Transcript for:
Exploring Islam with Dr. Khalil Andani

I am Cameron bertuzzi welcome to capturing Christianity Today we're talking about Islam and I've noticed actually this is one of the reasons for this stream today is that I've noticed that Islamic apologetics or Islamic debates and everything they're starting to show up more in my my YouTube home feed and so I thought it would be helpful to give those of you who are just not super familiar with the different say denominations that exist within Islam the different sects or just the different beliefs that Muslims hold I thought it would be very beneficial to have Dr Khalil andanian to uh to give you guys a sort of overview he's got a presentation he's going to give today but it's uh it's going to be sort of overview he's given this talk before in his lectures and stuff he's an assistant professor of religion where he teaches but uh again yeah I just thought it would be really helpful to give a sort of broad overview of what Islam teaches some of the different denominations and so um I'm actually really excited for this I was introduced to Dr andani well sort of in person I mean he and I have been Facebook friends for a little while but the first time that he was on capturing Christianity was just a few weeks ago at this point where he was having a conversation around Easter with Dr David wood and it was it was really great discussion and Dr andani gave me a lot of things to think about I thought it was great and since then I've listened to some other things that he's done online and he seems to just be great guy with some good information so I thought it would be very very beneficial very valuable to bring him on and to uh to do a dialogue with him on this topic and I think again it should be hopefully should be very informative for you if you're you know I mean even as a Christian growing up a Christian I I didn't have a whole lot personally of interactions with Muslims or really kind of figuring out what they believed and how do the hadiths work how does the Quran work how how do all those things intertwined and so um hopefully that's what we can provide for you today so with that Dr Khalil would you mind just giving a quick 60-second introduction about who you are for for people that are just kind of coming and learning about you for the first time sure so uh my name is Khalil and Dani I currently am an assistant professor of religion at Augustana College which is a liberal arts college in Illinois and I completed a PhD in Islamic Studies along with two master's degrees in Islamic Studies from Harvard University I completed that about two three years ago and I am a scholar of the history of religion by profession I focus on Islam so sometimes I describe my field as Islamic Studies uh and my job is to basically research uh investigate write about the historical development of Islam and in addition to that I also participate in an adjacent uh academic field called the philosophy of religion where people of religious and non non-religious affiliations uh you know rationally examine and scrutinize different points of religious belief so that's a field that I've also recently been participating in and um yeah I'm very happy to be here thank you so much uh Cameron for inviting me in for having sort of the open-mindedness to talk about other religions uh on on your channel which obviously is very focused on you know Christian Theology and history and so this channel is is it's been a great resource uh even for people like me um who don't I don't work on Christianity and sometimes when I need like a very sort of quick uh review of what's going on in in a certain subfield of Christian theology or philosophy I can just find the big names as get as your guests so it's very helpful to me yeah well I was thinking about the the way that this because because our mission at capturing Christianity is to expose the intellectual side of Christian beliefs so someone that's watching this might be wondering well how does that actually like doing doing a show on Islam how does that actually factor into the overall mission of of the channel so the goal is to expose the intellectual side of Christian belief but what I see I mean a sort of side or maybe a related goal would be to raise the sort of um level of dialogue in religion more generally so I would love to expose people to critical thinking not just within Christianity but also within Islam because just like uh I mean something that I've learned doing apologetics and studying Philosophy for all these years is that you can get very very deep and very rigorous very quickly and a lot of the objections that you have or you might have had in the past against some religious belief system um upon closer scrutiny you can find ways of responding to it in different ways that people have thought about this for you know even thousands of years different ways to interpret Genesis and the same is true for Islam and so what I want to do as someone who is you know I I'm a Christian apologist so I think that Christianity is true obviously but um what I want to encourage people to do is interact with the best versions of the views that you disagree with so don't just interact with like you know online or new atheism interact with the actual atheist philosophers like grandmapi and Paul Draper and I think the same is true for or for Islam but again the the overall sort of goal for capturing Christianity is to raise the level of dialogue for uh religion more more generally or that that's at least a related goal of what we what we aim to do here so that's that's sort of how it fits in um I'm even wearing a shirt that says by the way God exists you can't really see it on the screen but um I I have shirts that say by the way Christianity is true and that's that's one of our slogans but I don't want to wear it in this stream I don't want to turn off any of our viewers or any of our Muslim viewers that are that are tuning into this show today so um but I wore something that we both agree on that God exists so but Dr andani go ahead and take it away we'll we'll get directly into your your presentation and then hopefully I won't be interacting too much if I do have questions I'll let you know but at this point you feel free to take it away well you you feel free to interrupt me um you know at any time and and we'll just keep an eye on the clock and if we have to cover more ground we can we could minimize Interruption but you just feel free to do that so let me begin um by just situating sort of what I'm doing here uh and this will help your viewers as well so a lot of people are not aware that in the world today you can study religion in at least two different ways uh that is two completely different methods to study religion uh and those are known as the academic study of Religion and the theological study of Religion uh and I just want to very quickly tell you what these are uh and and then that'll help people understand sort of what what we're doing here and also what your channel does generally right so what your viewers uh your average person whether they go to church or synagogue or mosque what they're familiar with is actually called the theological study of Religion uh what does that mean well the theological study of Religion is when you study religion as a person of faith right you bring your faith and your belief and you study religion because you want to find out the objective truth about that religion and you want to better understand your own faith so that's called theological study uh there are institutions where people do this professionally so if anybody knows what a Divinity School is right uh we have um seminaries in the U.S Christian seminaries we have Bible colleges and also um even if anyone who goes to Sunday school like when you learn your Christian denomination in Sunday school you're studying it as a Christian right or when a Muslim goes to Sunday school or Saturday school the Muslim will learn about Islam as a Muslim so that's what the theological study of Religion is and the important thing to know about theological study is that it is prescriptive like you're studying because you want to know what the truth the ultimate truth is uh and basically many people who are religious will undergo this type of study right so this channel capturing Christianity all in all this channel is about the theological study of Christianity like you guys are studying Christianity as Christians right many of your speakers freely bring up their Christian points of view you draw on your Christian faith to interpret sources evidence and so on uh and often the theological study of Religion is sectarian that is to say it's quite normal to privilege the Viewpoint of one sect or one denomination over others where you would say Okay Catholicism is the true interpretation or somebody else might say no the Lutheran is the true interpretation and the other thing about this is that this is still a fully intellectual Enterprise so I call it it's critical and committed uh you still ask critical questions you still try to base things on reasoned argument you still try to base things on evidence but the questions you are answering is is this objectively true if in your case you would be asking is Christianity true and how do we prove it right on a Muslim version of this channel like blogging theology they're asking is Islam true and can we prove it right so that's what the theological study is about now we also have in the world today another way of studying religion which is known as the academic study of Religion and in the academic study of Religion uh you basically study religion but you don't take a faith-based or a religious point of view you try to take a neutral point of view that is a view that is neutral in relation to a particular religion it's not absolutely neutral because there's no such thing as absolute neutrality but from the perspective of religious claims you can try to be neutral so this is known as the academic study of Religion and in the academic study of Religion they're not actually trying to tell you whether a given religion is true or false that's not their job the academic study of Religion is descriptive which is in contrast to the theological study which is prescriptive right in theology you make an argument you say this is the true perspective on atone or the resurrection and you make an argument to argue for that claim in