Dr. Butch Ware is a lifelong activist and educator focused on the histories of empire, colonialism, genocide, and revolution. Over the past two decades, he has dedicated his scholarship to serving communities, most recently in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Ware has organized teach-ins, developed community education programs, and launched various activist and organizing initiatives. More broadly, he works as a public intellectual and organizer, supporting communities across the U.S. and globally in challenging imperialism, ethnic cleansing, and perpetual warfare, while promoting sustainable, just, and peaceful alternatives rooted in African, Indigenous, and Abrahamic traditions.
Below is a full transcript from his talk & discussion at Nuun Collective on October 6, 2024.
0:00:00 Qur’an Recitation
أَعُوْذُ بِاللهِ مِنَ الشَّـيْطٰنِ الرَّجِيْمِ
I seek refuge in God from Satan the accursed.
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful.
Quran 4:135-4:137
4:135
۞ يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ كُونُوا۟ قَوَّٰمِينَ بِٱلْقِسْطِ شُهَدَآءَ لِلَّهِ وَلَوْ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَوِ ٱلْوَٰلِدَيْنِ وَٱلْأَقْرَبِينَ ۚ إِن يَكُنْ غَنِيًّا أَوْ فَقِيرًۭا فَٱللَّهُ أَوْلَىٰ بِهِمَا ۖ فَلَا تَتَّبِعُوا۟ ٱلْهَوَىٰٓ أَن تَعْدِلُوا۟ ۚ وَإِن تَلْوُۥٓا۟ أَوْ تُعْرِضُوا۟ فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ خَبِيرًۭا ١٣٥
Believers, be supporters of justice, as witnesses to God, even be it against yourselves, or your parents or relatives; whether one be rich or poor, God is closer and more worthy than either. And do not follow desire, lest you swerve from justice; and if you pervert it or neglect it, God is aware of what you do.
4:136 يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوٓا۟ ءَامِنُوا۟ بِٱللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِۦ وَٱلْكِتَـٰبِ ٱلَّذِى نَزَّلَ عَلَىٰ رَسُولِهِۦ وَٱلْكِتَـٰبِ ٱلَّذِىٓ أَنزَلَ مِن قَبْلُ ۚ وَمَن يَكْفُرْ بِٱللَّهِ وَمَلَـٰٓئِكَتِهِۦ وَكُتُبِهِۦ وَرُسُلِهِۦ وَٱلْيَوْمِ ٱلْـَٔاخِرِ فَقَدْ ضَلَّ ضَلَـٰلًۢا بَعِيدًا ١٣٦
Believers, believe in God and God’s messenger, and the Book that God has sent down to the messenger, and the Book that God sent down before. And whoever repudiates God and God’s angels, Books, and messengers, and the last day, has already gone far astray.
4:137 إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ ثُمَّ كَفَرُوا۟ ثُمَّ ءَامَنُوا۟ ثُمَّ كَفَرُوا۟ ثُمَّ ٱزْدَادُوا۟ كُفْرًۭا لَّمْ يَكُنِ ٱللَّهُ لِيَغْفِرَ لَهُمْ وَلَا لِيَهْدِيَهُمْ سَبِيلًۢا ١٣٧
As for those who believe and then scoff, and then believe, and then scoff, and then scoff more and more, God is not committed to forgiving them or guiding them in any way.
Quran 93:1-11
93:1 وَٱلضُّحَىٰ ١
By the morning, bright,
93:2 وَٱلَّيْلِ إِذَا سَجَىٰ ٢
and the night when it is calm,
93:3 مَا وَدَّعَكَ رَبُّكَ وَمَا قَلَىٰ ٣
your Lord has not left you,
and is not incensed:
93:4 وَلَلْـَٔاخِرَةُ خَيْرٌۭ لَّكَ مِنَ ٱلْأُولَىٰ ٤
hereafter will be better for you
than what was before;
93:5 وَلَسَوْفَ يُعْطِيكَ رَبُّكَ فَتَرْضَىٰٓ ٥
your Lord will surely give to you,
and you will be content.
93:6 أَلَمْ يَجِدْكَ يَتِيمًۭا فَـَٔاوَىٰ ٦
Did God not find you orphaned
and give shelter?
93:7 وَوَجَدَكَ ضَآلًّۭا فَهَدَىٰ ٧
And God found you wandering
and gave guidance.
93:8 وَوَجَدَكَ عَآئِلًۭا فَأَغْنَىٰ ٨
And God found you needy
and gave sufficiency.
93:9 فَأَمَّا ٱلْيَتِيمَ فَلَا تَقْهَرْ ٩
So don’t oppress the orphan,
93:10 وَأَمَّا ٱلسَّآئِلَ فَلَا تَنْهَرْ ١٠
and don’t rebuff the seeker.
93:11 وَأَمَّا بِنِعْمَةِ رَبِّكَ فَحَدِّثْ ١١
And tell of the kindness of your Lord.
God, the Most High, the Most Magnificent, has spoken the truth.
0:05:55 Introduction
Kamran Kazmi: Dr. Butch, as-salamu alaikum. Welcome to Nuun. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit with us here today and share your knowledge. I want to start off with a story. You were 15 years old when in one night you read Malcolm X. Within that same week you read the Qur’an. And not only that— you took the shahada and became Muslim. And when I heard this story I realized that Butch Ware was Butch Ware long before he became the Vice Presidential candidate for the Green Party.
Butch Ware: Definitely.
Kamran Kazmi: Hundred percent. And tell me more about that.
Butch Ware: أَعُوْذُ بِاللهِ مِنَ الشَّـيْطٰنِ الرَّجِيْمِ I seek refuge in God from Satan the accursed. I think you can probably lower the gain probably half a decibel and you’ll lose that feedback. That’s years of hip hop performances. Just, uh, mic check. Can we go a little bit higher? There we go. Can everyone hear me? Perfect, in sha Allah.
