fact prescription.

Speaker 2: But what's the context behind this?

Shayan Parsai: Did you think that what God wanted to do was to test your devotion by saying, on Tuesdays at 4 p.m., I want you to hop on your feet three times? Or is it actually that we are recognizing the circumstances that are pushing towards exploitation? Prostitution, we know, was a major issue in Arabia and in the Near East in general in antiquity. And, you know, it's amazing how these prescriptions, if you'd see them outside of the scope of the context of the issues that people were facing, then you're not going to really understand. You're going to think that everything is kind of like an arbitrary designation. So I think that this is what really sets apart the work that we've done with the Qur'an. towards this. And in terms of going back to the idea of moral trajectory, just to kind of like make a final point on this, this is really like the essence of the way that we should be thinking about law now. And also in the context of Islamophobia, everyone has a lot of doubts. And I can understand why, because in our traditional centers of learning and meeting and gathering, There's a lot of issues. There's a lot of gendered issues. There's a lot of discrimination. There's a lot of abuse. There's a lot of kind of like quasi, how do you say, despotic circumstances and culture in these spaces, kind of very dictator-esque. And that causes people to really wonder, okay, where does this culture come from? And then they go back and they read the text through that lens and And so then it colors the interpretation of understanding, oh, so this is why the behavior, the behavior of like the uncle or the imam that is being extremely harsh comes from the same kind of idea in the text when I go back to it. But that's a misapplication. And you really realize that the moral trajectory is essential, for example, to make this a little bit more concrete. In Reasoning with God, the Shaykh makes a very interesting observation. He says that when Mary has or is pregnant with Jesus, she's completely alone. Everybody, you know, has shunned her. You know, she's going through the pangs of child pain and childbirth. And she's begging God for relief and help and this sort of thing. And it's so interesting that we know also in Ali Imran, when Imran comes and sees her praying in the mosque or in the prayer area, he sees food and he says, where did this food and drink come from? And then Maryam says, it comes from God and God sustains me as he wishes whenever he wants. But it's so interesting that in this instance where she is giving birth to this immaculately conceived child, that she has to beg God for some sort of relief and help. And then God says, you know, okay, I will give you a date. Here are some dates from this date palm tree that she's giving birth underneath. And then he tells her, shake the tree. Well, this is kind of odd if you think about it. In the past, when she needed food and drink, God would simply make food and drink appear. But now the food appears up on the palm tree, and she has to do this physical shaking of the tree in order to receive food. Her sustenance, like I call the movement for, you know, a relief, right? That is, you know, essential. So if we if we take that idea and think about it and say, OK, before Islam, before the Quran, women are receiving no inheritance, right? And then the prescription comes for women to receive 50% inheritance. Does that mean that this is fixed and that that's the end of it? That's what the solution was? But if we apply the medium principle, suddenly you start to think about these things from a different perspective. Where are we thinking of the divine command theory God who wants you to hop on one foot and see how devoted you are? Or are we talking about a liberation from systems of exploitation and hierarchical fixturing of human beings? So what we're really doing is beyond just helping the woman liberate. come out of the situation of like, when I get married, the only other way I can help myself is to have inheritance. Well, now you have some money and you can start to establish yourself in a material sense. And then you can start to come to the people and say, hey, have you noticed that women have been systematically subjugated and that public women were usually slaves? or prostitutes and private women were completely you know uh hit hidden away as like this more regal type of reality and so this we need to really like smash this kind of thing because we we don't have that kind of approach towards the male gender so this empowers the human being to really do a haraka for a baraka and then you become a actual agent of your own change that you are given some means for change, but then God watches you and is a partner in your life and sees you achieve the liberation that's necessary to relieve the systems of exploitation. In that, there is a far more compelling story and an empowering message that attracts people to this, you know, thinking, wow, you know, God is involved in my life. He cares. He sees what God sees. And I too can be involved in this. I'm not a passive participant.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that. My following question then is, what then do you believe the role is of the interpreter in Islam, of the Quran? Are they discovering meaning or are they constructing it?