the academic study of Religion they don't make arguments about religious truths their job is to just describe religious truths as people understand them so the academic study of Religion if I take Islam as the example it's not about whether Islam is true or false it's not about whether um you know God exists or not but it is about what do Muslims believe and what do Muslims practice and how do Muslims understand a particular issue and it's about describing that accurately across time and space and we could replace the word Muslim with Christian right so I often ask my class I pose questions and I ask them okay is this an academic question or is this a theological question the academic studies religion is very concerned with history so most historical questions are part of the academic study of Religion so for example uh did Jesus Christ exist like was he a real person or was he a myth this question is a purely academic question anybody can investigate this question you don't have to be a Christian to explore that question right another question uh was Jesus Christ crucified by the Romans this is an academic question another example what did the first Christians believe what did the first Christians believe this is actually an academic question what did Muslims believe in the year 900 this is also an academic question so I'm bringing this up because it is quite possible for a person to academically study a religion whether it's Islam or Christianity and not practice or believe in that religion this is a very very important point and so this is what I would say that we have many authors uh and you could be a religious person and study at religion academically or you can be non-religious it doesn't really matter so you have academic books on Christianity and Islam that take this academic approach they're not trying to prove these religions but they are trying to accurately describe the developments Within These religions some of these books are written by Christians some of some very good academic uh authors on Islam happen to be Christians okay like Daniel Madigan he's a professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown he's also a Christian he's a Catholic priest but he's a very good academic right um and and vice versa so you can have the study of a religion uh on academic grounds exploring questions of History culture literature development and you don't have to believe in that religion so nobody should be afraid just because you're Christian and now you're hearing uh talk about Islam it doesn't mean that the speaker is trying to convert you to Islam and the what we need to realize and I would argue that these two three bullet points at the bottom of the screen this is something that everybody academic and Theological should be aware of we need to remember that all religions are internally diverse So within one religion Hinduism Buddhism Islam Christianity there are actually multiple versions of the same religion okay empirically speaking that doesn't mean that now uh we have to believe all the versions are equally true but I'm just saying as a matter of history there are multiple christianities there are multiple Islams there are multiple judaisms number two all religions evolve over time so the current form of a given religion if you go back 500 years chances are the form of Chris of Catholicism you see right now the form of Sunni Islam you see right now it didn't exist in the same form 500 years ago and a lot of people don't like to hear this because they think that means there's something false but that's not true that would be committing the genetic fallacy right just because religious ideas evolve over time it doesn't mean that they're not from God anymore okay because religious ideas evolving over time are just about the knowledge of the members of that religion and how much the community knows at a given time and then the community can discover more about that religion you know later on so all religions evolve over time and we need to be careful not to back project a religious idea or a practice from one era and project it back one thousand years as if it existed back then when it didn't exist and finally all religions have evolved together and in conversation so it may be a surprise to some of your readers or your viewers but in the first two centuries of Islam so from the 600s to the 800s to the 900s uh you had Arab Christian theologians Living in the Muslim empire and they would be writing in Arabic and them and the Muslim authors use very similar terminology and they were sort of debating And discussing their ideas together uh maimonides whose most prominent Jewish philosopher he grew up in a Muslim environment he wrote in Arabic and he was very influenced by what other Islamic philosophers were saying about God and the Soul Thomas Aquinas probably the most famous Catholic philosopher today was heavily influenced by IBN Cena who was a Muslim philosopher again I'm not saying all this to delegitimize anything I'm just saying this is a historical fact that all these religions have been in conversation because religions whether you believe God is guiding humans and their understanding of religion or whether you don't religions are interpreted by individuals by humans and humans interact with one with one others so human interpretations of religion interact with one another so those are just the caveats now let me be very clear where I'm coming from I am confessionally a muslim okay that that is my faith and my commitments I'm a she ismaili Muslim that's a minority of of minority branch of Islam that is my confessional stance and I'm not shy about that however I am thoroughly trained in the academic study of Religion I teach at a college from an academic perspective my masters and phds are all within the academic study of Religion so I have the ability to talk about Islam specifically and Christianity from an academic point of view right where I'm not trying to sort of convert people when I teach about Islam to my students I'm not trying to make them Muslim right or if I'm teaching about Christianity to my students which I also do I'm not trying to make them Christian nor am I trying to to tell them Christianity is wrong so I'm trained in these methods as a teacher and a scholar and everything I'm going to say to with Cameron today in today's episode I'm going to take an academic perspective so I'm not here to promote one version of Islam I'm not even here to promote Islam per se I'm not here as a missionary that's not the type of the work that I do I'm here as an academic and I'm gonna try to give you a thick sympathetic but historically accurate description of what we're talking about so uh with that I can sort of move forward but Cameron did you have any input at this point uh no I'm just gonna say you're not you're not coming here as uh one of the dawa guys yeah exactly so um let me give another example right uh a lot of the YouTube channels on Christianity and Islam uh and again I don't mean any offense by this but Cameron's channel uh pints with the quietness you know there's all these Christian channels and then we have Muslim channels which call themselves dawa channels all of those are approaching religion from a theological point of view which is completely fine by the way right that's a fully legitimate way of doing religion but that is different from the academic study of Religion where people like me come from does that mean that I don't I don't do theology at all no I have done some theology but I even the theology that I do happens in an academic space so for example we have a field in the philosophy of religion uh where people of different religions make theological claims okay so if you you guys all know William William Lane Craig for example you know Joshua sejawave has been on this channel um you've had uh like Oliver I think you've had I don't know if you've had Oliver crisp and Tim I've not had crisp okay I don't know Rob Coons right Edward phaser so who are these people these people are philosophers of religion right uh they make theological claims but for the most part they don't say this is the truth because the Bible says it they argue on they argue it rationally so that's a kind of theology it's also known as analytic Theology and there's a space for that so I participate in that space so if you want to know my theological views you can check that out however my primary role professionally is to teach the academic study of Religion and that's how I'm gonna approach uh what we're doing here so um I want to just give a summary okay this is a this is a presentation we're gonna spend about an hour or something things are going to go over people's head so I just want to summarize if if there was a way to talk about Islam in a holistic way right and again as a descriptive Endeavor not not as a here to convince anybody but if we had to describe Islam as it's evolved for 1400 years and the way Islam looks today um I would use this model so there is a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad that is not in the Quran but it's found in a secondary literature called the Hadith okay the Hadith are a collection of reports about what prophet Muhammad said and did there are many different versions of Hadith and different communities have their own Hadith but based on one very famous Hadith this is usually what many Sunni Muslims learn first there's a certain way to talk about Islam which is known as the three dimensions of religion okay so according to this Hadith the prophet Muhammad said that the religion consists of three levels okay and those three levels are called Islam a word which means submission the second level is called Iman which means faith and the third level which is the deepest level is called isan which means virtue or goodness or beauty it's hard to translate it and basically when the prophet Muhammad was asked about the nature of the religion that he taught he specifically said that this religion consists of these three dimensions now what what does each Dimension actually contain what does it require so the word Islam in this diagram I'm not talking about Islam as a world religion now I'm talking about a very technical notion of Islam which just means submission so in this three-dimensional framework Islam is defined as following God's laws so for example praying regularly every single day for most muslims praying five times a day fasting