Yeah, you gave an excellent introduction. I’ll just add to this that I grew up initially in extreme poverty in Washington, DC. I was born—my mother was 15 years old — teenage mom, um, pregnant white woman in an extremely segregated city. Pregnant by a black man. She was told by her high school guidance counselor to have an abortion. That if she had me she would be strung out on heroin and prostituting herself by the time she was 17. So they keep me from ever being born. White supremacy is literally at my neck before I came into this world. My father had a sixth grade education. And in the first seven or eight years of my life. I think it’s technically eight eight-and-a-half years we never actually lived for a consecutive year at the same street address. In and out of different apartment buildings, evictions, public housing. Sometimes staying with relatives, couch surfing—not the cool in-your-20s kind but the kind where you don’t have no place else to stay but with relatives. Sometimes in my dad’s locksmith van. Sometimes at a battered women’s shelter.
So, when I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X at age 15 and I read Malcolm’s story of his father murdered by the Klan. Murdered by white supremacists because he was a Garviac — a follower of Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist, a leader of his time. Malcolm’s mother was driven to mental illness by the intersection of misogyny and racial violence. Malcolm himself seeing many of the same dark parts of the streets I had seen. Long story short: what that book did to me and for me was that it showed me that there is no place on this earth that is so dark that the light of God cannot find you there.
And so when I read that book cover-to-cover in one night, I wanted what Malcolm had at the end of that book. I wanted complete and total liberation—internally and externally. And so I went to my high school library and I checked out an English translation of the Qur’an. I think it’s the Arberry translation. It’s the one where the Surahs aren’t in the right order. You know this one? The penguin edition. And I read that cover-to-cover the next night. And then I fell asleep because I had been up for 24 hours straight without sleeping and I missed school the next day. I told my mom when she got home from work that I’m a Muslim and that I wanted a ride to a mosque so that I could make shahāda. And she said “I’m working this week”. I can take you on the weekend. And so that weekend she drove me to Islamic Society of Friendly Minnesota which was the first mosque that showed up in the phonebook and I took my shahada.
Malcolm was the person who not only brought me into Islam but also that taught me about Africa. Taught me to return to the source of knowledge of my ancestors. Malcolm said in another discourse—he said, “If a cat has kittens in an oven, that don’t make ‘em biscuits.” Don’t call them biscuits. Nobody chuckled. You guys don’t know what this means—it sounds cryptic. But I’ll finish the bar. Malcolm said, “If a cat has kittens in an oven, you don’t call them biscuits. You call yourself a Negro. Show me Negro land on a map. Negro, you come from Africa. Call yourself an African.” So Malcolm encouraged me to pursue not just knowledge of Islam but knowledge of self. And a de-colonial, anti-colonial sensibility that was about recovering a past that was stolen from you, taken from you. And that was not just taken from me it was taken from all my people—concealed from us! So that we would not be anything except whatever this colonizer says we’re going to be. Because the only reason a colonizer ever tries to separate you from your history is so that when they tell you who you are you have no choice but to agree with them.
So what I really appreciate about this invitation to Nuun Collective is that it’s clear that this is a space where you guys are trying to cultivate a decolonial and anti-colonial epistemology that’s about getting freed in here (points to heart) and in here (points to head). Because the reality is that all of the political organizing, all of the movement work that we do will only reproduce the internal mental structures of white supremacy unless and until we remove them from the interior of our beings.
0:12:42 What drove Dr. Butch Ware’s research interests?
Kamran Kazmi: That’s amazing. And I think that story actually kicked off a whole journey for you — I think what’s also crazy is you were fifteen and you were doing stuff that no one else was doing. Like, who reads a book all in one night?
Butch Ware: Laughs. Wait so first of all — any other nerds out there that read books? Okay I was going to say it’s not that unusual. Okay? Like black nerds of the world unite. I played sports but I’m like the biggest nerd you’ll ever find. And if I found a good book I did not put it down until I was done with that book. And that book — those were literally the two best books I ever read. The best book ever written in the English language [The Autobiography of Malcolm X] and the best book ever translated into the English language [The Qur’an].
Kamran Kazmi: Talk to me about this. How many of you guys have read Malcolm X? It should be more.
Butch Ware: And how many will read it tonight? Okay, there we go.
Kamran Kazmi: I’ve read Malcolm X myself. But most people who end up reading these books—even though they’re revolutionary—they don’t go on to then go get a PhD and do all this crazy research in West African culture and tradition—the resistance traditions of Usman dan Fodio, Ahmadu Bamba and so much more. So tell me what drove that and tell me about the research that you wanted to do.
Butch Ware: I mean, that’s a good point. Not everybody does this. People that have known me my whole life and even people that have only known me for the last six years like my beautiful wife, Clementina, sitting here in the front row, know that my style in life is to turn it up to 11 and then break off the knob. So, whatever it is, I go full at it. I want to be completely immersed in the thing and understand it completely. By the time I was seventeen years old I was organizing pan-Africanist reading groups. I read everything. I read all of the theorists that you guys have to read in college—I read those voluntarily. Voluntarily as a seventeen or eighteen year old. So I was reading Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. Reading Walter Rodney. I was reading those by the time I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old. I didn’t know what I was going to do with that except that I knew that I needed to, in some way, contribute to what these greats had done. I realized at age 20 that I wasn’t really going to be able to make progress with any of these goals without going to Africa.
