Interview With Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

8/4/2019 Interview With Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

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Interview with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

(Interview by Fauzia Malik)

FM: As-salaamu Alaikum.

SHY: Walaikumu Salaam.

FM: Jazak-Allah Khair for taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some of it with

us. You returned from the Hajj recently, and you’ve been previously haven’t you.

SHY: Right.

FM: What was different this time around as opposed to other times - or is each time

different in itself?

SHY: I think the Hajj tends to reflect the state of the Ummah. That’s one of the things

about the Hajj is that you get to see the Ummah. It’s a microcosm of the Ummahs

condition. And I think what you see on Hajj is that the Ummah is not in good condition.

What you see is that there is good in the Ummah, but the state, the overall state is not a

got state and I think that’s very reflective in the Hajj. One of the things that is very obvious

is that there is, in a sense, a loss of what’s called "Ithar" , which is deference to others. One

of the essential characteristics of the Muslims is this idea of deference and adab and if you

lose adab in the Haram, you certainly won’t have adab in the place where you’re coming

from. And so what happens is that you have people who forget partly where they are.

Some of the outwardly manifestations of that are a lot of people smoking, publicly, in the

Haram, a lot of intermingling between men and women in ways that are inappropriate.

Also a total lack of concern for the cleanliness of the place - garbage is everywhere. I mean,

already garbage as a phenomenon, it’s a modern phenomenon. Humans have always

produced waste products, but consumer waste products are very different from classical

waste products that were by and large, biodegradable - things that would go back to the

earth. And here you’re dealing with a lot of plastics and thing that are not...they’re ugly.

And there’s just a lot of garbage, and what I’ve think that is indicative of, the fact that the

Muslims throw things around, is that there is an assumption that somebody else is going



to pick it up. And so really what that’s telling us is that nobody is taking personal

responsibility, and I think that is by and large a real crisis in the Muslim Ummah as a whole,

that people, individual Muslims are not taking personal responsibility for the condition of

the Ummah, they’re expecting that somebody else is going to take care of the problems,

somebody else is going to take care of our troubles, and this has led to a type of apathy,and so I think that’s all reflective in the behaviour. At the throwing at the stones, I mean

that’s.... I mean, the people that I went with, we all threw our stones without harming

anybody, without any pushing and shoving, and we went in and out. But we did it because

we were consciously doing that, where as there’s a lot of people there that, there just don’t

care about other people, they’re pushing people to get their...to get in and do what they

have to do, and they harm other people doing it. You can see this also around the Black

Stone, you see it around the Tawwaf, and the trouble is is that by honouring other Muslims,

Allah honours you, and by disparaging other Muslims, you only in the end, Allah says "Ya

Ayohan nas, Inna Baghiakum a la Anfusikum" - O mankind, your harm of other people is

only against ourselves. And so by harming other people, what we’re really doing is harming

ourselves, and I think that’s what’s happening in the Muslim Ummah, and that’s why we

have this type of oppression in the Muslim Ummah towards one another, which manifests

in the corruption within government organisations, the corruption within the private sector.

FM: So are you saying that during the time you’ve been going back to the Hajj, things have

gotten worse - you’ve perceived deterioration or improvement?

SHY: No, I don’t think so - I don’t think that... I don’t want to paint a completely bleak... but

one has to be realistic as well. For me personally, despite all of that, there are extraordinary

things that take place, and it is still.... I mean the real task of every pilgrim is to, inspite of all

these overwhelming circumstances, to experience the Hajj as a spiritual journey. I mean,

that is a task. Something that probably earlier, in earlier time, it was easier. Now there’s astruggle.

FM: Why do you think Muslims have lost their tradition of mutual love and courtesy

amongst each other, why do you think there has been that decline?

SHY: Because there is a breakdown in the whole concept of what an ‘Ummah’ is, I mean

this is the idea of Divide and Conquer. It’s taken some time to achieve, but there has been a

breakdown in nationalities, there’s now artificially created nationalities and borders that

divide us, and those nationalities and borders have taken a life of their own, and so what



happens is that people begin to view themselves as Egyptians, as Algerians etc. and not as

Muslims, not as one Ummah and Allah says that "you are one Ummah and I am your Lord" .