in the month of Ramadan going to Mecca at least once in your life for pilgrimage giving a portion of your wealth to the less fortunate known as zakah Islam in this framework is defined in those terms a set of do's and don'ts okay so that's what we would call the legal dimension of religion and over Muslim history that dimension of religion which is following God's laws has been institutionalized as an entire science called fic or jurisprudence so anytime a Muslim has a question of a do or a don't am I allowed to do this what is mandatory for me to do what is forbidden all of those questions are part of the First Dimension the law God's law and let me just say there are multiple interpretations of what this consists of okay between shias and sunnis and ismailis and other groups but the point is the following God's law is just the first dimension of the religion okay now there's another dimension because religion is not just about do's and don'ts right you may follow the do's and don'ts perfectly but you all know religion is more than that the whole other part of religion is known as faith and here Faith would be belief in God in God's prophets and in various articles of Faith such as the Angels the day of judgment some Muslims will add predestination into that list of beliefs uh there's a set of Articles of belief that a Muslim has to believe in and when I say belief I don't mean like passive belief like many people today if you ask them do you believe in climate change they'll say yes but they won't be able to prove anything about climate change they'll still litter they won't recycle right so by belief here I mean convicted belief conviction so the belief that you're convinced of so the second dimension of the Islamic religion is Faith or conviction conviction belief and this is the realm institutionally of Theology and philosophy okay so there's an entire genre of Islamic writing where people are proving the existence of God they're proving prophethood they're proving or they TR they argue for the resurrection of the body the immateriality of the human soul all of this is part of Theology and philosophy and it belongs to the second dimension known as Faith or belief finally the third dimension of Islam is called isan or virtue and this Dimension is deeper than the first two in fact this is the goal of the Islamic religion okay like if we had to say what is the point of being a Muslim like why would anybody want to practice the religion of Islam in any given manifestation the goal is to develop isan which means virtue or beauty and what that basically means is to purify the human soul by reflecting the Divine names or the character traits of God that are possible for humans to emulate so this is often associated with what we today call spirituality or mysticism and this refers to a level of the religion of Islam that is focused on remembering God purifying the self of vices purifying the self of sin filling yourself with the love of God and ultimately for some of people who practice isan the ability to see God everywhere and even attain a sort of mystical Union with God okay and institutionally speaking this type this third level of the religion of Islam has been manifested as Sufism Sufism referring to the mystical traditions of Islam so if we were to summarize the entire religion of Islam over 1400 years in the different forms that it takes this three-dimensional framework would be the one that I would use and I'm not saying that every single Muslim now equally focuses on these three okay in practice there are some Muslims who are very obsessed with God's law and that's really all they care about there are others who are very focused on Theology and philosophy and there are others that are very focused on the third dimension so every Muslim will prioritize these differently but over history the third dimension isan manifested as Sufism over history this has been a very very strong part of Islam there was a point where the absolute majority of Muslims in addition to the first two levels participated in the third dimension of isan today what we are seeing when we people talk about political Islam and establishing Islamic nation states that is very much a preoccupation with just a small part of the First Dimension and ideally a Muslim whether Shia or Sunni ideally a Muslim will want to balance and actualize all three of these domains and if there was a again this is just for summary purposes right if there was a way to summarize what what does it mean to be a Muslim that has stood for all time I would refer to a particular verse of the Quran this is chapter 2 verse 177. and this verse says and I quote in English goodness does not consist in turning your face towards East or West the truly good are those who believe in God and the last day and in the angels in the scripture and the prophets who give away some of their wealth however much they cherish it to their relatives to orphans the needy The Travelers and the Beggars and to liberate those in bondage those who keep up the prayer and pay the prescribed alms who keep pledges whenever they make them who are steadfast and Misfortune adversity and Times of danger these are the ones who are true and it is they who are aware of God this is one verse of the Quran but it's an important verse because it's what we call a summer it's a summative verse it basically summarizes in one verse all the important things that a Muslim should be focusing on and here you notice that a lot of what's listed here could fall into one of these three So It Begins by saying those who believe in God in the last day and the angels this is talking about Iman Faith then it talks about people doing uh Good Deeds virtue which falls into the third dimension and then it mentions prayer and zakah which are ritual required rituals in the First Dimension and once anyone who's integrated all three they are called those who are aware of God so if if there's one takeaway today if you miss the rest of the presentation or fall asleep I would say if best to the best of my ability this is like a summary of Islam as a religion and a way of life so I can pause here Cameron if you had any questions comments at this point no I I don't actually uh I think this is really helpful though I mean I've I've listened to some audiobooks on Islam just laying out kind of the the different denominations and and beliefs and everything but I haven't seen it summarized in this way where you're sort of you've got these these three different ways of of living so I think it's very helpful yeah this is actually um this is even how it's taught traditionally like this this idea is one of the earliest things that Muslims learn even from a traditional education point of view and there are some textbooks in the western Academy that also use this that's why I use it all right so now um we can go into you know some very very specific things so let's just talk very again I'm going to be very basic today I'm showing you guys the same slides I show my students right students who like take a religion 101 course so if some of the audience finds that this is very basic that is the point but um I you know if we do later shows I can happily discuss more complex theological issues like the is the Quran created or uncreated and are God's attributes distinct from him I'm all about that but basic education so what does the word mean um the word Islam as many people know means submission or Surrender a secondary meaning According to some scholarship is that Islam also means monotheistic tradition the Muslim is a person who does Islam so interestingly Islam is a verb it's not really a noun right the word Islam is is really a verb it's an act of of doing something so a Muslim is one who does that act the one who submits to God the one who surrenders to God and secondarily a Muslim is anyone who is a monotheist we can talk about that in a few moments now the way we use the word Islam Today in the 21st century right and since the last two three hundred years is we refuse the word Islam for our world religion right so we have multiple religions so in the current meaning Islam is a religion that is not Christianity and it is not Judaism and there are two billion Muslims in the world today approximately as we don't have exact figures but there's almost 2 billion now Muslims are very diverse we're going to talk about how diverse they are but there are two principles that all Muslims have in common at the level of belief all Muslims believe that there is exactly one God who creates sustains and governs the universe all creation and all Muslims believe that Muhammad is the messenger or the prophet the Emissary of that one God apart from those beliefs you will find the two billion Muslims disagree on a lot of stuff and we'll talk about a little bit of that but these are the two core beliefs and um there was a time you know when the word Islam had a much wider meaning than this particular religious tradition but today when somebody says Islam we're referring to a rarefied religious tradition that has evolved for the last 1400 years so when I talked about the three dimensions here these are a description of the evolved religion of Islam okay which is not Judaism not Christianity and so on okay now if we go back one note that I wanna one thing I wanted to note is that on the original definitions that you give of Islam and Muslim it seems like a a Christian or Jew could fall under those definitions yes that's very good so let's talk about that um what is the earlier definition of Islam because there is one right and for that we have to trace back back 1400 years and we have to go to okay what we call historical Islam which is the world religion right where does it come from so historical Islam has evolved from the mission and the teaching of a particular individual Muhammad the son of Abdullah known to us as the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and his family and the historical Muhammad lived in 7th Century Arabia he was born approximately in the year 570 and he died in the year 632. uh we do have an entire field about the historical Muhammad okay uh and that's a whole issue in itself but we have very good grounds to know that there was a historical Muhammad he was a person who lived in this environment in 7th Century Arabia he did preach he did claim to be a prophet or a messenger of God and the primary source that we have of Muhammad again