Shayan Parsai: That's a brilliant question. I think the answer is the role of the interpreter is about making things accessible. We are in a stage now where we're moving beyond simply the dictates of mere muqallid versus mujtahid kind of dynamics. I think that we're still going to have to have that in our current age and time. But we've moved past this kind of like gilded reality where, you know, there are the scholars that they only do the scholarship. And then we have, you know, the leather makers and the shoemakers and the, you know, You know, the one who strikes the iron and the one who does basket weaving. And those strict divisions in the past worked and it made sense. But then it was up to the wisdom of the scholar really to figure out to what degree do you let people in. The issue is now we all have a lot of access to a lot of material and it's confusing a lot of people. So as a scholar, you need to be able to help. I mean, we can warn people and we do and say, you know, when you open up Bukhari or you open up Bihar al-Anwar or you open up like a book of hadith or a book of fiqh or whatever. you may come across something that is going to strike you as concerning because this is a text that's not necessarily designed for the average person. This is source material or it's even, like you said, it's a type of text that's kind of like a legal hornbook or like, you know, going through the mechanisms of law as a jurist. That's not going to help your spirituality. It's not going to help your relationship with God. So what is the scholar's job? The scholar's job is twofold. In one sense, we need to be able to, the scholars need to be able to make the actual religion, the actual connection to God applicable and accessible through the Quran and the Sunnah and like, those who are the path of, you know, and the precedent of those who have been the wise of the past, you know, of our tradition. They need to find a way to make this accessible to people. And so that is functional. And in another sense, we also need to help along this idea of both the trajectory hermeneutics and Islamic ethics, right? We need a consciousness, a group consciousness that is aware of what the essence and the objectives of Islamic ethics is about. And understanding the idea of prescriptions and law within the framework of of ethics and within the frameworks of liberation from exploitation. That is the core, I would say, need. And part of this is responding to Islamophobia, because Islamophobia is what is catching us out in this. I mean, it's like it's like the double tap strike in a way right the colonialism hits you on the first strike and then the second strike is look at how disgusting your tradition is you know and so then your identity is completely peeled and the only thing that then takes the vacuum of that space is capitalist culture and so then that's it you're toast you're now you're just you're commodified and you know they they crack the whip and you produce whatever it is that they need And now they don't just have to punish the body, as Byung-Chul Han says. They've moved into this era of, we've moved out of biopolitics somewhat into psychopolitics. And now we can psychologically orient you so that no longer are you just simply the physical slave, but you are the mental slave of the self by calling yourself the entrepreneur. I am going to form my own destiny now and make myself You know, I'm going to commodify myself and I am, you know, this this human project that is going to make money. And really, the God then becomes the God of capital. And so that is disastrous. That is disastrous. We cannot allow the human identity to take this shape. So really, I'd say, you know, as a third answer is. What is the primary source of shirk today? If Islam is about tohi, it's about oneness of God and what oneness of God means in modernity, in this modernity. Let's forget about past modernities. What does oneness of God mean in this modernity? And in this modernity, it's going to have patterns like the past, right? What does a scholar need to do? The scholar needs to show us how the Qur'an used narrative to show us, to illustrate to us how to think about our modernity. What's the point of bringing up the story of Musa and Fir'aun several hundred years before the story of the Prophet? you know, of course, I mean, do we just assume that, okay, the same dynamic, the same exact culture was taking place in the time of Moses as in the time of Muhammad? No chance. It's impossible. But there were patterns, human patterns that are similar. So the pattern recognition is really important. That's why the scholar needs to be beyond just able to do istambat and extract rulings, they need to be able to understand the patterns of history, the patterns of psychology, the patterns of sociology and anthropology. You need to become, if not a master, at least really well grounded in the patterns of the epistemologies of our age.

Speaker 2: It's exactly from... that kind of not being in tune with the epistemologies of our day. And, you know, I'm not going to be shady, but as someone who has come under, who comes under a lot of smoke and attack for adopting a Marxist lens, Right. And then you just hear, I've heard things like, oh, that's just a liberal. I'm just like, huh? Like Marxism, liberalism, you know, they're very different concepts, right? There might be some overlap somewhere. Some readings lend to that. But again, it's like that kind of laziness of like, oh. that laziness or unwillingness to engage with things that you disagree with, even when you're refuting it. So I think that's, again, being well-versed in the epistemologies of the day are important. If you're going to make, again, because if epistemology is how we understand things, modernity, those of us living in the West have specific, have been inculcated into particular ways of being and seeing. If you are not aware of that, Or if you are either unaware or unable to articulate them, then how are you meant to even hit and reach people and speak to people? You know, speak to people according to their level, right? And that's not, this is not like a hierarchical of like knowledge in that sense, or like people are just smart and dumb. No, it's much, it's more profound. It's that understanding that people are going to see things differently. How are you going to make the Quran relevant to these people? And that's why I think it's a question of interpretation. I want to move on to justice now. My next two follow-up questions are, is, again, it's almost a rhetorical question at this point, but I think we have to go into it. But is justice the central organizing principle of Islam? And how do we identify what justice means in different historical contexts? Or in our context? Two big questions.