And so, I had two professors at the University of Minnesota at that time. One had worked in Senegal and one had worked in Ghana. And they were both encouraging me and saying that they thought I should consider doing a PhD in history. And I said, “a PhD in history? I can’t afford regular school. How am I supposed to afford to graduate school?” I was literally working two jobs at that time to get through school. And they said no you don’t understand, you have really good grades and you write these papers well. You can go get a PhD and they’ll pay not only your tuition but they’ll pay you a stipend for you to go get a PhD. And I literally looked at Genome—and that was her name—I looked Genome dead in the face and I said “man y’all be doing black folk wrong. I have never in my life heard of this. No one in my neighborhood has ever heard of the idea that you could go to school for free and get a PhD and somebody would pay for it.” Never heard of it. So I was like, okay, so I’ll consider it so they said well you should, if that’s the case—what I wanted to do in that time was go to Africa. And I had these two professors, one that worked in Senegal and one that worked in Ghana and they told me about this undergraduate research grant. So you write a proposal, they give you money, and you go study whatever you want. I was like, bet. I can write. I’m going to write a proposal. So, this was 1996 — they gave me $7,000 to go to Senegal. I chose Senegal instead of Ghana because my assumption was that if I went to English-speaking country I would never learn an African language. It would be too easy for me to just be me in that space. So instead, I went to Senegal. I studied French and learned French in one academic year before going to Senegal and I started learning Wolof as soon as I got to Senegal. And within a year or so I was fluent in the Wolof language. I knew I wanted to keep going to Senegal for the rest of my life, and I knew somebody else was going to have to pay for it. Because I was broke. So, yeah, that was when I took seriously that idea of doing a PhD and I wanted to research this topic that everybody else in my academic environment thought was a really stupid idea, except for my PhD advisor, who really encouraged me.
So I had this idea, when I was in the first year of graduate school, that the most important social institution in Senegalese society had never been studied carefully in a non-racist way. And that was Qur’an schooling. And this is before September 11, 2001. People didn’t really pay attention to Islam in academic circles at that point in time. None of my—literally I had professors that said why would you want to write a history of Bible school? Because for them, it was like an intellectually uninteresting question. But the Senegalese colleagues that I had and friends that I had—they were like “no, this is the most important thing you could possibly do.” Yeah. So, they encouraged me to study the history of Qur’an schooling. I mean long story short that began like PhD research in French archival sources, Arabic written sources, hundreds of hours of oral history interviews in the Wolof language with people who grew up in Qur’an schools. And it began the process that eventually led to my first academic book The Walking Qur’an. Islamic education, embodied knowledge, and history in West Africa. That book started out as conversations with friends about how to write a history of Qur’an schooling that was actually respectful of Islam and respectful of Africa. Because no such thing existed at that point in time. So it was really translating those ideas that Malcolm introduced me to Africa and its importance, and of Islam and its importance and then bringing those into my own life and my own work and beginning to put my own academic imprint on it.
0:19:32 What formed Dr. Butch Ware’s worldview?
Kamran Kazmi: So, just like how not many people from your background end up going to do a PhD and research, not many people go from that to being the Vice Presidential candidate—
**Butch Ware: **Laughs.
Kamran Kazmi: You know what I mean?
Butch Ware: Maybe even fewer, yeah.
Kamran Kazmi: So it’s like what really formed your world view? What radical ideas were you dealing with where you were like at the end of the day this is—
Butch Ware: Um, hold on. So, I always take my shoes off when Qur’an is being recited. So let me put them back on because my feet are freezing. Sorry. Okay. So, before I answer that part of the question, actually, now that you’ve framed the question in this way about becoming a Vice President—there’s a story I should tell that I don’t usually tell. When we moved from Washington D.C. to Minneapolis, I moved from a community that was 95% black to a community that was about 20% black, probably 10% indigenous, 10% Asian (mostly Vietnamese and Hmong in our neighborhood). So it was like a mixture of—probably about 10% Latin, mostly Mexican in that neighborhood. So I would say it was probably about a 50-50 split between people of color and white working class folks. I don’t think I’ve ever told this story in a public setting. When we first moved, I was waiting on a bus with my mom and I looked around and said “Mom, there’s a lot of white people here.” And she said, “Yeah honey. Well, you know there’s more white people in America than there are black people.” And I said “Why are you lying to me like that?” I thought that was the most ridiculous thing that I had ever heard, growing up in D.C. Like it was completely inconceivable that that was actually factually true.
At that point in time, we were actually coming home from Howell Elementary on the south side of Minneapolis. And Howell Elementary was actually where my dreams of one day becoming a president were ended. Because, when I was a kid in D.C. I memorized every single piece of presidential trivia. You could pick a date on the calendar and I could tell you a piece of presidential trivia that was associated with it. And my aunt once tested me on this. She was like, “what about today?” And I said, “Oh, I can’t think of anything.” And then I was like “wait, today’s Martha Washington’s birthday.” Like, I had Rolodex recall on all of these pieces of presidential history. And I think the reason is that somewhere in my head, growing up, even under the circumstances that we were in. The fact that I was born on election day in 1973. The fact that I was born in Washington, D.C. in the specter of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And because, like, I thought, inside my head that I could figure things out and be good at stuff. I think in my head I wanted to be President of the United States when I was a little kid. At Howell Elementary, I was doing my presidential history trivia trip. And a teacher said to me, “You know Butch, there has never been a black President of the United States and there probably won’t be one.”
Kamran Kazmi: This reminds me of Malcolm X.
