Shiekh Hamza Yusuf: Reflections on Lebanon and Israel!!!

[Daniyal]

Hi all.

The following is a lecture from Shiekh Hamza Yusuf. (BTW - Shiekh literally means 'old man' in Arabic but it is a title given to scholars, dispite their age).

For those of who you don't know who Shiekh Hamza Yusuf is, he is the most prominent and one of the leading figure heads on Islam in America today. Thousands and thousands of people attend his regurlar lectures.

He is also the founder of the Zaytuna Instituite, which is one of the leading Islamic study center in the West which teaches 'Traditional Islam'.


Anyways, here is his reflections on the current crisis in the Middle East. Everyone should watch this, because he relates (like he usually does) on a 'human' global level rather than a specific Islamic level (only if his intended audience is the Muslims).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh4kzyTfszA


I hope we can all learn from these wise words.


If you want more of Shiekh Hamza Yusuf's material, you can find his audio lectures here:

http://nadeem.lightuponlight.com/indexaudios1.html#Hamza_Yusuf


With Respect...

 

[Djamila]

Beautiful, thank you for posting! I'm still only a few minutes in, but had to come back to respond.

 

[Djamila]

Having seen more, I'm very impressed with how he uses Jewish and Christian teachings in his sermons as well. That's something that, until now, I've only witnessed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

[Djamila]

Interesting what he says about not killing women and children. I don't agree that the hadith is equal to the Koran, it pains me to hear a Muslim say such a thing actually, but I do agree with the message in this particular example.

It reminds me of the honor killings thread, when someone posted a link about blood fueds in Kosovo and northern Albania. The article mentioned that the prohibition against injuring women among Muslims in Kosovo and Albania was so strong that when families were having blood fueds, the women could literally go with torches to light up their enemy's house - making it easier for their men to attack. And the enemies would not touch these women.

It's also very important in Bosnian culture. That is why the systematic rapes of Bosnian Muslim women was such a tremendous blow to Bosnian Muslims. It also explains why our religious leaders declared these women to be the moral and heroic equivalent of any male soldier who died on the battlefield. Where women in Pakistan, for example, are often murdered for shaking hands with a man - women in Bosnia were honored for having been raped. The children that resulted from these rapes, of which there are at least several thousand, were declared Muslims, were declared Bosniaks, and religious fatwas demanded they be accepted by Bosnian society and included as any other children would be.

This is something I see lacking on all sides today and I agree with him that is something that must be revived.

 

[Djamila]

I also must comment on his belief that in order to bring an end to terrorism coming from Muslims, such activities against Muslims must also cease.

Now, I don't support this statement as an excuse for Muslims to sit back and say: you first. This is one of the most annoying things about the war on terror in my mind, that those carrying out this war expect the Muslim world to fully capitulate while they do nothing, while they have not even begun the process of looking at themselves long enough to determine they must do something.

It can't be a way of putting off living out lives according to our faith because then we just hand the forces of evil in this world a second victory. Not only have they been allowed to completely destroy Lebanon, kill hundreds of civilians, and make roughly 1 million people homeless - we've also allowed them to turn us away from the teachings of our faith. We've allowed the guilt, the frustration, the desire for revenge to overcome us and that in itself is another victory for those who wish harm against us.

It's a victory they were given long ago in Palestine, and a victory that has come in other places as well - in Lebanon, now, but also in Chechnya and other regions of the world. Now, we are human beings. You cannot logically expect a man in Grozny, Chechnya, to have lasted all these years, all these bombings, all these brutal and senseless acts of violence and still be sitting calmly. You can't expect human beings to take such situations forever. For the Chechens, it has been going on for 300 years, for the Palestinians, for roughly 60. There are whole generations who have been raised and given their faith not as a religion, not as salvation, but as just another weapon in the endless wars in which their people have been involved.

This cannot continue. The Palestinians, in my mind, have ever moral and legal reason to oppose the Israeli occupation, and the international community believes this as well - there has been a UN resolution on the table demanding Israel's withdrawl for more than 30 years. But they don't need to corrupt their faith to continue in their struggle. They can base their opposition to the occupation in law, in reason, in compassion, in common sense. They do not need to base it in Islam.

Now I understand this is a defense mechanism, it is a way of helping you fight for what you know is right, a way of keeping your morale up. Without religion, the Palestinians might have just given up. Only God can put into the hearts of his people the strength and courage and bravery it requires to stand up to such injustice for so long.

But God does not give us bomb belts and AK 47s. That is where we have been going wrong. Ghandi got it right. Now will that approach work in Israel, probably not. The Palestinians went for years without these kinds of attacks and the world still did nothing to address or try to correct the ethnic cleansing committed against them. So I can understand the frustration.

But you cannot allow others to corrupt you so deeply. I mean, we're talking about Islam, about our faith. How can ever allow them to touch this? How can we ever respond to their barbarity by misusing our faith?

These are the types of things that annoy me. I could go on, but it's enough for now.

 

[jewscout]

Ghandi got it right. Now will that approach work in Israel, probably not.

on the contrary i think a Palestinian Ghandi would accomplish far more than Hamas, Arafat or Nasrallah ever have or will to gain a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

but then such non-violent methods have never been attempted on a large scale in this conflict....

 

[Djamila]

on the contrary i think a Palestinian Ghandi would accomplish far more than Hamas, Arafat or Nasrallah ever have or will to gain a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

but then such non-violent methods have never been attempted on a large scale in this conflict....

I thought - if they just lie down and allow their homes to be destroyed, their lands confiscated, their fields bulldozed, and so on... then such policies will only become easier to implement.

But the Palestinians have not had a way to defend against this anyway. The only true defense they have are the Israeli groups who come to protect their fields from Jewish extremists, to link hands and protect their homes, to drive their produce and crafts to markets in Israel proper, and so on.

So non-violent resistence in this area could work, if it became more universal.

The only real "defense" they have now are terrorists groups, who can't really defend them so much as carry out tiny pricks of revenge elsewhere.

 

[jewscout]

But the Palestinians have not had a way to defend against this anyway.

wait...didn't the majority of the Arab world fight nearly a half dozen wars in an attempt to "liberate" Palestine? Which, in hindsight, seem to have been bids to gain political power for themselves, rather than actually caring at all about the Palestinian people.

and these terrorist groups you speak of...are the reason that Palestinians can't drive their goods to market...the traffic was not cut off until the last Intifada in 2000...before then such trafficing of goods was permitted.