Shayan Parsai: Look, the answer is yes. I mean, I'm tired of tiptoeing around this subject. It is not only a pillar of Islam, it is the central pillar of Islam. And if that bothers you, that's your problem. And you are belaboring the text if you do not understand it this way. I'm just going to come out and say it as, you know, gloves off because we can't continue in our circumstances to be coy or shy about this. That somehow you can continue to exist in the genocide reality of the genocide in Sudan and the genocide in Palestine and the genocides to come and the genocides of the past. that we continue to not learn about anything. The fact that we can continue to just say, oh, Ahlus Sunnah wa Jama'ah is this idea that, you know, that the consensus of the community or the consensus of the scholars will never disagree with that which is the will of Allah. And then you hide behind this idea. And then it's okay. So now the consensus of the community is what? The consensus of the community is that genocide is bad and that Palestine needs to be free. But where is the power in this? You know, we cannot continue to have the privilege of hiding behind these concepts that then allow us. And I have to say this when we're in this context. I think a lot of scholars or a lot of imams, a lot of folks within the Muslim community, they did the right thing by verbally supporting Palestine. But I'm so sorry. This has hid everything. a lot of the shortcomings of the Muslim community. It has kind of almost put on a makeup on our shortcomings because this is the bare minimum is recognizing the effects of this genocide. But look closely at the voices that have avoided directly engaging the agents of the political agents of the GCC and the other Muslim countries in general that have not only closed their eyes, but aided and abetted this process. And even in the current context, continue to oppose the agents that are opposing Israel and the United States empire policy. Now, you know, it's like, you know, I can't, you know, this is a silly, this is a more extreme example, but like just Mishari al-Afasi's recent nasheed that came out, you know, made God, you know, strike down the hand or, you know, curse the hand of Iran and the one that stands with Iran. And it's shocking, you know, like you could just say nothing. But the point is that you are an agent of empire. And so when we talk about justice, you want to say that his moral imperative of justice is about protecting Kuwaiti hotels. You thought that you can exist within this circumstance. You thought that the GCC can continue to flourish and make all this money and everyone continue to drink all the coffee and go on and have a great time while two miles away, people are being pulverized, literally. People are being disappeared by bombs where they can't even find the remains. We can't even do like an actual counting of bodies anymore. And now you've been mum on this for three years, and now you want to open up and do songs? Whoever is with Iran, we're against them. And that is a direct attack on the resistance in Palestine, which is also shameless. 100%. It's amazing that this is a more extreme example, but it's also covered up a lot of the speakers that are out there. You just throw on the kufiyah and then you continue with business as usual and say, Israel, you know, is an aggressor. Well, obviously, Israel is an aggressor. Can we get past some of this? This is scapegoating kind of the suffering of someone else by not actually engaging the centrality of justice. If justice is central to the Quran and Islam, which it is, then it's an imperative. It is an imperative. And so part of your questioning is about like, is justice a central organizing principle? One hundred percent. I mean, one hundred percent. I think that, you know, one of the central narratives of the Quran, this is my own personal, I guess, project, so to speak. I believe that when we return the Quran, the narratives are extremely important. And one of the narratives that I think is very elucidating about what the Quran is about is the reoccurring narrative of the fall of Adam and Satan and this whole kind of dynamic between Adam and Satan. And what's interesting is in Surah A'raf, there is this segment where Satan comes to Adam and Eve and essentially says, take from this tree and you can live forever or you can transcend, you can become greater than you are and misleads them. And they listen to him and they, and they do this. And then suddenly this is, it says the Quran says that Satan stripped them essentially of their clothing of light. He, he literally exacted a physical punishment on the body of Adam and Eve. And when he robbed them of this clothing, suddenly they became aware of the horror of material reality, which is, I'm hungry, I have urges, I'm cold, where will I be safe? All of these types of material considerations that would suddenly become the greatest test For humanity as it comes to earth, you know, this metaphysical being that has the breath of God, you know, this transcendent kind of being that now has to balance their, you know, the divine essence that lives within them alongside their material reality. Well, that makes justice an imperative. And to add to that narrative really quick, just to make this final point, what's amazing is that Shaitan devils down. He never apologizes. He says, I'm just going to continue to give you evidence about why these human beings are just slaves to the material. And what's amazing about Adam is he makes this mistake and he immediately amends and asks for forgiveness. He says, oh, my gosh, I've made a mistake. I've you know, I got sidetracked by this material kind of reality and this need for transcendence and this need for meaning. And I ask you for forgiveness, God. And God accepts this forgiveness. He says, I forgive you. And does something really amazing. That initial physical trauma of being stripped naked by Satan, God returns and says, I am going to give you beautiful clothing. In this instance, God reclothes Adam and amends him and Eve in this instance. And also... It empowers them to, from then on, engage in a trajectory of beauty. It says that beauty and beautifulness is at the very central nature of love and loss, so to speak. That dichotomy and that kind of dynamic between these two poles is really interesting. That with pain comes this impetus and this imperative for justice. There's a really interesting beauty behind that, where the trauma comes, and the trauma is the problem that exists in materiality, and then you respond to this materiality by an engagement in that which is truly divine, which is the reparations, the amending, the rejuvenation. You've gone through some of this horrible physical transformation. And then God comes and clothes you in beauty, you know, and gives you this libassu taqwa. He gives you this God-conscious clothing that you're going to carry with yourself, regardless of what you're wearing. You know, if you're a real Muslim, you are God-conscious. And God-consciousness is always about justice. It's always about setting the scales back to where they belong. That is the project. of the human being as charged by divinity. So when you ask me, is justice a central organizing principle? Is justice Islamic? Is justice, you know, a, a, a, a, you know, it is Islam. It is Islam.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that. So, You've answered my next question, but I do want to hear a response from you. Given what you said, that justice is Islam, there's no Islam without an understanding of justice, right? I guess the question becomes on people, how then do you recognise justice? Either in our contemporary age, or we recognise what is just in our contemporary age, and flip side of that, Can a ruling be considered Islamic if it is unjust?

