Imam Omar Suleiman is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research and a professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
4:06 - God
11:51 - Loss
20:41 - Life after death
22:20 - Why God allows suffering
35:45 - Seeking the truth
43:24 - Islamophobia
1:08:22 - Muslim ban
1:11:44 - Where do Muslims stand politically
1:15:51 - Meaning of prayer
1:29:28 - Mecca
1:34:39 - Malcolm X
1:37:50 - Muhammad Ali
1:42:36 - Khabib Nurmagomedov
1:48:46 - Prophets
1:54:57 - Quran
2:00:44 - Ramadan
2:07:48 - Future of Islam
2:10:57 - Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis
2:19:04 - War and religion
2:28:56 - Israel and Palestine
2:54:39 - Hope for the future
2:59:23 - Omar leads Lex in prayer

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So the BBC reached out and said, we want to interview you.

We want to take you to a park and have you meet 1 of the protesters who's been wielding his gun outside your mosque and talk to him.

It was really interesting because they'd interviewed him before meeting me.

And the things that he was able to utter before meeting me and before meeting Syrian refugees was just awful.

I mean, the most dehumanizing rhetoric that you can imagine.

But then at the park, he meets me, talks to me, he meets a Syrian refugee family, 1 of the girls whose leg had been blown off in an airstrike, and he said, I feel like an idiot.

I mean, he expressed all sorts of regret and was teary-eyed that he could dehumanize people the way that he was.

And so my whole thing was and is come inside the mosque, put your gun down, disarm yourself and learn.

And you'll be surprised what you'll walk away with.

And only took 1 meeting with him to completely shift his worldview at the time, which was made up of heroes and villains, the Muslims unfortunately being the villains that had to be wiped off the face of the earth so that the earth could continue.

The following is a conversation with Imam Dr.

He's a Muslim scholar, civil rights leader, founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and he's a professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University.

He's 1 of the most influential Muslims in the world and is a fearless, kind-hearted human being who I'm now proud to call a friend.

As a side note, allow me to say a few words about Israel and Palestine.

While this conversation with Omar Suleiman was mostly exploring the history and beauty of Islam and the Muslim community, we did delve briefly into the topic of Israel and Palestine.

This topic is an extremely challenging 1, and an extremely important 1.

It has deep roots and implications in US politics, in global geopolitics, in military and religious conflicts, wars and atrocities, and basic struggle of all human beings to survive, to protect their loved ones and to flourish as individuals and as communities.

I did not want to cover this topic in a solely scholarly fashion.

Much like with the war in Ukraine, it is not simply a story of history, politics, religion, and national identity.

To cover this topic in the way that my gut and my heart says to do it, I have to talk to everyone, to leaders and people on all sides, Muslim and Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian, from refugees to soldiers, from scholars to extremists.

I'm not sure if that's possible or wise, but like Forrest Gump said, I'm not a smart man.

And maybe you know how the rest of that goes.

I just like to follow my heart to whatever place it leads.

I ask the Muslim and the Jewish communities for your patience and support as I explore this topic.

I will make many mistakes and I'll be listening to all voices so I can learn and do better.

I've become distinctly aware that my approach of talking to people from all walks of life with empathy and compassion, but with backbone, can create enemies on all sides.

I don't quite yet understand why this is, but I'm learning to accept it as the reality of the world.

Hopefully, in the end, whatever happens, whatever silly thing I do, has a chance of adding a bit of love to the world.

Thanks for going along with me on this journey.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Omar Suleiman.

We've been trying to do this a long time.

It's the world tried to prevent it through the funny ways that the world does, but here we are.

Thank you for making the sacrifice and coming down, or coming up, I guess, to Dallas, I appreciate it.

Let's start with the biggest question, who is God, according to Islam?

God is the most compassionate, the most merciful, the creator of the heavens and the earth.

He is beyond the constructs of our imagination.

But he is ever accessible through sincere supplication.

When you call upon him alone, 1 God, He is closer to you than your jugular vein, the Quran tells us.

He's known by many names and attributes, but His essence is 1, He's 1 God.

No human likeness, no human imperfection can be attributed to Him.

No partners, no image of him can be constructed.

So God represents, he is a feeling of closeness that is accessible to every human being?

We call upon God, but there is certainly a feeling of closeness when you access him.

So I think the beauty of Islam is that as perfect as God is described, He's also so accessible to the imperfect.

And so the idea of sincere supplication and connection to Him, we worship Him alone, we call upon Him alone, there's no clergy, there's no barrier between God and us, and that encourages a sincere devotion and commitment to Him alone.

And so He is certainly described supreme, and God speaks to us through the Qur'an, and we speak to him through sincere supplication.

And his attributes are the furthest from us in terms of their perfection.