from a historical perspective is the Quran the Quran although today it is a written document right the written document contains the words that Muhammad historically recited over 20 years so from a historical perspective the text of the Quran is the words that Muhammad uttered and preached it is Akin it's not exactly this but it is as if we had the sermons of someone who preached 1400 years ago so the Quran as a historical document you don't have to believe that the Quran is from God to be with me on this but the Quran has a historical document can basically be validated as originating from the mission of Muhammad and the Quran represents what Muhammad believed and what he taught it echoes because it's it's a 20-year recitation it echoes many of the historical incidences and happenings that happened over Muhammad's Mission uh so the Quran is a very important document just for historians on the origins of Islam and if we if we use the Quran as our primary source that we can look at later sources because we have a lot of later sources about Muhammad as well there are sources written 100 years after Muhammad 200 years 300 years we have to be more skeptical of that right just like when we want to study the historical Jesus Cameron maybe you know this what would be our best source for his the historical Jesus like what would we go to uh well I mean apart from the Epistles it'd be the Gospels yeah we would go to the synoptic gospels right because the synoptic gospels Mark Matthew Luke those are written you know within decades of the historical Jesus right uh so we have an analog of that when it comes to the historical Muhammad and origins of Islam the Quran uh according to the you know the majority of academic research the Quran was put to paper in an official book around the year 650. this is what all the latest historical research on the Quran has shown so the document that we have the text of the Quran that we have today that are you find in in Arabic these are copies of copies of copies of a official Quran transcript that was written around the year 650 and for people who are interested the latest research on this one one article is by Dr Van puten it's titled the grace of God there's another research paper written by Dr uh by haitham sitki uh also about the compilation of the Quran so apart from a few dissenters the vast majority of Scholars of Islamic Origins and Islamic Studies agree that the Quran as a text was compiled around the year 650. now just do some math that is within 20 years of the death of Muhammad right so that's a great source and we can tell about what Muhammad taught basically from the Quran we have one other document from this era that has sort of survived known as the constitution of Medina but we don't need to get into that today so if we based our analyzes on the Quran as our primary source now some people will say oh but what about all the Hadith right uh well the Hadith from a historian's perspective are not a primary source why because they're not a primary source because the writing down of Hadith is separated from the historical Muhammad by 150 to 200 years if not more so Hadith books like bukhari Muslim tirmity IBN Maja Abu dawood these are the names of Sunni Hadith books these Hadith books are written in the 800s and the 900s the historical Muhammad lived in the 600s so that's a 200 year separation so a historian does not really use the Hadith for information on the historical Muhammad they don't really help now on the other hand when we talk about this maybe a bit in a bit a traditional Sunni Muslim does rely on their Hadith however they still look at the Hadith critically because the Hadith in terms of whether a Hadith is actually true or not there is still doubts about that the best type of Hadith from a Sunni theological perspective is Hadith that means the Hadith is mass transmitted most Hadith don't meet that criteria anyway so even then there's a bit of an issue but if you're looking at this historically let's say you're not a Muslim or maybe you are a Muslim but if you're not Sunni and you don't use the Sunni Hadith and you just want to know what did this person named Muhammad teach what did this person believe in what did he preach the Quran is your primary source so to summarize what did Muhammad teach well according to John Esposito who is a a well-known academic of Islam Muhammad from Muhammad's point of view Islam was not a new religion Muhammad did not come and say I'm starting a new religion I'm calling it Islam sign up here Muhammad believed that there was one God who created and sustains and governs everything and that human beings have always been intended by God to recognize and worship this one God and that over time human beings just forgot about the Oneness of God and instead worshiped Idols or worshiped you know their own egos so when Muhammad preached when he talked about Islam he didn't use Islam as the name of a brand new religion he used Islam in the technical sense of the act of surrendering to the one true God so according to John Esposito Muhammad maintained that he did not bring a new message from a new God but called people back to the one true God and to a way of life that most of his contemporaries had forgotten or deviated from so in the historical Muhammad's View and in the view of the Quran Islam is just a generic term for surrendering yourself to the one God who created and sustains you right like that that's all it means um but compared to the people of Muhammad's own time many of them worshiped Idols in this is 7th Century Arabia so for the idol worshipers this is like a radical thing and I I describe Muhammad's message as an ethical activist monotheism so it's not enough to just worship God right that's That's essential but it's essential to follow what God has commanded people to do and stay away from what God has prohibited so there's a lot a legal Dimension uh justice is very important much of the Quran is criticizing 7th Century Arabian society for uh bearing their daughters the infanticide uh for uh not taking care of women for not taking care of the poor so there is a social ethical Dimension to the monotheism that Prophet Muhammad taught it's not just about belief it's also about righteous action much of the Quran is a struggle against certain Pagan groups that tried to oppress and persecute the monotheists so it's also about establishing a just ethical Society where all monotheists Jews and Christians included can freely worship God much of the Quran is concerned about establishing that type of society and defending churches and mosques and synagogues from being attacked by the pagans of that time so the thing about this idea of Islam that you find in the Quran and in in the views of the historical Muhammad is that Islam is just a monotheistic tradition in that original meaning some people call it prophetic monotheism so according to the Quran Muhammad is the last in a long line of Messengers or prophets from God who go back to Adam right and many of these uh I don't have all the names here but many of the prophets the Quran recognizes as preaching the worship of the one God many of those are biblical prophets Adam Noah Abraham Isaac Jacob Joseph Jesus Moses David Solomon uh many of many of these are prophets shared between the Bible and the Quran so Islam in its original sense from a historical perspective just saw itself or it was seen by Muhammad as a restorative monotheism not as some brand new religion and to be honest I would say the same thing about the historical Jesus so if you ask a historical Jesus scholar did Jesus of Nazareth preach a new religion called Christianity everybody will say no Jesus did not preach a new religion called Christianity Jesus preached an interpretation of the Israelite religion which he believed that as God's representative he had the correct understanding of that and then what happens in both cases of Muslims and Christians is that the teachings of these figures are institutionalized interpreted by communities and then later they're given this label as a new religion and that's just an entirely natural thing so from the perspective of the Quran and from the perspective of early Islam and there's again there's academic research to show that this is what the belief was the Quran understands monotheism as particularly manifest with Abraham the Quran appeals to Abraham as the model of monotheism uh and the Quran recognizes multiple sort of covenants with the family of Abraham that God established now in the Bible you guys will be familiar if you read Genesis God told Abraham I will make you a great nation and then God told Jacob I will make you a great nation and that great nation is understood to be the nation of Israel right the Israelites the 12 tribes God sends many prophets to the 12 tribes Moses is like you know one of the major ones they're more prophets from a Christian perspective as you know Jesus is the culmination of that Covenant with between God and Israel right now that's one perspective from the quranic perspective this is all affirmed by the way the Israelite Covenant it's fully affirmed in the Quran from a quranic perspective there was also another Covenant made with Abraham's Elder son his firstborn son Ishmael and the descendants of Ishmael you can find Echoes of this in the Genesis narrative right in Genesis we still read God told Hagar that he will make Ishmael into a great nation God told Abraham he will make Ishmael to a great nation so there are echoes of this but from the quranic perspective there is a covenant with Isaac Jacob and with Ishmael and from the quranic perspective the culmination of the abrahamic ishmaelite Covenant is the coming of Muhammad who is the last prophet and therefore what we call Islam in a sense would be the great nation of Ishmael now of course Jews and Christians don't believe in this side of the Covenant but what I'm trying to illustrate here is that what the Quran is doing and what Muhammad taught is not a negation of the biblical judaic and Christian understanding it is rather a reinterpretation and complement to that biblical Heritage that's what's going on right it's sort of like reconceptualizing what was there before uh and situating Muhammad and his mission as built in to this system it actually reminds me a lot of descriptive descriptive here right on sort of how how does the Quran and early Islam understand this yeah it reminds me