Shayan Parsai: No, no. I mean, full stop, full stop. Islamic law is about resolving the issues of the people and offering them an answer to injustice. It is a response to injustice. God, we have to understand the oneness of God through this lens. The oneness of God is, yes, we come across problems, but problems are meant to be solved. That's what God wants. And that brings us closer to God. That's the search. That's the whole point of this whole thing is. Can we be kunu rabbanyoon? Can you be God-like? And what is being God-like? God-like is, you know, coming into a circumstance of inequity and solving these problems. Yeah, I mean, how do we think about these rulings?

Speaker 2: Yeah, these rulings, how do we recognize justice? And I guess what should the approach of Muslims be when they recognize something in the past that it disturbs them, right? Yeah, was it Islamic then? And no longer Islamic? Was it never Islamic? Gigi, I hope that question is a bit more clear.

Shayan Parsai: Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, there is a few things that we have to keep in mind when engaging this. The first thing is, we have to have a good opinion, a benefit of the doubt. First, that benefit of the doubt goes towards God. You cannot approach, I mean, I'm going to say, open up a parenthesis here very quickly. Approaching Islam and learning Islam and this sort of thing separate from pursuing God is not going to yield you results. not i guarantee you this first you are a seeker you know that's first and foremost so we need some sort of epistemic humility here uh as part of our modern conscious we're very arrogant as modern especially westerners our our base level is arrogance it has to be about seeking nearness and knowledge and proximity to god first and foremost Then when we have that set, we recognize the reality of commitments. You know, when you cast your glance and your view back into the past, you have to recognize that these are the remnants of the tradition that prove that you existed in a different time, that Islam existed in a different time, that the trajectory of Islamic ethics, you know, developed over time. So yes, in your current circumstances, if there is an imam or a sheikh or something that is clearly violating the well-established ethics of human consciousness in your own time, I have no problem. Get upset about it. You should get upset about it. But when you look backwards, you cannot back project the conclusions that we have come to in our context with all of the access that we have, with all of the extra privilege that we have.