You have one Lord, one Ummah and one Prophet. We have in our Ummah all of the

ingredients that no other communities have, not even the homogeneity of countries, don’t

have the ingredients of unity outside of there countries. In other words, the Japanese, theydo have a type of solidarity based on their Japaneseness, but outside of that, outside of a

bloodlink, as a people and a language link, they don’t have anything to unite them.

Whereas with the Muslims, we have within our tradition all of the ingredients to unite the

most diverse people and it’s extraordinary, there’s nothing else similar to it at all in history

or in the world right now.

What America would like to do is they would like to unite the world based on shared,

quote - unquote, values, because I don’t like that word, based on these shared values of

consumerism, gratuitous consumption, of pleasure and the world is created basically for

play and entertainment and as a pastime, and music and dancing and basically bestial

lower self behaviour and this is what they’re spreading all over the world. So everybody will

look the same, in their jeans and their Nikes shoes, and everybody will listen to the same

sugared pop music, and everybody will eat the same hamburger, French fries and

milkshakes and everybody will have the same banal perspectives on the world. So this typeof unity which is based on reducing the human being to an automaton, who has no

volition of its own and who simply sleepwalks through life without any sense of identity,

awareness or tradition. This is the unity they’re hoping to achieve with this idea of some

kind of one world. Maybe with some new-age spirituality thrown in there because people

do tend to have some spiritual needs, so we can throw in some new-age... it’s all one in any

case, right? So take a little dabble from this religion and that religion, and we can all be

Buddhists, and then you can just meditate, or something like that, or they’ll, I’m sure, be

providing soon enough, Spiritual Television.

FM: Have you read the book by James Redfield, it’s very appropriate to what you’re talking

about, The Celestine Prophecy ?

SHY: I actually have read that. I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s this kind of

new-age religion that’s being promoted - which is Dajjalic in its nature because it’s looking

at certain spiritual truths and it’s distorting them. Iblis is the mimicker, right, I mean Allah

says that his throne is on water, so Iblis made his throne on water. Iblis is the great



mimicker; he’s the mocker. And so the pseudo religion always will mimic true religion, and

unfortunately when you don’t have people that have the ability to discern and distinguish

between truth and falsehood, then they spend their life being misled and groping in

darkness.

FM: Do you think the intellectual decline in our Ummah can in any way be related to the

decline in the Arabic language and its importance?

SHY: That’s a very strong element in the whole overall decline. Out of the several hundred

languages in the world, there are only a handful of languages that are considered

‘civilisational’ and Arabic is certainly one of them.

Right now, the language of power and dominance, and of discourse at whatever level -

whether commercial, philosophical or scientific - is English. And the power elite in the west

are certainly capable of articulating in the English language. Whereas in the Arab world,

you would be hard pressed to find people capable of articulating verbally - using the

Arabic language as a vehicle for discussion and serious though - unless they had been well

trained. More can actually write and part of that is because the Arabic language is so

deeply rooted in classical Islamic Knowledge.

English has a worldview, and now you find in the Arab world, people who have English as

their second language - usually their higher education will now be in English. Every

language contains within it the roots of the worldview of the people that produced it - so

by taking on the English language, one is taking on a western worldview, and you can’t

avoid it. By abandoning the Arabic language what people are doing in fact is abandoning

the worldview that the Qur’an provides. Also, the Muslims had a deep sense of the

linguistic power and the actual underlying expression of reality embedded in the language.

The language of the Qur’an is the language of truth, and therefore the one who learns it

and is deeply into it will ultimately be confronted with reality through the expression of the

Arabic language.

FM: Why do you think so many pieces of good Islamic literature are being written by non-

Muslims - e.g. George Makdisi’s ‘Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian

World’ ?



SHY: Partly because the west is the dominant power-elite, and the dominant powers

always have intellectual apparati to maintain their power - part of the apparatus, what it

will do is it will enable and facilitate research and facilitate intellectuals to explore/pursue

ideas and thoughts ultimately for the benefit of the power elite. But what will come out of

that often is that people who do have inherent brilliance are able to have the time and thefreedom to think deeply about matters. This is the whole system of endowments in the

west - if you look at most of these people who do these things, they’ll often have a

paragraph of gratitude towards some fellowship that was given to them, which gave them

2 or 3 years to do the research they needed to do. What happened in the Muslim world is

that because there is no power (the Muslim world has in fact become of secondary

importance) most Muslim governments are in no way interested in pursuing intellectuals -

in fact, quite the opposite. They want to prevent them from thinking, they don’t want them

to think. The fact that the west does allow these intellectuals to pursue things is in no way

indicative of some desire for truth.