a lot of the way that you're describing it reminds me a lot of the the Protestant Reformation it was this sort of getting us back to at least a lot of Protestants uh informed sort of academic type Protestants will say that you know this Protestant Reformation was trying to get the church back on track so to speak and so it kind of sounds like that's what you're saying here this was this was Muhammad's goal was that he wanted to get all of the abrahamic religions back on track um and you know this idea of restoring something to its origin if you think about this most pre-modern religious figures articulated their work in this way right Jesus said something very similar Jesus criticized the Pharisees and other groups for not following Moses right for adding their own stuff and many of the Israelite prophets would criticize their contemporaries for deviating from what God had originally revealed or decreed so this is a very common idea and it's only in modern times where being novel is seen as a good thing right most pre-modern projects are always couched as okay we're going to restore this you know you guys messed up somewhere we're gonna restore it so this is what the Quran is doing uh and one does not have to believe in any of this to recognize and understand what is going on right because when you want to study your religion you want to study a religion with empathy at least this is what I teach my students uh the approach I take and I'm I'm a Muslim but I teach about multiple religions I have I have to learn and study Christianity and teach about Christianity do my job so my Approach is I'm going to have critical empathy for what I study which means I'm not going to straw man what other religions believe um I'm not going to privilege you know the the weakest or the most extremist or the most tepid form of a given religion I'm gonna sort of represent other religions even though I don't agree with them in the best possible light because that will help my students understand them better so that's the approach I think that we have to take so you don't need to agree with this right I have many Christians and Jewish viewers will be looking at this and and their eyes yeah well I'm looking at the live chat and everyone's kind of going crazy right now yeah yeah so but that's not the point the point that you guys need to know is this is what the Quran says and this is what Muslims believe right so this is relevant because today in America there is a tendency to see Islam and Muslims as other right as in they don't belong to our civilization we so are supposedly judeo-christian even though the term judeo-christian is invented in the 20th century uh there's a tendency to see our way of life as judeo-christian and Islam as something that has no relation to us uh but this would just not be historically accurate it's not even accurate from the perspective of the religious Mythos which is what I'm describing here right even if you think this is a myth okay okay many historians think that basically before you know David we can't really know much historically anyway but even if you think this is a myth this myth is important it's important for people to know because the myth tells you how Muslims Jews and Christians imagine themselves right and that's very important all right now so what does Islam originally mean so according to one academic Dr Juan Cole if you only stick to the Quran and what is written before the Quran and you you take later tradition out for a second the term Islam just means monotheistic tradition and very interestingly the Syriac Christians had a similar word in Aramaic this word uhuta and the Syriac Christians had a related word word called Islam and in Syriac Christianity when you submit to the teachings of the church that act of submission in Aramaic is called Islam okay and the teachings of the church are called Machel manuta these two words Islam and Marshall manuta these words are direct cognates of the Arabic word Islam so when the Quran used the word Islam and when Muhammad used the word Islam they are using a term that Syriac Christians in that era would already be familiar with and if on that basis the word Islam really means monotheistic tradition and I'm quoting here Juan Cole who is a professor at the University of Michigan so when the Quran says in you know the religion of God is Islam the Quran says that the religion before God is Islam the Quran says whoever accepts a religion apart from Islam it will not be accepted from them it's not talking about Islam as we know it today which is a confessional religious tradition with clear borders when the Quran uses the term Islam it just means the prophetic tradition of monotheism so technically all monotheistic religions participate in Islam okay so if we have Judaism Christianity and the teachings of prophet Muhammad what he taught in his time Islam refers to the common core of them which is monotheistic Devotion to the one God so from this perspective from this early perspective Jews and Christians are Muslims with the small M why because Jews and Christians at least from the quran's perspective Jews and Christians worship the one true God that Muhammad and his community worship even though there is disagreement about the character of this God and the Deeds of this God according to the Quran it's the same God so the wider meaning of Islam would include all people who worship the one God you could probably add sabians and zoroastrians to this as well and this sort of uh builds so when you have a verse in the Quran Quran Surah 3 verse 19 the religion and the sight of Allah is Islam what do we mean here well many people today think that this refers to the historical developed Islam that we have today but if you read the Quran as someone living in the 7th Century they would not understand Islam to mean this 1400 year historically developed tradition they would read the word Islam and they would understand it as the act of monotheistic surrender submission to the one God and Jews and Christians and other monotheists they're also doing Islam so that's the difference when you read when you read the Quran historically versus when you read the Quran within the web of later developed a tradition and and you know there are many um similar arguments you could make about how we should read the gospels or the New Testament where words have one meaning in the first century but by the fourth Century they have a different meaning uh Cameron did you have a comment on on this particular thing no all right so this is again the early understanding okay of Islam uh what will happen within 100 Years of the death of Muhammad so when when we go to the 700s now Muhammad has passed away uh the leadership the political leadership of what he left behind has been taken over by different Empires these Empires known as the umayyad Empire the Abbasid Empire these Empires evolve what we call the religion of Islam and one of the major Evolutions is that the word Islam shifts in its meaning it goes from General monotheism where Jews and Christians were included and it takes on a new meaning to mean those who follow Muhammad's laws so in the later meaning of Islam you have to believe and follow Muhammad to be a Muslim and in the later meaning Jews and Christians are not included under the rubric of Islam anymore so there's a shift and it's really in the 700s that the the teachings of Muhammad as interpreted by later communities that gets the label Islam and now Islam is defined as an exclusivist religion basically again the Quran is not that exclusivist when it comes to these matters the Quran does clearly differentiate between a believer in Muhammad and someone who does not follow Muhammad that is there but the term Islam is much wider in the Quran and I mentioned this on the last podcast we did with with um with David the Quran in two verses explicitly says that Jews Christians anyone who believes in God and the day of judgment and does good any righteous monotheist can be saved the Quran clearly says that so the quranic message was much more ecumenical but over time within the next few centuries many Muslims developed a more exclusivist understanding of what Islam means and who gets saved and these sort of things okay so now uh in the next sort of 30 minutes let's just talk about um some of the diversity we have you know with that develop within this tradition uh but before we get to that one quick thing I want to point out um so all Muslims refer to God as Allah okay Allah is an Arabic word uh it's written it's written here you can see it in the calligraphy here Allah is an Arabic word uh most likely we're not we're not 100 sure most likely the word Allah is an allotted form of the word which means the god okay just like in Greek in the Greek New Testament you have hothias right hothias is the proper word for God in the New Testament Greek in Arabic it was and at some point it became Allah and Christian Arabs today if you pick up a a Bible in Arabic right and if you listen to you know Christian Arab liturgy and if you read Christian Arab writings from the 800s they refer to God as Allah as well so Allah just means god properly speaking uh some people have polemicized against Muslims saying Allah is not the same as God it's an idol or something like that well that is not how the earliest Christians even responded to the emergence of Islam okay we don't have one Christian including John of Damascus or um you know other Christians who lived at that time we don't have any Christian who came and said Muhammad taught his people to worship a different god named Allah who's not the same as you know the one we worship as the father of Jesus Christ like I I am not aware of any Christian in the early period who saw it that way on the contrary uh for John of Damascus who is by the way very against Islam but even he wrote on the assumption that the one whom Muslims refer to as Allah is the same as the one and Christians refer to as God the Father okay uh and Allah for Muslims is the continuous creator sustainer of everything that exists and in there in Islam there is a famous tradition of referring to Allah by many names uh sometimes it's 99 Names I've seen up to 360 names as well and among those names the most important are the names mentioned in this phrase so we have this phrase here Bismillah Rahim this is a phrase that opens every chapter of the Quran every quranic chapter except