Butch Ware: You said it. That’s just like Malcolm X. And that’s exactly it. So literally that is the day I stopped giving a damn about school. And you can look it up, I had a 2.9 GPA in high school. I did not go to class. In fifth and sixth grade, in junior high, they had to call in my mother and they threatened me with everything they could. I was in the gifted and talented program at the school but I had not done a single homework assignment in four months. Because I just didn’t care. You couldn’t get me to care. Why should I care? If you’re telling me that there is this ceiling on what I can achieve why should I care? Why should I buy in? And this is what every single black kid goes through in the American educational system. Every single one. It happened to Malcolm. Malcolm wanted to be, if I remember correctly, a lawyer. And his teacher told him that he should think about being a carpenter and that is a good occupation for a Negro. Be what I told you to be. This is what I have slotted for you. So, now to your question. Quite literally, I don’t think I ever thought of being President of the United States again after that. Not one time. My wife three years ago probably said you should consider running for office. I’m like that’s crazy. Never. If you run tape on me teaching in community environments over the last 20 years you will not find a single piece of tape where I’m talking about running for political office or having any kind of political aspirations of any kind. Zero. So when I did this Instagram live with Dr. Jill Stein and was interviewing her about her platform and kind of pressing her and asking these questions, it didn’t really occur to me that 24 hours later they would call me back and ask me if I would consider running on the ticket. And really, probably for the first time since I was seven or eight years old, I had to think about what that would mean. And I realized that while I had never had, as a —literally I’m not even mukallaf right at that time. You know age seven or eight. Right. In all of my time of being a person who is legally responsible from the standpoint of the shari’ah for their own actions, I had never thought about doing politics. And yet, at the same time, in that moment I realized that the people that I wrote about in my academic works, the people that you mentioned like Uthman dan Fodio, like Ahmadu Bamba—the people that Malcolm had guided me to in African history—these African Muslim scholars that, like, if you — so first of all, and don’t lie, but raise your hand if you’ve actually read anything from The Walking Qur’an—from my first book. See, it’s a very small number of people, right? You guys just know me as a politician. That first book The Walking Qur’an was—so most academic books don’t get read by anyone. That has increased in sales every single quarter since it came out because the community has read that book especially the black muslim community. Okay. And another thing about that book is that there were three academic journals that devoted entire special editions just to discussing the epistemological implications of this book. It’s a revolutionary book. And it’s a book about revolutionaries. Because the main characters of that book are muslim scholars that were minding their own business teaching their students, teaching the disciplines of *tasawwuf—*of ethical training, of spiritual training—and then the slave trade arises. And so they realized that their ethical responsibilities under the circumstances is to fight against the principal evil of their time. The same way Ibrahim AS stood up against Nimrod. The same way that Sayyiduna Musa and Sayyiduna Harun peace be upon them both stood up against Pharaoh. The same way that John and Jesus stood up against Rome. These black Muslim scholars, male and female, I should add, stood up against the imperialism of their time. They stood up against white supremacy. In North Africa, Abdul Qadir Jaza’iri, Emir Abdul Qadir, the Algerian leader, he’s crowned with the turban in his community at age nineteen of being the greatest living spiritual heir of the medieval Sufi ibn Arabi. At age twenty he is organizing resistance to French occupation of Algeria. That the scholars were people who when the moment called on them to fight against the fundamental oppression of their time. They didn’t hesitate. So I did not hesitate when I got that call. Never planned for it would have asked for it. Was not going to back down from it. And I realized that after writing the histories of these scholars that stood up against the face of white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation in their own time that I was being called into the fight that I had been writing about.
0:28:10 Lessons on how to break the status quo
Kamran Kazmi: Last question and we can go into the prompts. What you just mentioned is people looking at their society, looking at the status quo and just obliterating the status quo.
Butch Ware: Laughs. Yeah, definitely.
Kamran Kazmi: Okay, that’s what we were talking about. But what’s crazy is that’s been your whole life. Really, you know. The first story you mentioned to you going into to research. To doing everything you know. That being said there are people here in this room including me who when we think about the status quo. and breaking it we hesitate, you know. And tell me about what lessons you can give us about going forward.
Butch Ware: That’s an excellent question. The most important thing that we can do to emancipate ourselves is to literally never let an ounce of the colonizer’s narrative occupy any space in our heads or hearts. Like Malcolm said never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are. Do not let them tell you what your capacities and limitations are. My favorite MC one of my top 5 favorite MCs. Wize intelligent from Poor Righteous Teachers—you know, classic 90s hip hop group. He comes to my hip-hop history class over zoom at UCSB every year and he said this thing which to me is better than any bar that he ever rapped. He said that narrative scripts human behavior the way that code scripts computers. Narrative scripts human behavior the way that code scripts computers. And it’s true. And it’s the reason by the way that the majority of the word count in the Qur’an is spent on, what? Qasas. Story-telling. The tales of the previous prophets. Now, what does God say in Suratu Hud? Qur’an’s 11th chapter 120th verse. God says, “Indeed in all that we relate to you in the tales of the previous prophets with it fortify your heart.” We fortify your heart. So God tells us what the function of historical narrative is. The function of historical narrative is to fortify your heart. And what is this heart. And this is the perfect example of how you do not ever let them colonize the way that you think. So, the heart is mentioned 132 times in the Qur’an as qalb and quloob. The Qur’an mentions sadr or sudoor— the breast— as an allusion to the heart, the case that holds the heart 44 times. Okay. The Qur’an mentions the fu’ad, the ardent flame of the heart 16 times. Almost 200 references to the heart in the Qur’an. Zero references to the mind. Not one reference to the mind in the Qur’an. ‘Aql, the term that is usually translated as the mind or intellect, when people translate from classical Arabic into English. ‘Aql never appears in nominal form of the Qur’an, it never appears as a noun in the Qur’an. ‘Aqala, intellection or understanding, appears in verbal form. Never as a noun. Because the thing that does the intellection, or the understanding—the thing that does the aqala-ing. If you’ll bear with me. The thing that does the aqala-ing is the heart in the Qur’an. They have hearts but they don’t