FM: That is a very important note.

SHY: Right. Sometimes, truth is a by-product of it, because in order for the to fulfil what

they want to fulfil, they allow an ‘expressive’ control of their intellectuals - but because of

the nature of the mechanism, it will in the end, only serve the power elite.

FM: Someone remarked that "sitting before a teacher who passes you knowledge is like

taking a photograph - in that by the light, the image of what is in front of you is implanted

in your heart. This is education."

Please comment - why can’t we receive ‘education’ from reading books?

SHY: Part of it is the idea of transmission. Anybody who has studied with a teacher will

know the answers to that question and anybody who hasn’t won’t. It’s the difference

between hearing about something and experiencing it. Our tradition is a tradition of

transmission. Our Prophet (saw) was taught by an Angel - that Angel was taught by Rabb

-ul-Izza - the Lord of Power. And the Qur’an says, "over everyone who possesses

knowledge is someone who has more knowledge". When Musa (as) was asked if there was

anyone more knowledgeable on the earth than he was, he replied "No". But Allah then sent

him to study with Al-Khizr, who the majority of scholars say wasn’t even a prophet, so



here’s a prophet being sent to a non-prophet and it was a reminder to Musa (as) that one

can never assume that there is not someone that they can learn from. Part of the modern

crisis in the Muslim Ummah is we have auto-didactic scholars - the damage that they have

caused is, I think, extraordinary, and one of the signs of the end of time is a Hadith in which

the Prophet (saw) said knowledge would be taken from a "Saghir" which means "a littleone". Ibn Abd-ul Barr, the great Andalusian commentator on Hadith, wrote that what this

Hadith means is that the chain would be broken towards the end of time - people who had

not taken their knowledge from the previous generation will begin to transmit knowledge,

and that knowledge will be their own opinion and not transmitted knowledge and from

the Muslim perspective, truth is not something that needs to be discovered - it’s

something that needs to be learned. In the western understanding, truth is something that

needs to be discovered, truth has not been given to man - it’s something that man needs

to discover for himself. In the 20th Century, although that meta-narrative is disappearing,

i.e. - the post-modern phenomenon is in a sense a capitulation to the idea that there is no

truth - and if there is truth, it is not with a "T" but with a "t" - meaning, "your truth may not

be my truth". What the post-modernist thesis is to say that, really what we have not is

some grand narrative of the search of truth, but rather a meta-narratives or small narratives

of the truth, that each one is as equally true as the other which is ultimately saying that

nothing is true. Because one you say everything is true, what you’re really saying is nothing

is true. If I say it’s wrong to kill and somebody says, well that statement has no meaning

because what is "wrong"? - what’s your definition of wrong? And because wrong cannot be

technically defined within the dominant discourse of the 20th century, therefore it has no

meaning. Whereas, if I say it is wrong and wrong is that which Allah has made prohibited, I

am laughed out of the auditorium because what I’m saying is that "truth has been revealed

by God" - that is no longer an accepted premise for the modern social discourse. So we

can’t talk of morality - all we can talk of is legislation, and legislation is what the latest

vogue is - should we have the death penalty or shouldn’t we.... it becomes a debate, and

there’s nothing in stone so to speak. Like "Thou shalt not kill". It becomes "should we kill or

shouldn’t we? Well, let’s take a vote". Truth becomes a democratic process, and that is very

alien to the Islamic tradition. So the idea that truth is something which is transmitted from

generation to generation is no longer acceptable within the dominant social discourse.

And for the Muslims that has been the truth because the Prophet (saw) said that this

knowledge - i.e. the truth/revelation will be carried in each generation by upright people

and transmitted to the following generation. So Muslims have always seen that knowledgeis a transmission, from the breasts of those who know to the hearts of those who don’t

know.



FM: Many sisters wish to travel to Muslim countries to learn the Deen from those who

know, but they are concerned about the issue of travelling without a Mahram.