one begins with Bismillah her mind Rahim furthermore whenever Muslims begin any activity uh when you start your car before you eat uh before an important event it is very common to say out loud this before you say your prayers Muslims will recite Bismillah either silently or allowed so this phrase I I don't have the statistics to back it up yet but if I were to guess this may be today the most frequent religious phrase like uttered in the world because two billion Muslims are reciting Bismillah all day and I just want to point out that in this phrase it means in the name of Allah in the name of God the infinitely compassionate that's the infinitely compassionate and the most merciful so of all the names of God the two most important from a perspective of daily practice are God the infinitely compassionate which could also be translated as the infinitely loving and the merciful and it is worth noting that both of these Divine names right come from the Arabic word Rahim which means Womb so these two Divine names which again are recited like so frequently by Muslims these two Divine names evoke the motherly or maternal love of God just by their etymology and according to many scholars such as razasha Kazemi and a Christian Catholic scholar named Jordan dinari duffner both of these are are people who've written books on this this Divine name Rahman and the Divine uh the the attribute rahma which means loving compassion this is directly equivalent to the New Testament idea of agape agape love so this is telling you that in Islam God Allah is infinitely loving and there's a reason why I'm saying this on this channel I have seen so many videos from well meaning yet ignorant Christian preachers who say that the god worshiped by Muslims is not a loving God but this is actually tells you the opposite and the rahma that God is infinitely giving that is love that's why some have translated this as infinitely loving so Allah is all loving and that's Rahman and Rahim are the most prominent Divine names in the Quran and again the scholarship on this has directly drawn a equivalence between agape in the Christian Greek context and rahma in the Quran so I just wanted to point that out uh before we move forward so all Muslims do this type of practice now there are other words in Arabic that are more restrictive than agapic love okay so another word for love which is a more restrictive Kind of Love Me is Hub okay but that has a different meaning than this so when the Quran says Allah does not love the evil doers it doesn't use this term which is agapic love it uses a more restrictive kind of love known as hope uh but when it comes to agapic love it is correct to say that Allah is infinitely loving because that's literally what the Quran says so I just want to point point that out Okay so the other thing I would mention and we can talk about the details of this in another in another stream but tawheed the unity of God is like the foremost principle for all Muslims right so tawheed is the idea that God is absolutely one and absolutely Transcendent absolutely dissimilar to his creation uh and this idea of God of tawheed uh was originally articulated against the idol worship that happened in 7th Century Arabia that they worshiped Idols there it was directed against paganism and I mean let's be honest it was directed against the Christian belief and the Divinity of Jesus and the Trinity okay so this is a major difference that I think everybody knows this for Muslims God is one in every respect if I were to put it in Christian terms for Muslims God is unipersonal right uh so you could call this a Unitarian monotheism so the Trinity is rejected by the Quran the Divinity and the Incarnation of Christ is rejected by the Quran um that is part of the notion of tawheed uh the quranic verse that Muslims recite in every prayer is the one you see over here chapter 112. um on this particular verse there's something interesting I could show you this quranic verse which summarizes the concept of tawheed for Muslims it seems to be a quranic response to Christianity okay so though I put the verse up here in Arabic we recite this in prayers every day the translation is up here so what is this verse saying so I've broken it down this is according to a an article by The Scholar German scholar Angelica noiver she actually lined up the quranic Creed if you want to call it that of tawheed with the nician Constantinople Creed so you notice that the Quran is partially agreeing and disagreeing with the nice Ian Creed okay so he is God the absolute one are unique well this agrees with the first line of the Nicene Creed we believe in one God and then Allah God is absolutely self-sufficient this is uh this is what the philosophers would call assayati right so the god of Islam is essential his essential quality is assayati that's what Samad means uh and this parallels the second sort of clause of the Nicene Creed so up to this point you have agreement right Muslims and Christians believe in one God that's fine and then you have the disagreement and we can be honest about that so where the nice Ian Creed says Jesus Christ is the only begotten of God that he is God of God and that he is consubstantial with the Father the Quran disagrees and the Quran is doing what I would call uh with all respect to my Christian friends the Quran is doing a course correction okay it's it's trying to correct something that in its view uh deviated from the truth and the correction is to say that in contrast to Jesus as the Divine begotten the Quran says that God he did not begin nor is he begotten and there is none like unto God there's nothing similar to God uh so what this tells us is that the Quran is in a conversation with Christianity and with specific forms of Christianity especially at that time and hidden here is an allusion to the Shema so notice in the first line of Surat al-iklas it says means one in Arabic this is the cognate of the word in the Shema in the Shema Jews declare and Jesus himself recited the Shema that the Lord is so according to Angelica noiver what the Quran is trying to do is trying to correct the Nicene Creed and point Christians back to the Shema that was taught by Moses and Jesus According to which God is echad absolutely one in all respects so again this is sort of like what all Muslims share but now let's sort of look at some of the diversity that we have within Islam which is very important to note so the reason why we have diversity in Islam is the prophet Muhammad played a central role in his own time so if you want to know who was Muhammad as a historical figure again irrespective of whether you are Muslim or not Muslim you can get a good job description of the historical Muhammad by reading the Quran and this is his job job description we are told in the Quran Muhammad was a messenger of God so he conveys messages Revelation from God we are also told that Muhammad holds God's Authority on Earth so he's not just a messenger he is God's agent he is God's representative this is sort of similar to some of the Divine agent christology that you could find in the New Testament uh so Muhammad is God's representative to obey Muhammad is to obey God to disobey Muhammad is to disobey God this is clearly stated in the Quran in addition to that Muhammad was a teacher so he would convey a revelation from God he would convey God's command and then he would teach it he would be The Interpreter of the Revelation not just the deliverer so Muhammad was a law Giver in his own right and every judgment order interpretation that came from Muhammad was understood to be coming from God whether in God's words or whether in Muhammad's words everything Muhammad says is divinely inspired according to Muslim belief and according to the Quran and finally and a lot of Christians don't know this Muhammad is an intercessor so you'll you may be familiar especially in the Catholic tradition uh there's a belief that certain human beings are mediators between God and humans and that you can call a mediator you can ask a mediator to pray for you pray for you sorry right the Quran has a Theology of intercession and Muhammad is the intercessor so according to the Quran if you commit sin and you want to atone for your sin and be forgiven by God uh you have to go to Muhammad and ask Muhammad to pray to God for you and Muhammad has to pray for you and then you will be forgiven your sin there are other verses that if you want to make an atonement offering to God you make you give your offering to Muhammad Muhammad accepts the offering and then Muhammad prays to God for you and Muhammad cleanses you of your sins there's an entire verse about that so Muhammad is a very important figure and again I'm not even going to the Hadith I'm just going based on what the Quran says which is a good historical depiction of this so um if you think about this Muhammad when he dies like when Muhammad passes away in the year 632 what's going to happen because one person is feeling you know his shoes are very big you could say right Muhammad is the political and religious spiritual ruler of a community of monotheists in Arabia they go to him for every matter he is their day-to-day guide so what happens when he passes away and this leads to the divisions within Islam so I'm going to go through them very quickly today uh just a drive-by of this and later you know if we do a part two we could do a whole thing on you know what does this group believe and what does this group believe so the first level of division is and again I'm describing this from I I'm not going to go through like every Century on what the divisions were I'm saying if you look at Islam Today what are the major divisions that we find right so the first level of division is between sunnis shias and ibadis for convenience I'm not going to talk about the ibadi so sorry to my body friend but we just don't have the time right now so Shia and Sunni uh 80 of Muslims today are Sunni 20 are Shia but there's like two billion Muslims so there's still hundreds of millions of Shia so you need to know the difference between them people should know so why are they different differ over two questions number one after Muhammad what kind of a leadership should exist what kind of a leader should there be for the followers of Muhammad and number two who should the leader be those are the two questions now Cameron does this sound familiar to you on some