But he is ever close to us through our supplication, through our prayers, and through our connection to him.

to have a connection with God, how difficult is that process?

How difficult is it for the people that, for the many, many, many Muslims that you've interacted with?

Well I think that there are different layers of difficulty.

There is the personal difficulty, submitting yourself to God.

Islam requires a complete submission to Him.

And 1 of the things that happens is that if we project some of our bad experiences with authority onto our relationship with God, then we immediately perceive him in a certain way that might not allow us to gain a closeness to him because maybe we didn't have the best relationship with our parents growing up.

Maybe we didn't have the best relationship with our parents growing up.

Maybe we didn't have the best relationship with authority figures in our lives.

And so this idea of an ultimate authority to whom you submit yourself can be very difficult.

You know, Malcolm X, who was 1 of the most prominent converts to Islam in American history, talked about the difficulty of prostration for the very first time, putting your head on the ground, putting your face on the ground and praying to God is a very humbling thing.

Submitting all of your affairs to him is very humbling.

And ultimately you have to relinquish control.

And you can't relinquish control without trust.

And so for me personally, you know, growing up, going through certain difficulties, having a sick parent who struggled in her life with cancer and with strokes, dealing with racism in South Louisiana growing up, it was important for me to learn about God through my difficulties, for example, rather than let those difficulties turn me away from Him.

Many times people put a barrier between them and God because they can't make sense of the things that are happening in their own lives.

And so they project anger towards God and at the same time deny their own belief in him and do away with this natural disposition that every 1 of us has to believe in him.

So there are intellectual barriers, certainly.

But I think that 1 of the beautiful things about Islam is clarity.

There is an explanation for his existence.

There is an explanation for our existence.

There is an explanation for the existence of difficulties and trial, an explanation for the existence of difficulties and trial and explanation for the existence of desires and distractions, and it all comes together so beautifully and coherently in Islam.

And so I think that for many of us, we want to be our own gods, and ultimately we create and fashion gods in ways that allow us to still be the ultimate determiners of our own fates, of our own story.

And that's very unfulfilling when you fail at your own plan.

But when you realize that there is 1 who is all-knowing, that there is 1 who is all-wise, You actually find peace in submitting yourself to Him.

And so submitting your will to Him, submitting your desires, submitting your own fate to Him, becomes actually an experience of liberation.

Because you trust the 1 that you're submitting to.

You trust His wisdom over yours, and that gives you a lot of peace.

You pray to Him, you call upon Him, you supplicate.

And everything in your life suddenly has meaning.

You know, in our faith, everything is about intention.

And there's an intentionality even behind the most, seemingly most mundane actions.

A morsel of food in the mouth of your spouse, your family, is looked at as a great charity.

The way that you enter into a place and exit out of a place, what foot you step in, what foot you step out with, there's an intentionality, there's a word of remembrance that's spoken, there's a word of praise before and after you engage in any action, there are things that you say before you eat, before you sleep, there is meaning even to your sleep.

1 of the great companions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, he said, that I seek the reward for my sleep just as I seek the reward for my prayer.

Because you sleep to refresh yourself so that you can once again do great things.

And the intentionality behind that allows even the sleep to be rewardable.

You eat to nourish yourself so that you can do great things.

You seek to be in a position of independence and of being sustained so that you can sustain others.

So the prophet peace be upon him says, for example, that the upper hand is better than the lower hand.

The upper hand is the giving hand, the lower hand is the receiving hand.

So to seek a position where you can help other people, Everything becomes intentional.

And there's no such thing as, you know, something that is meaningless and without purpose.

So every pursuit is ultimately a pursuit of God.

And when you pursue God sincerely, then he rewards you, not just with paradise in the afterlife, but he rewards you with a great sense of serenity and self-satisfaction here.

You mentioned part of the struggle growing up was having a parent, your mom, who was sick.

So my parents were, well my father, thank God is still alive.

My mother was a pious woman, a beautiful woman, a righteous woman, a woman who was known for treating everyone with a great deal of love and respect.

She used to write poetry about oppressed peoples around the world.

From her homeland in Palestine to the genocide in Bosnia, she followed every conflict before social media and poured her heart into it.

So when I think back to my mom growing up, she was known for her smile.

And in fact, every picture of her, she's smiling.

And at her funeral, you know, people talked about her smile, that she would smile at everyone, and that was kind of her thing.

So if you were left out of a gathering, she was smiling at you, and she'd kind of welcome you in.

She was a woman of prayer and a woman of contentment.

So I used to see her in her prayer clothes all the time.

In fact, when I think back to her growing up, I think of her more in her prayer clothes than in her normal clothes, because that's how often she was engaged in prayer.

And I think of her making sure that everyone was included in a conversation.

So she was very interesting in that she had several strokes and each 1 of those strokes impaired 1 of her senses to some extent.