SHY: First of all, living in the non-Muslim lands - it is accepted in Shariah that if a women

makes hijrah from the land of the non-Muslim to the land of the Muslims, she doesn’t need

a Mahram - that’s a well known principle in Islamic jurisprudence. The way I view it is I think

that a woman is safer without a Mahram in the land of the Muslims than she is with a

Mahram in the land of the non-Muslims.

FM: To what extent can a female, married or unmarried, affiliate herself with a sheikh whilst

keeping within the boundaries of the Shariah?

SHY: Women traditionally studied with teachers, it just has to be done with adab. There’s

obviously more limitations on the female, the Qur’an says the male is not like the female.

It’s obviously better and more preferred if a women learns from a female sheikh, and there

used to be a considerable number of them in the Muslim Ummah. There isn’t anymore and

it is even quite unusual now to find a male teacher who is of any high calibre, but to find a

female is an anomaly in the Muslin world right now.

FM: With regards to the Shariah, why do you think that the rules regulating trade/industry/

business transactions have almost been abandoned by the Muslims?

SHY: Because we’ve become subject completely to the dominant world order, which is a

capitalistic, western world order and so international law is now western law, this is history,

just read what happened in the 19th century with the abdication of Islamic Law and the

usurpation of it place by western legal systems - with some amalgamations like the Anglo-

Mohammadan law, where personal matters (e.g.; inheritance & marriage) were left to the

scope of the Islamic Tradition, but those matters that related to business and commerce

and penal codes became under the jurisdiction of western secular law.

FM: In the Mu’watta of Imam Malik (ra), he places a lot of emphasis on the "Aml of

Medina". What is the difference between this and Hadith?

SHY: Within Imam Maliks (ra) framework, he sees that Medina has a unique status thatother cities do not have during the time of the Tabi’een, because what he says is the



Tabi’een were people who lived with the Sahabah, there’s over 10,000 Sahabah buried in

Baqia who died in Medina. He’s saying that this city was a city that had a special place in

Islam that no other city had - even Mecca - because Medina is the city in which the Islamic

legal system and the Islamic social order was fully implemented. For that reason, he in a

sense is a inheritor of a social expression of the totality of the Islamic teaching and so hisrecording that in the Mu’watta is in a sense a recording of what he would consider a city in

Submission, and for that reason he would say that if I find an isolated Hadith, not

Muttawatir (a Hadith that has several transmissions), with one or two chains from the

Sahabah and I find 1000 of the people of knowledge from the Tabi’een in Medina doing

something, Imam Malik is saying that their actions override the solitary transmission of

that Hadith - i.e., the fact that they’re not following that Hadith and that they were people

who lived in the presence of the Sahabah, and that practice would’ve been done in the

presence of the Sahabah, among whom were men like Ibn Umar and Umar ibn al-Khattab

and women like Aisha, that these people knew better what was the final Islamic decision on

the matter. Imam Malik for that reason would consider the action of the people of Medina

- when he says that, he rally doesn’t mean everybody, he means the people of knowledge

in the city, and the city was filled with people of knowledge. Imam Malik felt that the action

was a Hadith, only it had achieved the status of Muttawatir because of its agreement in the

city of Medina - even if he did not have an actual verbal transmission of that matter - e.g.,

there’s a sound Hadith that the Prophet (saw) told people not to fast on Friday, but in the

Mu’watta, Imam Malik new that Hadith and said "I found the people of knowledge in this

city fasting". - they considered it to be a virtuous day to fast. His point was that they were

doing that action in the presence of the Sahabah, and none of the Sahabah said you can’t

fast on Friday. Therefore, Imam Malik is saying that the fact that they transmitted this as a

virtuous day to fast, and it was not rejected because of that Hadith, he considered isolated

transmissions of the Hadith to be weaker than the transmission of Aml, of action.

It’s a difference of opinion, but it is an accepted principle in Usul. Imam Shaffie and Imam

Abu Hanifah don’t agree with it, nor does Ahmad, but they do agree the Aml of Medina is

higher with regards to certain things e.g.. Measurements.

FM: Have you written/published any works?

SHY: I’m in the process of doing so - I’m working on a few things. I’ve published a few

articles and things.