Speaker 2: back onto people.

Shayan Parsai: You should, at minimum, try to reserve your judgment and understand some things are historical and they are mistakes. It's possible. We make mistakes now. Why should it be that the people of the past didn't make mistakes? You know, whether it was just at that time or whether it wasn't just at that time, we have to kind of take a benefit of the doubt approach that people probably tried or wanted to try to come to the ethical solution. Otherwise, you're throwing the tradition out. And then if you're someone that is not connected to a tradition, is connected to nothing at all, and then capitalism takes over again. We can't have that. We have to start doing things different. So part of that is, you know, how do we identify what is justice in different historical contexts is with this humility of understanding that they may have gotten it right and they may have gotten it wrong. What we need to do is to observe it. We need to observe it and take from it what we can see still matches our patterns. And the parts that come up short, either in their time or in our time, we have to recognize that that requires an amendment. And part of that also is recognizing is about being well read enough about history. You have to understand context. I mean, this is why we keep saying, you know, you can't just read history. Hadith or read from a legal horn book or what and then and then chat, you know You know shoot from the hip from there You have to understand if you're going to actually do this work if you're gonna actually do this work you have to really be humble and engage in in a lot of historical reading to kind of get into the consciousness of the historical context of the people who were engaging this material in the past. And that, likewise, is the same issue in the present. You can't help to be at the forefront of ethics if you don't know what's wrong in society. In order to understand what is wrong in society, you have to engage in the very best of scholarship that exists. And you cannot hide from things and say, well, I'm not going to read X writer because he's not a Muslim, or I'm not going to engage in liberalism or post-liberalism or in Marxism or communism or abolition or whatever it is. It doesn't matter. If you're unaware of the discourse, you can't offer anything. You can't offer anything. And the thing is that you have the responsibility of offering it. Because at the end of the day, God didn't charge the abolitionist or the Marxist or the, you know, whoever else with solving all of the problems. Who did he charge? He charged the Muslims. So that's part of the thing that like coming back again to your previous question about justice being a central pillar. It's like, My guys, everybody, listen up. This is a huge responsibility. You can't just keep hiding behind the dry adherence to ritual and hope that that's going to let you off the hook at the end of the day. So again, to bring all of these questions together and synthesize, that's another major responsibility that the scholars have, is to make people aware that we are responsible just... way beyond being Sharia compliant, so to speak, we are supposed to be at the forefront of these movements. And that requires reading. I mean, how many times is it like, it's shocking to me, like when I was first reading about Islam before going to the mosque, I read a lot from the writers and the scholars of the Iranian revolution. And I thought, when I go into the mosque, they're going to be talking about books. There's going to be seminars left and right. They're going to be reading contemporary thinkers. It's going to be like this intellectual milieu. And I'm like, wow, I can't believe I've been missing out on this in my whole life. And it's been a long time now, well over a decade or so. And I have not seen this happen once. And it's really shocking. It's probably really hard, you know, when we're here at the Asuli Institute to try and dip into this, you know, read as much as possible and share some of these gems because it's not about agreeing or not agreeing. It's about being relevant. You can't be relevant if you're not doing the reading and you're not engaging in the discourse. One last point on this. Other faith groups do this. Like the Catholics routinely have high level seminars where they're bringing in their top scholars and they are engaging really, really serious thinking within, you know, not just within Catholic thought, but within, you know, political philosophy, you know, politics. How are they going to shape the future? They're doing the work. And it's not like we don't have the capital and the material wealth to be able to help do that work. You know, people avoid going into academia because you can't find jobs. But somehow Catholics are in academia. The Jewish community is in academia. All kinds of other groups are in academia. But we don't support the scholar that goes into academia. And so therefore, the scholar thinks to themselves or the potential scholar thinks to themselves, well, I can't do this work because I can't pay the bills. So that that's a question of justice as well. Facts.