understand with them. They have hearts but they don’t reflect with them. Now think about this. Think about this (points to heart). Real quick. Point to your mind. Good, do it. That’s your brain. That is a physical organ that exists inside your head. The mind is a concept that European enlightenment rationalism has foisted upon us. And we associate it with this physical organ that exists inside our bodies but they’re not the same thing. The mind is a concept, it’s an abstraction. It’s not an organ. If the mind were a real thing, I bet God would have mentioned it in the Qur’an. But he mentioned the heart 200 times and never once the mind. Well, if even the instrument that you think that you think with was provided to you by your colonizers, then how will you ever be free? All of our categories, it’s not just our narratives but even the categorizes themselves are poison, they are an intellectual prison designed to make us accept and internalize our chains. So that we take them with us wherever we go. The only advantage that I have ever had over anybody and everything because I did not get dealt the easiest hand to play. That despite being beaten down in those ways by white supremacy, I never for once accepted anything that white supremacy said about anything. Don’t believe a word of its narrative about anything. Don’t trust any of its categories. Instinctively resist them. And when you do that, then that opens up space for you to actually explore what our own indigenous traditions, what our own Abrahamic traditions—the tools of thought that they gave that allowed humanity to thrive for thousands of years before this last 500 years of exploitation, murder, imperialism, and theft. If you think with and through these categories alone, you are the poison. And it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, it doesn’t matter what your ethnic background is. And even the antithesis—this is going to make a bunch of leftists mad—but I often say that about the Muslim community—I often say that capitalism is their religion, Islam is their ritual observance. Can I get a witness from the congregation. That’s where you say amen. Thank you. Right? And when I really want to stick it to them, I say that sunna that we respect the most is middle class respectability and conspicuous consumption, not the sunna of the Messenger of God ﷺ. Peace be upon him. But and people love it and the leftists love it when I go hard on capitalism. And they don’t love it when I say that the antithesis both linguistically and epistemologically must contain the thesis inside it. Do I have to say that again? Antithesis, linguistically and philosophically, contains the thesis. When you argue the opposite of a thing, you have to include the original thesis in it, because you have to respond to the question that was posed. So, Marxism, contains the same toxins, that capitalism does. It is a wholly materialist philosophy. Believes that the metaphysical realm is of no significance or importance in structuring human affairs. So, while I use all the time Marxian critiques of capitalist political economy, I actually do not believe that Marx provided the answers for human development. I think that you can provide an excellent critique and a structural criticism and you can make lots of really really important radical improvements. And I’m a big believer in Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah and all those African revolutionaries that use Marx, but Kwame Ture himself said that this is a philosophical deficiency in classical Marxism. He said when Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the masses”, that was only true for Europe. He said they were the last ones into Christianity and the first ones out. And it was only used for exploitation, so for sure that critique hold for Europe. But if you study the traditions of the non-Western world, emancipatory spiritual traditions exist and obtain within all of them. And indeed, even in the pre-White supremacist European system, there were the roots of things that were actually nourishing for human souls and reproducible and sustainable. Whiteness is as destructive, white supremacy is as destructive of the humanity of the oppressor as it is of the oppressed. And that’s why the Messenger of God, that’s part of why the Messenger of God, ‘alayhi afdalu al-salatu wa al-salam, said, “Help your brother whether he is oppressed or oppressor.” And they said, Messenger of God how do we help an oppressor? And what the were really saying was why the hell would we help an oppressor? But they said how? And he said, “Stop him from oppressing.” The reality is that all of humanity will breathe free for the first time when they are free from this white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist toxin. We have been breathing in poison our whole lives and calling it air because we didn’t know no better.
0:38:33 Break/Breathing Exercises
Kamran Kazmi: I’m going to let everyone take a second to let the ideas and lessons marinate. Just take a second.
Butch Ware: Okay. As-salamu alaikum. So I’ve been given permission to make an editorial break into the program. This is the point where if this is was one of a program I was organizing instead of just [participating in, this is the part where everyone would stand up and physically move their body. Because the Quran tells us that the human being is comprised of four principle units. A spirit, a ruh; a heart, a physical body, and soul, a nafs. So when we’re in this space of where we’re doing intellectual work, we’re focused primarily on the heart but it can be easy for us to get out of balance. So when we do this much like heartwork and there’s lots of invocation of the Prophet ﷺ, recitation from Quran, we’re focused predominantly on the spirit and on the heart. So I think everybody just needs to take a minute to give the body its right, let’s stand up. Stretch your body a little bit. Move your limbs, try not to knock over your neighbor. And we’re going to do a very, very simple breathing exercise. It’s one I learned at the Shādhilī Zawiya in Avignon, France. And I’ll tell that story just briefly. Nine French families that were all the students of a particular Sufi shaykh in Damascus purchased the castle of a 19th century French philosopher and turned it into a Sufi lodge. It’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. They raise bees and they have a farm there and it’s amazing and you have to go. And every weekend there they do dhikr. And one of my favorite and simplest dhikr to do that they do is that you breathe in as slowly as you can and you exhale out as slowly as you can the name Hū. Which is one of the oldest primordial names for the uncreated creative essence, Allāh tabāraka wa ta’āla. So we’re just going to 3 times breathe in as slowly as we can feel the breath enter into our lungs. The breath that God breathed into our shared human ancestor Adam, who already contained Eve within him. And we’re going to breathe it out and return it back to its source. And we’ll do this three times.
Breathing exercises.
Butch Ware: Now that you’ve returned to you fitri state. Your innate natural humanity. Turn to your brother or sister in humanity and greet them and see their humanity and so turn to your right and give salams to the one there. And turn to the left and give salams to the one that’s there. Bring it in, bring it in, bring it in. … And then what we’re gonna do is move into the next phase. So the only way we’ll ever bring this gathering back together is I’ll say la ilaha illa Allah. You say Muhammdur Rasulullah. La ilaha illa Allah. Muhammdur Rasulullah. La ilaha illa Allah. Muhammdur Rasulullah. ﷺ*.* Okay let’s everybody sit back down.