So she was partially deaf because of 1 stroke.

And she'd be sitting in a gathering and she'd be pretty quiet with a big smile on her face, very serene, and she would tell me, alhamdulillah, which means thank God, all praise be to God, that I can't hear because I can tell when people are gossiping, when people are saying negative things around me about other people, because she says even the look on people's faces changes.

So it was really interesting because she was that spiritually rooted and deep that she said, like, you could see on the looks on people's faces when they started to speak ill about other people that their faces would change, that their demeanor would change.

And she said, I would actually praise the Lord that I couldn't engage in those conversations and that I wasn't sinful for hearing them.

And what she would do is, what people said at her funeral, which was really beautiful to me and was very comforting to me, and I took it as a life mission, that if you were new to a place or if you were kind of in the corner and not known to other people in the community and you felt left out.

She was the 1 that literally would look around the room and she'd see who was standing in the corner and who was new to the community or new to whatever place and she'd go and try to include that person in the gathering.

So even when she had impaired speech and impaired hearing, With her smile and with her warmth, she was able to welcome people wherever that was.

And so the amount of people that came to her funeral and the stories that I continue to hear till this day, 15 years later, after her passing away, of people that said, you know, no 1 ever treated me the way your mother treated me.

So that was actually part of my faith journey.

When I think of great people, when I think of people of faith, she's the first person that comes to my mind because despite her challenges, she was always the greatest person that you would meet.

Anyone that met her and that knew her would say, I've never met anyone that kind.

She would shed tears over people that she had no connection to.

This is again, before social media, before the heavy exposure that we have to people in conflict zones.

She had to engage every single human being in her life in a deep and profound way because she had a profound connection to God and she believed that that was her calling.

And none of her challenges made her bitter.

In fact, they only made her more connected to God and they only made her a better person until the last breath that she took.

But I feel like everything I do is an extension of her.

The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that when a person passes away, there are only 3 things that continue to benefit them, that continue to extend them.

A continuous charity, or a piece of knowledge that continues to benefit people or a righteous child that prays for them?

And I wanna be that child that prays for her, but also does charity in her name extends her charity, extends what she taught me by being the person that she was to everyone around me.

And there's some times where I don't feel like getting out of bed, sometimes where I don't feel like doing for myself, but I actually feel like doing for her.

So everything in my life that I try to do, I try to make an extension of her.

I believe that everything I do that is good will be of benefit to her, and I believe that it would make her proud.

And so as much as I miss her, as much as I am fueled to do for her, and so I continue that, and that's kind of become part of my life.

It's been my life story as a child and as an adult.

It's been sort of the centerpiece of my life, to do things that extend her and ultimately in the process, hopefully benefit me because I believe that she's a woman who, I pray, is destined for paradise and I wanna do the things that would get me there too.

What did you learn about death, about life, from losing her?

I feel like the facade of the material world was made evident to me at a very young age.

You know, most children grow up and their parents wanna protect them from everything.

You know, my mother wanted to downplay her own tragedy so that me and my brother could live a fruitful and fulfilling life.

My father wanted to protect us from the hardship of her life so that we could live fulfilling lives.

He was, he'd often be the only father on a field trip, even though he was a distinguished professor.

He was a very busy man, but he tried to show up at a field trip and tried to make our lives as normal as possible.

But in the process, we always understood that there was more to life than what other children were seeing it as.

And now I know that as an adult, there's more to life than what other adults see it as.

The material world disappointed early on so that we could see beyond it.

And I often tell people that, you know, there are many that grow up in tragedy, orphan children, refugees that grow up and do incredible things because they immediately see past the facade.

They see through all of the material promises of this world, the deception of it, and that you can choose to be bitter as a result of that, or you can choose to be better.

And I think that for me, I had to consciously make that decision that I was going to live a life of prayer.

I was going to live a life of commitment and in that process, invest in something that's greater, invest in something that doesn't disappoint.

I believe in the hereafter, and I believe that God will not let any trial or effort in this life go to waste without it being repaid in the hereafter.

And so life and death, I understood existence to be transcendent early on.

That if I believed that there was nothing to life except for life, I would be a very bitter person.

But because I know that there is more to it than this, I'm able to exist in it without being depressed by it.

So the Quran tells us that God brought us from the darkness of the womb into this life, you were nothing but a dirty drop of fluid and you became this fully proportioned human being from the darkness of the womb, you come into this life, you experience it and then you go to the darkness of the grave only to be resurrected once again.

And that we are souls with bodies, not bodies with souls.

And there's a huge difference between those 2 things.

This is the vehicle that contains us here.

This is the material world that we encounter here, but we are not this, and this is not our entire existence.

This is a life in which we seek to worship him and seek to live in accordance with the purpose that he has set out for us.