FM: There are Muslims who say that we should not attach the word "Syedinna" to the

Prophet (saw). Is there such a thing as loving our Prophet (saw) too much?

SHY: The Prophet (saw) said in a sound Hadith "I’m the Syed of the children of Adam", so

he is our Syed whether people like it or not. Allah (swt) praises Yahya in the Qur’an by

calling him "Syedinna Wa Hasoora", that he was a Syed in the Qur’an and our Prophet

(saw) is certainly greater than Yahya. Syed means master in the Arabic language, and he is

our master.

You should not say Syedinna in the Fard prayer when you do the Tahiyya - there is an

opinion that you should, but it is a weak opinion. But when we speak of the Prophet (saw),we should call him the Messenger of Allah, the Prophet of Allah or we should call him

Syedinna. We should not say Muhammad without putting some honorific title before his

name. One of the things that Qadi Iyad points out in the Shifah is that Allah (swt) always in

the Qur’an calls his prophets by honorific titles, e.g.. Ya Ayohal Muzamill, Yasin and so on.

It’s part of the adab of the Muslims.

With regards to loving the Prophet (saw) too much, it really has no meaning. He is the

means through which we have come to know Allah. The Hadith says whoever has not

thanked people has not thanked Allah, this is why massive respect is owned to the parents,

because they were the means through which you were given life. Even though it’s Allah

(swt) who gave you life, Allah has command that you honour your parents in a way that no

one else has been given that high status in the Qur’an - after Allah and his Messenger

(saw), high status is given to parents in terms of obedience, so after obeying Allah and his

Messenger (which is obeying Allah), the next highest thing the parents.

The Prophet (saw) said none of you truly believe until I am more beloved to you than your

own self, and so if you love the Messenger of Allah (saw) less than you love yourself, then

you don’t have true iman. And if you love the Messenger of Allah (saw) less than you love

your parents or your children, then you don’t have true iman.

FM: Many people would like to know about the Zaytuna Institute and why you decided to

found it/what are your goals in relation to it?



SHY: Zaytuna is just a vehicle for doing the work I’m doing. To me institutions don’t really

mean anything. Ultimately, institutions are nothing other than the people that run them. I

think the important thing for us to remember is that ultimately we are all mortal, and that

our time is limited, and so the best actions are those actions that continue on. My hope is

that this work will continue on after my lifetime. The work is nothing other than trying toteach the message of Islam. To establish institutions that guarantee or give whatever

worldly guarantee that we can have that that will continue on, is part of our tradition. The

creation of endowments to make sure that the traditions of Islam would be maintained

from generation to generation. It’s my small contribution to the overall picture. What the

Muslim world needs is for Muslims to take it upon themselves, at the personal level,

maintenance of the tradition, and it has to happen. It’s not the talk of any one individual,

but the talk of an Ummah. But an Ummah is nothing other than the individuals that

comprise it. Muslims have to recognise that our tradition is disappearing, and that there

has to be efforts to re-ignite learning at a senior level.

FM: What about the Rihla Course?

SHY: The Rihla again is an attempt also at doing the above. What it will hopefully move to

is a full-time type of Madrassa, but right now it’s a summer programme of one month.

The problem is that the Muslims have fallen into the western approach - which is the

‘conference’ approach. We have conferences, but the conferences last a few days, they are

comprised of talks that are in a sense not so much informative as inspirational, and there’s

not a real transmission of knowledge, rather a type of narrative story telling which is not

conducive to the transmission of Islamic knowledge. Islamic knowledge means sitting at

the feet of people, who sat at the feet of people, back to the Messenger of Allah (saw).

Even within the western corporate model that created the conference phenomenon, it’s still

buried in institutions -i.e.. Conference papers are actually the result, in the western model,

of research which will end up being abridged synopsis of someone’s work, and if attending

the conference are interested in it, then they can actually have access to the work of that

person. What happens in our conferences though is that there isn’t any work really being

done other than this type of inspirational model. I don’t think we should eliminateconferences all together, but I think people have to recognise the limitations of the format.



FM: What books are you currently reading?

SHY: The Saffwat -at- Tafsir of Muhammad Ali Sabooni, and also "The Venture of Islam" by

Marshall Hodgkin.

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Interview With Shaykh Hamza Yusuf