Kamran Kazmi: So as part of our signature tradition. So this isn’t like any other halaqa, right. We’re going to be engaging deeply with ideas. So please bring out your pens, your pencil, your paper. And we’re going to be focusing on this prompt that Dr. Butch will introduce.
Butch Ware: So one of the reasons why I was really excited about this is that I really love the innovative pedagogical style that Nuun is working with. I think it’s very fantastic to break things up and make people write. Actually when I do academic writing it usually starts by hand and only later do I type. There’s a different kind of experience when you write it out. So this particular writing exercise is going to, in shā Allāh, help shift us—oh, go ahead. Do you ned to make an announcement? Do people need paper and pen? If you need paper and pen raise your hand.
Butch Ware: And we’re going to do these one at a time, correct? Yes, okay. If anyone wants to buy a notebook. Let’s get that merch moving, come on. No—so hold on—it’s important. No, no but it’s good—she said “I thought we were talking about anti-capitalism?” It’s a beautiful point. Commerce and capitalism are not the same thing. I know, I know. But it’s an important thing to remind people. The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, was a merchant. Commerce is good. Capitalism distorts commerce. So, do business. Business is good. Capitalism is exploitative by its nature. It’s extractive. The next time we have non-racial capitalism will be the first time we’ve had non-racial capitalism. Capitalism has the racism baked into it. And it is a system of transcendent meaning. It assigns value to human beings on the number and nature of their possessions. It’s a dīn of its own. No believing person can believe the basics of its tenets. Because we believe that our innate value comes from our Creator, not from the number and nature of our possessions. So, commerce is good. Capitalism is shirk. Yeah, I said it. Tell your desi uncles. Tell them I said that, too. I’m not expecting them to vote for me, anyway. But you guys. You guys. I’m counting on the 18-29 demographic. And we’re also polling well in the 30-44 right now too. So, yeah—go ahead. We’re going to treat the question with this exercise, I promise. I promise.
0:46:25 Prompt #1: If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
Butch Ware: Okay, so here’s the exercise. The exercise is built around the three questions of Rabbi Hillel. And this is also about how we model the actual Islamic tradition. It’s that we benefit from and respect the scholars from our brothers and sisters in faith among the ahl-ul-kitab. I personally love Jewish scholarship as much as I hate Zionism. I’m just gonna put that out there. So Rabbi Hillel had these three incredible questions that are great for the writing exercises that we are going to do now. The first of them was: if I am not for myself, then who will be for me? The second, is if I am for myself only then what have I become? And the third was if I do not take action now, when will I take it? So we’re going to do exercises around those three. The first one starts here. If I do not advocate for myself, who will? This is about self-definition. How do you define yourself and your role? So, at the top of your page you write “I am…” And then you start writing, go. I need pen and paper too.
0:53:35 Discussion on Prompt #1
Butch Ware: So no one should feel like they have to share. What you’ve written is for you and nobody else. And also we do not definitely have time for anyone to fully read out everything that they wrote. But we also definitely want to open a conversation. Anybody that wants to share something they took out of this exercise. And we also definitely do not have time for anybody to fully read out everything that they wrote. But we definitely also want to open a conversation for anybody that wants to share something that they took out of this exercise. It doesn't necessarily have to be even the content of what you wrote down but your reflection on what you wrote down or your reflection on the undertaking the exercise itself. Okay, hold on, no nobody's gonna be able to hear that on that side. Let me see if we can get the mic to you.
Attendee: I wrote: I'm self-sufficient and I have the ability to think and speak for myself nobody else can think for me. I am the captain of my own ship. If you allow others to control your way of thinking you risk becoming a sheep to the masses. You'll be nothing but a number to the hive mind.
Butch Ware: We got a hand back there. Just come a little closer.
Attendee #1: Are we reading the whole thing?
Butch Ware: You can, you can if you want or you can just reflect on what you know. If you feel like it's long to read the whole thing you can just say something about it. It's up to you.
Attendee #2: Okay, I'll read it. I’m Muslim and I try to keep on the right path. And I pray we all go to jannat-ul-firdaws, and become rightly guided, and become who we’re meant to be.
Butch Ware: Ameen. Ameen. Ameen.
Attendee #3: If I don't advocate for myself, who will? I said, Allah will. How do you define yourself I define myself as an accumulation of all the ideas that I have encountered, all the experiences I have experienced, and all the people I have met. And your role in the present moment. My role in the present moment is to bring change. Everyone's role in every moment is bring change. Either change yourself, your brother, your sister, your family, your room, or go bigger—change the community. Change ideas, change thoughts, or maybe more than change—just influence.
Butch Ware: Beautiful. Yeah, yeah. Then we'll come back up yeah oh there's a sister right here also.
Attendee #4: Bismillah. I said I'm a Muslim Palestinian woman. My role in this moment is to maintain my identity by continuing to grow intellectually and spiritually, and strive to preserve my identity. Through that, I advocate for myself. I don't allow for the outlined preconceived expectations of society to impact or affect how I define myself for the role that I make for myself in this moment. I was created not to remain silent I believe I was created to speak up.