Speaker 2: And I think two things strike me in what you said. The first thing is like, what does it mean to be a Khalifa fil Arab? What does it mean to be Allah's vice-chairman, however you want to translate it, on earth, right? And I think what you elaborately said is that it's about putting things right, putting things in their proper places, and that is justice, right? And it's also, second thing you talk about, about There's almost, and this is where I'm actually going to come for a lot of scholars. I won't say names, but I am quite unforgiving in the cultivation of spaces that are deeply, and they only work and are reproduced because they rely on being anti-intellectual. I'm really frustrated because I think, you know, the first wonderful, in the Quran, you know, Iqra, I know people have issues with the authenticity of this hadith, but you know, seek knowledge all the way up until China, right? I know there's debate around authenticity, but again, we know that this tradition is one of knowledge. So I cringe when I see so many Muslim scholars' videos talking about feminism, talking about Marxism, talking about all these concepts, liberalism, and it's clear that either they haven't read this stuff or they have had very unfortunate experiences unfortunate approaches in the sense that their reading has not yielded anything because I'm thinking I have no issue with people disagreeing with anything that I say but I would always appreciate someone who engages me in what I put out and then say okay these are your assumptions I disagree with your level of assumptions I disagree with your epistemology here I disagree with the way in which you've read this particular thinker, that's rich. That's how knowledge is produced, otherwise knowledge becomes stagnant, right? If it's not going through stresses, if it's not being debated. But I think a lot of times what we call mainstream Islam, as you said, capitalism comes in there. It's been commodified. It's about the algorithm. It's about selling courses, etc., But what kind of human beings or Muslims are being cultivated, it's ones that I think that if I do this one wrong move, I'm going to be condemned. This is haram. I can't engage with this theory. If I read it, it's going to lead me off. It's going to lead me astray. And I think to myself, how insecure must people be about their faith or about Islam? That if you just poke one thing at you or you shine a light at it from this direction, somehow the whole Islamic project is going to become undone or unraveled. I find it very strange, very strange kind of approach. Because I know for me, I have, not to say my faith doesn't wax and wane. I think everyone's does. But alhamdulillah, for the most part, I have conviction in Allah and that in my faith. So I'm not afraid of reading anything new, thinking that it's going to come and undo my faith in some way. But yeah, I think, let's wrap up. Because, yeah, but I do have my final questions. I think you pretty much answered a lot of the questions I had anyway, to be fair, so thank you. But I'll say my final one would be, if someone then now wants to begin engaging the Quran seriously, but engaging it in the ways in which we have spoken about, engaging the Quran in a way which centers justice, and engaging in a way of the Quran which refuses hierarchical positioning of human beings on gender, on race, sexuality, whatever it may be, How does someone come to the Quran in this way? What advice are you going to give? What tips are there?