of the debates and discussions you've had with respect to Islam oh um oh yeah yeah so you're talking about yeah you're talking about the different denominations like yeah who's who are there going to be is there going to be a pope or not exactly right so it's a big question on like who Who's the who what kind of leadership do you get you get one person do you get a committee right you get all the Apostles of Muhammad does the whole Community get to decide is it all meant for themselves okay so those are two questions they came up as soon as Muhammad died like this was debated okay now over time here are the answers that were given so for sunnis there is no divinely appointed leader after Muhammad Muhammad is the last messenger of God and that's it after him the community gets to decide who is in charge through some sort of consultation process okay in practice the tribal leaders get to decide so what ends up happening for sunnis is Muhammad held all kinds of authority spiritual religious military legal ethical everything together what the sunnis do over several centuries this takes several centuries to get this model different levels of authority go to different groups so they Khalif or caliph becomes the political leader only the scholars of the sunnis become the interpreters of the religion they interpret the Quran and teachings of Muhammad the Sufi shakes become the spiritual leaders and even the community to a certain degree has a level of leadership the Sunni Community the Sunni body as a whole okay uh and and there's other forms of leadership but for the sunnis the leadership of Muhammad is sort of segmented into different parties and each party claims a portion of that Authority but nobody claims to be appointed by God and no individual leader claims to be infallible for the Sunni paradigm okay so what actually happened so for the caliphs there are four caliphs that the sunnis believe again there was no unanimous agreement on them but they are the ones who ended up ruling politically so Sony's believe in four righteous caliphs and after that them the caliphs became imperialized which is to say whoever had an Empire an army they could become the caliph by Conquering the other one okay and that's how the history played out the last Imperial caliphate were the Ottomans they made the silly decision of backing the Germans in World War one they lost world war one and the ottoman caliphate was dismantled by the new Turkish state today there is no Sunni caliphate so for sunnis the main authorities in religion are the scholars your average Sunni will learn Islam from a scholar they will not even read the primary sources themselves because in Sunni Islam authority of the primary sources of the Quran and the Hadith still must be mediated by Scholars so it's not exactly like the Protestant View the sunnis differ from the Protestants where the sunnis do have scholarly mediation now the other group is the Shia the Shia believe and this will be familiar to you Cameron in some in a certain degree the Shia believe that while Muhammad is the last messenger of God there are no New Revelations what Muhammad taught has to be preserved and interpreted by a divinely ordained infallible leadership so the Shia believed that God actually will appoint leaders after Muhammad and the name of that leader who's appointed by God and who is infallible that person is called the Imam so the Shia believe in a line of divinely appointed imams after Muhammad and they believe that these imams come from Muhammad's family they he comes from Muhammad's bloodline the first Imam according to the Shia was Ali he is the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad so he's Muhammad's first cousin he married Muhammad's daughter and then thus the children of Ali are Muhammad's own blood descendants and they will be the imams after him and in the Shia belief humans cannot appoint an infallible leader only one infallible leader can appoint the next one so Muhammad appointed Ali according to the Shia belief Ali appointed his successor then he appointed his successor and you have a bloodline of infallible imams that's the basic difference between shias and sunnis now I just need to warn people that Within These groups there are further differences so if you look at the Sunni situation there are multiple schools of thought within the Sunni Community when it comes to interpreting Islam now you may ask well why do we have that well we have that because there are many ways to interpret the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad these are not clear texts who decides on the criteria who decides on what the method of interpretation are because in the Sunni world anybody can be a scholar you just have to prove your training in some way and you can say that you're a scholar so in the Sunni Paradigm we had many scholars and these Scholars some were very popular so entire schools of thought are named after them so these are like sub I would not call these dnop full out denominations but I would call these schools of thought among the sunnis now again this this I'm just sticking with the same graphic I'm just expanding it so people can keep track what about the Shia so among the Shia we have divisions as well why are do why do we have divisions among the Shia well if you follow the bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad and you believe in one infallible Imam at a time what happens when you have an Imam and you have two children who both claim to be the right infallible leader you would end up with a schism so on the Shia side you had different groups that arose from following different lineages of Muhammad's descendants so one lineage is called the twelvers and that's a line of only 12 imams that's the most popular Shia group today they believe in 12 12 successors of Muhammad the 12th has disappeared he disappeared in the year 874 and they're waiting for him to come back so they're called twelvers another group of Shia known as the nazari ismailis they believe in a continuous succession of imams down to the present day and today they have the 49th Iman who is alive in the world like you can Google him and see who he is so the shias have differences based on which lineage of Muhammad's bloodline do they hold to be the correct one and if you follow the ismaili lineage and just for disclosure I myself am ismaili so Islam for ismailis is interpreted by this one person Islam for sunnis is interpreted by The Scholar of your choice Islam for the twelvers is interpreted by their Scholars because their Imam has disappeared so the twelvers followed their own Scholars so what Islam looks like is going to be very different depending on which denomination you actually follow and sometimes the beliefs will be different sometimes the practices will be different you can end up with very different paradigms basically and this of course confuses people but it's just something that we need to know um so there's another sorry do you have something to say yeah so as an as Molly where do you fit in here which exact because it looks like there's a a few on the Shia side yes so on the Shia side you had like a primary division between imamis and zadies then this group divides into 12 Earth and ismailis and then the ismailis Divide further so the nazaris are right here they're like fully part of the Shia so you're nazari yes yes okay okay this will help your viewers so if we I know you also you also don't have a whole lot of time right you've gotta head out to to do something yeah I'll go for a few more I'll go for a few more minutes on this so just to talk about the Shia in a little bit more detail right so the biggest group of Shia 12 verse uh you guys people should know about 12 Earth because who rules Iran today the regime that rules Iran they are 12 vershia clerics they're known as Ayatollah so for twelvers the Imam that they believe in has not been seen since the year 874. nobody knows where he is he's called The Hidden Imam so because they believe in a hidden Imam that's their infallible leader right but they don't have access to him so the 12 verse follow their own Scholars or clerics called ayatulas there are many ayatulas and the ayatulas are basically people that interpret the day-to-day Islam for the twelve Russia and these are some of the famous ayatulas of our time you'll notice here I assume that they don't think that the ayazulas are infallible they they think that they're falling they think the ayatulas are fallible Scholars and that's why there's many of them and you can pick who you follow there's about like I don't know like 50 ayatulas today alive so you would pick whichever ayatula you take as your model of emulation basically right and some eye tools are politically active so the ayatulas in Iran are politically active right they rule a state now for the nizaria Smileys which is the branch I belong to uh which is the second largest Shia group so the twelvers are the largest the ismaili are the are the second for the nazaria Smileys there has been a continuous succession of imaps from the prophet ichimam appointed one of his sons and he appointed his son so you have 49 imams today and these are the last four imams that the nazaris have had like we know who these people are some of them were quite well known so um the current Imam is this person he's known as Aga Khan IV he is the leader of some 15 million nazaria Smileys and he interprets he's the sole infallible interpreter of Islam for nazaria smileys so if you're a nazaria smiley you don't follow what the sunnis do you don't follow what these ayatulas do you follow Islam as the Imam interprets it because the Imam is infallible so the the funny thing is is that if I were to draw a parallel and again this is very very close to Catholicism yes the closest analog between Catholicism and Islam is the nazaria Smileys it's not exact so there are differences in how we understand infallibility for example uh the pope is elected by Cardinals the Imam is just appointed by the previous Imam um it's different but there's an analog and what's very interesting is today the ismaili imamate and the Catholic Church have actually very good relations so the Aga Khan actually met Pope Benedict um several years ago uh you know so there's a way why are the nazaris such a small Branch you said only 15 million why is it so small the nazaris are small uh for several reasons one reason is that