And after we pass away, our soul continues onwards, either to reward or to punishment or to a mixture of both, but it's a realm of accountability.

And hopefully it's a realm of reward should we exist in a way that he wants us to exist.

So you said that you can look to God for wisdom to make sense of the world.

There's a lot of stuff to us humans that's difficult to make sense of, like you losing your mother.

What wisdom Have you been able to find from God about why there is suffering in the world, why there's cruelty?

You know, there's a saying that I wanted to ask God about why he allows hunger and war and poverty, but I was afraid he might ask me the same question.

There is enough food in the world for everyone to have a 3,200 calorie diet a day.

God has certainly given us enough guidance for us to not inflict on each other, the cruelty that we inflict.

When we look to the world around us, first and foremost, we have to have a sense of accountability.

But at the same time, we understand that God in his wisdom allows for certain outcomes that we cannot encompass with our own.

And that to isolate these incidents and to try to make sense of them is no different than a baby in the womb that doesn't understand the world that it's coming into and trying to explain to that baby that hasn't yet developed its own senses and its own perception of this world, what is happening to it, right?

You know, I often think of the example of a child and, you know, having been at this point now through the experience of parenthood, I'm still learning.

I'm just going into having a teenager with 3 kids and being a softie for my kids, when you have to tell your child that they can't have something that they really, really want.

And that child thinks You hate them at some point, you know, because why are you stopping me from putting this toy in my mouth and choking myself?

But at the same time, you prevent them out of love.

They're not in a position to understand that you're preventing them out of love.

And to isolate these incidents with God and to say, the wisdom, what's the wisdom?

You're trying to make sense of a pixel when you can't see the bigger picture.

Your mind is not at a place where you can make sense of the bigger picture.

And so for him to even explain to us every incident would completely defeat the purpose of putting your trust in him.

So we believe in a God that is all-encompassing in his knowledge and wisdom that gives us, and Islam is very specific by the way that there is what God tells us to do and there's what God allows to happen.

So what God tells us to do in terms of the roadmap towards good, and then what God allows to happen in his divine wisdom, that no outcome can escape him, but at the same time, we are accountable for our own actions and our own deeds.

So when you Come to someone and say, you know, why did God allow this to happen to this person?

I can't rationalize that for you because my understanding is relegated to the immediate experience in front of me.

But if I know God, and if I learn about God, then I don't have to make sense of the plan, but I can tell you that I trust the planner.

And I think that that's where peace is found.

You know, a lot of times you look for the light at the end of the tunnel.

What's the light at the end of the tunnel?

In Islam, there's emphasis on God and the hereafter, because to try to make sense of a divine decree and why certain things happen in this world without the existence of a God or without the existence of a Hereafter will always fail you.

So the existence of a God that is all-knowing, what we don't know, I know what you don't know, that understands what we don't understand, the existence of a God who is not subject to our constrictions, and the existence of a hereafter where all things find recourse, where there's divine recourse, allows for this world to be situated within the existence of something greater and not treated in isolation.

So when you're trying to treat an incident of this world in isolation, you're going to fail.

And when you try to treat existence in this world and of this world in isolation, you're also going to fail.

And so the emphasis is the belief in God, a God that is not limited like you are, and a belief in the hereafter that is not limited like this life.

And so everything continues onwards And there's divine recourse for everything, each and everything.

You know, the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, mentions that on the day of judgment, a person who lived the most difficult of lives will be dipped into paradise 1 time, and will be told, Have you ever seen any sadness, any hardship?

Now, when you think about the most difficult life, some of the commentators in Islam, they said that this is perhaps referring to the prophet Job, a you peace be upon him, because Job lived obviously a life of great difficulty, but that a person who lived a very hard life would be dipped into paradise 1 time.

And just with a dip be asked, have you ever seen any hardship?

And that person would say, what is sadness?

Now, if you don't believe in the hereafter, if you don't believe in anything beyond this life, then the recourse has to happen in this life.

And because we see so many people pass through this life without recourse of cruelty, without recourse of suffering, then we're forced to try to make sense of it.

And if you are someone who believes that this entire world came into existence through randomness, that we're just an existence of random atoms that collide with each other and that all of this comes together out of nothing, then how can you put your trust in anything that is greater?

So as a, you know, you asked me as a, as a child of, of a parent who suffered, I believe that every moment that my mother suffered, that she will be rewarded, that she will be elevated, that all of that made her or contributed to the beautiful person that she was and will contribute to the beautiful reward that she receives and the recourse is certain to me as a believer in that.

So the right approach to making sense of the world, especially making sense of suffering and cruelty is that of humility that we as humans cannot possibly understand fully.

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Omar Suleiman: Islam | Lex Fridman Podcast #352