Shayan Parsai: That's an amazing question. The first thing that I'd say is intention and purity are very central. Intention and purity. The Quran is, you know, really magical. And sometimes to be able to access like a magical thing, you kind of have to pay a toll. You have to show that you're prepared to sacrifice. And here the sacrifice that you have to make is ego, and in a very specific way. There's like an istikbar versus istighfar kind of dynamic, like going back to that kind of eternal struggle between Adam and Satan, you know. Adam makes a mistake, becomes aware of the mistake, and he immediately amends and admits, right? But Satan just doubles down and, you know, carries the weight of that same thought process. You can't get through the gate of knowledge that the Qur'an has without humility. And humility is a key component of repentance. You have to meet yourself and say, okay, I'm going to take an inventory of all my life. I need to recognize, this is again back to the idea of why justice is so central. You have to hold yourself accountable. You have to do your due diligence and recognize where you've come up short ethically. This isn't about like the technicalities of halal and haram. It's about your own internal, intuitive, moral, you know, like nafs, your own self, your own consciousness that is able to tell where was I being unfair? And you admit it and where you can, you amend it. And then, you know, after that process, you take a personal accounting regularly. It should be almost daily, you know. And you're really meeting yourself. And then that creates two things. One, it creates a pattern within yourself of practice that avoids injustice because you've recognized the propensities and proclivities that you have and your culture has towards injustices. And this goes back again to that question of how do we recognize injustice? Part of it is in recognizing ourselves. You need a moral empathy that develops by being muraqib, by being vigilant over your own behavior. Empathy is huge. You need to be able to see how does somebody else, how would somebody else have felt if they were on the other side of things. And on the other side is humility. When you are prepared to admit to yourself where you have come up short in terms of ethical and diligent behavior and etiquette and whatever, then. you naturally begin to chop away at the structure of arrogance because you're being humble enough to take inventory of yourself. This is the first thing. When that happens, then you've kind of achieved the ritual purity or you have to continue to engage in this ritual purity when you approach the Qur'an. The next thing that I'll say is a lot of the early revelation has psychological pattern recognition within the text. It's in the text. It's very often that it brings up, يَا أَيُّهَا الْإِنسَانُ Oh, human being. Okay, so it's not saying... you know, someone who is, or it says, you know, the human being tends to do X, or the human being tends to do Y. Why is this important? Because that is inspiring confidence in you about the Qur'an's applicability in your current circumstances. The Qur'an and God recognize that human beings are essentially sophisticated patterns. There may be things that change in your immediate circumstances in terms of material reality. Sometimes you can move faster from point A to B, sometimes you can move slower, but it still comes with its own ethical challenges. So what I would say is a focus at first ought to be on some of these earlier revelations that talk about these timeless human kind of psychological patterns of difficulties. Like here is the type of psychological profile that that God wants from you, that expects from you, that is moral and ethical timelessly. And then here is a timeless archetype of the type of human being who is constantly dodging accountability. And I would say that's another major principle or another major pillar of Islam. is accountability. And it's really in the Fatiha. Part of the methodology of the Tafseer is that we say that the Fatiha is really the key. The first chapter of the Qur'an is really the key of the Qur'an. It kind of spells out for you the real major elements of the Qur'an. And accountability is is one of those. When you recognize that God is the sovereign and the entity, the reality, the existence that is responsible ultimately for the accounting of judgment, then you recognize that your existence as a moral agent is about holding yourself accountable. And then after holding yourself accountable, holding existence accountable to an ethical, divine reality, divine-based existence. So yeah, this is what I would say. And then obviously, beyond the self-promotion, I don't think it can qualify as that, but I believe that the best place to do this is... by coming to the Tefsir, the Project Illumine Tefsir series that we have, and supplemented it both with the Sira, because the Sira really brings the stories to light that are often kind of like ignored, No. And, you know, just the other day we were recording an episode and the sheikh brought up this really great point. And a lot of people know the story of Jafar ibn Abi Talib, Imam Ali's brother, who did the hijrah to Abyssinia. He went to Abyssinia during the persecution and they moved there and they were talking to the Najashi, the king of the Abyssinians. And he started quoting from the khutbah, the sermon that Ja'far was giving about what Muslims are about. And he gives this long khutbah about how Muslims are about equity, Muslims are about taking care of the orphan, Muslims are about helping the widow, Muslims are about setting right what has gone out of balance, essentially illustrating the whole idea of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil. And then he caps it off, and Muslims also pray, and Muslims also fast, and Muslims also do ritual observances. Which is fascinating, because some of the early surahs, like for example, Surah al-Muzammid, we know that before the formalized prayer, the ritual prayer was instituted, that the Prophet and his closest companions, his earliest companions, were spending a third of the night or more in intense remembrance and dhikr and worship. Now imagine if that was their relationship towards a unsanctioned, like specific ritual performance of worship. And then he said that last in comparison to the ethical responsibility of a Muslim identity that really just... leaves one kind of gobsmacked about how these two things are absolutely integrally linked. They cannot be separated. So that is what we're about. And I think so investigating these sources and going through the Tafsir and going through the Sira really invokes a confidence in the Muslim community. That, okay, now I really know what this is about. And I can really connect to what Ja'far is talking about. What is the essence of Islam? And you can say like, this, this is the essence. This is the essence. So yeah, I think that that conviction grows in you and then the Quran becomes a companion for you.

Speaker 2: I think that's such a beautiful way to end out. So my brother, my teacher, thank you so much for joining me. And once again, it's not a self-promotion because I do the same all the time in terms of checkout or sort of institute. Check out Sheikh Khalifatullah. Check out Imam Shahi Haasai. And honestly, people till today, not to say I have no issue with this, but my DMs are always bombarded and I can't get to everyone. So if you are someone that asks a question of where to start with Islam, you have the Usuli Institute as a place to start. Inshallah. Take care.