politically speaking the nazaris were persecuted for most of their history there were several uh massacres genocides against the nazaris there have been multiple attempts to wipe them out entirely uh and those who survived the genocidal uh events a lot of nizares had to practice Takia so they had to live outwardly at sunnis or twelvers for Generations otherwise they'd be killed and if you have a community that practices dissimulation for many generations many of those communities completely forget their original religion and they get assimilated into these more 12 or Sunni things so a lot in izari communities were just lost through that sort of bleed but from uh from a perspective of global influence the nazaris are very influential Community today like the Aga Khan is a internationally known humanitarian figure he wins Awards the prior Imam agacon the third he was the president of the League of Nations during the 1930s it's interesting he's got no facial hair or anything I assume that that's part of the the teachings that have come out yeah so what you have in the nazari model is that the law certain laws of practice can change because the Imam can reinterpret certain rules for Modern Life so I'll give you an example beards are not a requirement right uh nizari is smiley women are not required to wear a head covering the hijab and the face Veil is bad you're not allowed to wear a face Veil um things like women's education is mandatory right uh other types of practices have been evolved under the Imam like how many times you pray uh dress codes and this sort of thing so the nazaris are like outwardly they're the probably one of the most modernist branches of Islam but it is a traditionally rooted modernism right like the tradition of following the imams is still very important it's not really a Reformation movement because the nazaris didn't like they didn't get created like 100 years ago right they've been they've been around uh for centuries the ismailis as a group and the 12ers a lot of people don't know this 12 ismailis as groups historically are older than sunnis like the Sunni Paradigm took 500 years to coalesce into what it is now uh the twelvers and the Smileys as groups predate the coalescence of Sunni Islam so these are not like groups that just showed up uh recently um and I know some people like to compare ismailis to Mormons uh but with all due respect to Mormons there's really no analogy uh for that comparison hmm so if I just uh Circle right back and I'll conclude now um there are other differences in Islam I can talk about some of these a bit later but this is sort of my comprehensive uh diagram now let me be very clear before people get offended on this chart I have listed groups that claimed to be Muslim that does not mean that every group will necessarily recognize the other as muslim okay but as an academic my role is to describe Islam right not prescribe Islam so if the ahmedis and the quranists claim to be Muslim I've put them on the charts uh and what you have here is like denominational diversity but I've also put this here we can do a whole separate thing on this we have many theological schools within Islam and then we have many Sufi tarikas which I didn't talk about today but there's even the diversity is both horizontal and also vertical right it's like if you go deeper within Islam you get to theology and then if you go deeper than theology you get to Sufism and it's important to acknowledge that that those are also part of Islam historically and all this diversity is multi-layered so we can talk about some of the things I didn't get to uh maybe in another session but let me just return to my summary slide again if I had to describe Islam as a historic historical phenomenon that has rules beliefs spirituality I would describe it in these three dimensions so the religion of Islam has three dimensions the first is called just Islam following God's laws the second is called Iman which is Faith which is belief Theology and the third deeper Dimension is isan spiritual virtue which is ultimately about purifying the human soul to emulate the Divine character traits that element of Islam is primarily manifest in Sufism and for most of Muslim history all three of these were recognized as essential to Islam although today you will have this or that group that only pays attention to maybe one or two of these things all right well I I this was actually really really informative and things sort of ramped up toward the end so I anticipate people are going to have some questions and want to to learn more so uh Dr Khalil I'd love to have you back on I mean I already have a few other shows that I have in mind of of uh possible things that we could work on together but um in any case I really appreciate your time and coming on and explaining all of these things to to my audience I think it's going to be very very valuable if someone actually sits through and soaks it all in just to have a better understanding of what's going on here the the only thing that that I would like to see is uh just spending more time maybe on on uh some specific beliefs that that exist within the different denominations um that was the only sort of further question that I had but I know that that's going to take a whole lot more time so uh but maybe if you know if you guys watching want to see that and you'd like to to see more detailed analysis outline of of all of these different denominations and what they believe and everything and and where some of these uh because one of the questions that I've got is is as I'm I mentioned this at the beginning of the stream I'm seeing more and more sort of Islamic apologetics coming up on YouTube and everything and so one of my questions as someone who's not super familiar with Islam is well where do these guys fit denominationally where where are they coming from because you know obviously like everyone's going to have if you fit in this denomination you're going to have and really care about different things uh than someone who's in a completely different denomination so you might be wanting to defend more conservative views that someone like yourself or or other denominations aren't necessarily going to be super concerned about so anyways it's just uh I think that's also going to help maybe the audience kind of understand like what's going on here with the the different views that are being expressed and in the Christian Community you can kind of know like a calvinist is going to really care about these things versus someone who's uh like a mullenist or an Armenian so there's it's I guess sort of common knowledge at that point but um anyways yeah I just think that it'd be very valuable to to have you back on to to talk about that but then other some other topics as well yeah I'm happy to do that I just wanted to give people the the bird's eye view first right yes and then certainly you know like you could we could do a whole show just on like I use that three-dimension thing right because you could just focus on one of those Dimensions right like if theology is the interest then we would be on the second dimension Iman and then we could say okay here are seven theological schools and this is what they think of God uh or if somebody was more interested in in law then that's a different thing so we can certainly uh do that but I want to give your viewers like the big picture first right yeah um and I'm really glad that for the invitation and that you know you're you and and your show are so sort of open-minded and in the business of just public education because like you don't need to believe in something to be well informed about it and I think a lot of people today can't separate those two things right but once you realize that you can be be learned in a matter or a subject even though you don't believe in it then that I think will make people feel more confident and comfortable even about their own worldview yeah part of part of my goal with today's stream was like I know that a lot of Christians because we're seeing again more more Islamic apologetics pop up online and so Christians are kind of thinking well maybe I should start to get into the sort of responses and responding to these sort of things that are that I'm hearing from from Muslims online but um I think that something like this is going to provide a lot of value because it can give people a sort of overview of what's going on where maybe where where to go at this point where you kind of want to go with it with your studies more into Islam and uh it makes me think a little bit more like it'd be fun to even do a show on just some of the different beliefs of these these popular dawa guys like muhammadi job and Ali dawa and some of these other guys that are they're amassing these really huge platforms and uh Khalil are you still there looks like you might have Frozen Okay looks like you're back I have to go to my college for something uh they're gonna wonder where I am but uh no worries yeah thanks thanks for joining me this has been a lot of thank you and uh all right take care and see you next time okay we'll see you later all right guys so um the show today was again it was the purpose of it was to just provide some uh information and and help well the purpose of it was actually to provide value to you guys so if you're studying or if you're interested in Islam then hopefully that's what you got out of the show today and again I'd love to do more of these types of episodes and um you know if it doesn't just have to be Islam we could look at Judaism we could look at other religions so uh the point is is to be primarily informative so if you got something out of it let me know in the comments let me know if you'd like to see more of this type of content if you if you hated it also let me know in the comments uh the live chat's been interesting to to kind of keep an eye on as we've gone out gone throughout the show today thank you guys for tuning in thank you for your continued support of capturing Christianity there is a lot a lot going on behind the scenes that I haven't really talked about yet so I plan to actually do a video very soon just giving you guys an update on what's going on with capturing Christianity but thank you guys for tuning in I'll see in the next capturing Christianity video so God bless you hey it's me again uh actually don't leave yet I've got 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