Butch Ware: Beautiful. So I'll take I'll take that back. So, first of all, just a round of applause. I thank the people who were willing to share. I am—like, really quickly, more about myself. So in addition to being an academic, after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, I opened a public social media account for the first time in my life. Okay, and probably some of you guys follow that Instagram account. Raise your hand if you follow my IG. Raise your hand if you're going to follow my IG. Okay, good. Because I feared that I would be judged by God for any beneficial thing that I could contribute to humanity in that moment that I withheld. So that's why I turned everything public-facing. I stopped writing the academic books that I was writing and I focused on doing things public-facing. And that led to doing online spiritual incentives that are rooted in the the African-Islamic tradition. And in four years since that time we've had over 3,500 people take those online spiritual intensives. I see sister Shayla's taking at least like six of them, no joke. So in those spiritual intensives, and then after quarantine ended, I started doing them in person as well, as you know hybrid online.
So one of the things that has come up consistently and it's germane to this topic of, you know I am, is that in a basic way, all of those great spiritual masters that led resistance movements in Africa—they were always focused on teaching kind of one basic thing—so they they structured society in different ways. Their movements looked different. They were organized according to different kinds of plans. But what they consistently did was they focused not on the architectural blueprints of the building that they were designing, but the structural integrity of every individual human brick in the structure. In other words, what difference does it make if you build a capitalist structure or a socialist structure if every human being in it is corrupt and rotten? If the human ingredients are broken and unhealed then it doesn't matter how good the design was. So that our traditions, what they really are designed to do, is help get us back to our humanity. To restore us to our humanity. And in the West African tradition, this was always defined as two things. They say the roles of a teacher are two: help a person return to their fitra, and help them establish their relationship with the Word. That's it. The rest will take care of itself because if you get back to your innate humanity, fitra, for those that are hearing this word for the first time is a word for innate disposition. It's derived from the name of God, Al-Fatir—the originator—this is your original state. And in Islamic conception, unlike in a Christian conception, there's no original sin in Islam. The human being doesn't come in in a sinful state. The human being comes in in a sound state. A good state. And how could it be otherwise? Everything else in creation in the Quran is created with speech. [إِنَّمَآ أَمْرُهُۥٓ إِذَآ أَرَادَ شَيْـًٔا أَن يَقُولَ لَهُۥ كُن فَيَكُونُ ٨٢] When God wants to decree a matter he has only to say unto a thing be and it is. But the human being is actually created with God's hand. God says to the devil, “Why did you not bow to that which I made with my hand?” The human being is made with this caress. Intimacy. And the breath of the Divine is breathed into the frame. So the sanctity of the human being is implicit and explicit in our sacred tradition. So going back to uncover your humanity reveals that which is sacred within you.
So this is the last thing that I'm going to say on this and then we'll move on to the second question. The Quran for Muslims teaches us why we are here. But only God is going to teach you why you are here. That means that you have to develop that relationship and you have to probe internally the purpose of your life. You have to do the inner work. You can't put back onto the Quran responsibilities that the Quran puts on you. The Quran does not have all the answers. The Quran has the methodology for you to get the answers. Yes, the Quran says you should marry. But the question is should you marry her? Do y'all understand what I'm trying to say? So that means that you have to be like engaged in a direct relationship of communication. Interrogating your purpose. Calling on God for help. I am is at the foundation of it all. But if we stop there—
Kamran Kazmi: Say that one more time. Say the line where like God tells us why we are here.
Butch Ware: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah that's one one of the favorites from the online spiritual intensives. That's not from any of my teachers I made that one up. The Quran tells us why we are here, right? What our purpose is as human beings. It situates us relationally in the universe, but only God is going to tell you why you are here. Another way of saying it—and thank you for the invitation—because it reminded me of what I actually wanted to say is that you have to uncover what God made when God made you. Am I making sense?
Kamran Kazmi: Too much sense.
Butch Ware: You have to uncover what God made when God made you. And these people that led these movements. People like Khadija bint Muhammad al-Aql. She was the teacher of the first anti-slavery rebel that I've been able to document in West African history. These male and female exemplars—what made them different—the reason why they move differently in the world, the reason why they accomplished things that ordinary people couldn't accomplish, was because they knew exactly what they were here to do. They knew that it was already written and that all that they had to do was go claim their birthright through their efforts in this world. And so that everything that facilitates the completion of a mission that they know their life is for, they undertake, and everything that inhibits the completion of that mission, they leave. Most especially people in their 20s are always trying to figure out which way do I go? How do I make this decision? Well if you already know who you are, these become easy decisions.
Kamran Kazmi: I know we're going a little bit off tangent, but how did you know who you are and how—because I think that's the biggest question we ask ourselves. Like, who am I? What am I doing here? How do I get to that point of understanding?
Butch Ware: Well, okay, yes. So this would take me into the khutba that I gave at the University of Pennsylvania for the Muslim Students Association there. I'm just going to give the short version. So one thing that you'll notice if you read those stories of the prophets in the Quran is that all of the prophets in the Quran have incredibly—what's the word that I'm looking for—an incredibly difficult, hard childhood. The Quran is basically telling you over and over again that extraordinary people don't have ordinary childhoods, usually. Like, Moses is a baby in a basket floating down the mightiest river on Earth to the mightiest tyrant on Earth, tested right from the beginning. Now why am I mentioning this? Because usually when God wants to raise the status of an individual or a people, he first delivers them directly into the hands of their enemies. Because one of the things that you learn when this happens is that you don't have anything else that you can rely on ever, anywhere, except for God. And many of us learn to rely on proximate causes. But those of us that have had everything stripped away from us learn that we don't have anything that we can rely on at all except for Allah. So the sooner you get to the place where you realize that you don't have anything that you can count on at all except for God, the easier that process becomes. Because then it becomes a performance for an audience of One. You lose any concern with how people perceive you, how they might judge you, what they might think of you. Instead, you only focus on “is this thing that I'm doing the best maximization of the gifts that God gave me?” Specifically, whatever my talents and proclivities are, is this the best way that I can lay them down in service to the Divine? And laying them down in service to the Divine always means laying them down in service to humanity. This community, unfortunately, has learned to index its morality in terms of personal piety. But the reality is is that the relationships that we establish in the world are the primary determinant of our fate on the day of judgment. Our personal sins— God washes those away with repentance, or even without repentance if he wants to. But God is The Just. So he gives justice to every last one of his servants, believer or non-believer. Which means that if you allow injustice and oppression to persist in the world when you have the capacity to stop it, you are risking your immortal soul. So when you are evaluating things in that way, then you immediately think “what must I do today to put myself in service of the most precious thing that God ever made: the human being?” And when you start thinking about how you can live a life of benefit and of service then your purpose come to you. But all of us, instead, are thinking “I got to make more money. I got to get ahead. I got to do this, to do that.” The best thing— the favor that God did for me—is that every single thing that I ever tried to do for myself God caused it to crash and burn. And every single thing that I ever did for the benefit of others God made it flower.
1:09:10 Prompt #2: Who are we as a collective?
Kamran Kazmi: I think this is a perfect segue into next prompt.
Butch Ware: Yeah you laid that up nicely. He threw the alley and then you have the oop. All right, so, prompt two. If I'm only for myself then what have I become? If I'm only for myself what does that make me? Who are we as a collective and where are we heading? So, yes, you have to stand for yourself otherwise no one will stand for you. If you don't respect yourself, who's going to respect you? If you don't speak up for yourself, then who will speak up on your behalf? And Muslims, and especially, Muslim women—speak up for yourselves. Stop letting this misogynistic community push you around. And if anybody gives you a hard time send them to me. Because that is actually the job of men. Men's job is to make their shoulders wide to make room for people whose shoulders aren't as wide. That's it and instead of making space for the women in our community we silence them and then get mad when they go running into toxic philosophical systems like white Western feminism. Man, you pushed them there. So, if you don't speak up for yourself, then nobody's going to speak up for you. Speak up for yourself. But then, if you're only selfish, then what have you become, right? So next prompt. Everybody got their pen and paper ready? This one you write at the top of the page—I'm gonna get five minutes and 55 seconds lined up. Right at the top of the page, and everybody study the prompt, you start with we are. Go.
1:17:08 Discussion on Prompt #2
Butch Ware: All right we are now at time. If you need a couple seconds to go ahead and finish that last thought please feel free to do so. And again we can take a couple people that are willing to share.
Attendee #5: If I'm only for myself, what does that make me? Who are we as a collective, and where are we heading? We are the guardians of future generations. Cultivators of the world our children and grandchildren will inherit. We are not just responsible for ourselves. We are the final bastion against the forces of evil that will use technology, AI, and pillage our natural resources, environments, and destroy our world and destroy our humanity and continue our dystopian prison. We are tasked with dismantling that system and creating and building that space for our future.
Butch Ware: Allahu Akbar. We're gonna make sure that everybody that hasn't spoken yet gets a chance. Yeah and people that haven't spoken, sorry.
Attendee #6: We are the ummah that our beloved Prophet ﷺ fought for, made du’a for, and cried for. We have the power to fight for justice and bring about change, not only in our community, but in the world. We are activists, thinkers, innovators, speakers and most important—Muslims.
Butch beautiful yeah get got to get note one cordless mic yeah exactly
Attendee #7: As-salamu alaikum. So I said we are no longer a collective but a collection of individuals whose sole purpose is to benefit their own selves without any regard for anybody else around us. Thereby perpetuating a cycle of individualism and solely fostering a dislike for others based solely on the fact that it's no longer about you but about the ones that are around you.
Butch Ware: Facts. Let's take one one more from the sisters.
Attendee #8: We are the voice for the voiceless. We are the ones who bear the consequence of surrendering, when Allah told us in Surah Nisa, ours is to stand firm for justice as witnesses for Allah, even if it is against ourselves.
Butch Ware: I meant to come back to that. Yeah where's AR because that's that's what he started beautiful and I'll take it back just just in the interest of time. So for all the people that didn't back just just in the interest of time so for all the people that didn't get the chance to share theirs um I have to leave at 6:00 but you guys have the space till 7:00. So the hope is that everybody will be able to share their thoughts that people will be able to exchange ideas um after after we're finished so hold on to those notebooks hold on to those thoughts. I wasn't expecting to do this but I'm going to read mine if I can make out my chicken scratches it's going to be tough. I'm not a medical doctor but you know how like medical doctors are really bad to have that handwriting. Apparently PhDs too. We are at the precipice of a new age for humanity. The days of universal selfishness are over. This is to your point brother. W.E.B. Du Bois said of capitalism—he said “a system of universal selfishness can never bring social good to all”. If everybody is just individuals looking out for themselves then you cannot have social good. So the days of universal selfishness are at an end. The nadir, the bottom, of human development is almost over. We will one day look a back upon these years as the storm that shook the foundations but brought abundant rain. Everything we need to have abundance, prosperity and community is already here. We must simply learn to love one another enough to share it. We are shaping a mass awakening. We will reap its fruit in this lifetime, inshallah. We must be cautious for the next few years. Those whose lights are dimmed will fight with darknesses in their hearts. They will resist, but we will win. It is written. God's promise is true. On this point, we were discussing a moment ago that as Malcolm said “never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are”. The biggest obstacle that we have believe it or not is not these systems of oppression. The biggest obstacles that we have are these systems of oppression we have internalized the limitations that have been imposed upon us. And I'm going to tell just a quick story that one of my mentors told me when I was 19-20 years old. This was on the south side of Minneapolis outside of a Huru Bookstore and his name was Mahmud Alati. He was a professor at a neighboring university. I never took a class with him but I learned so much from him and he said to me “Butch,” he said, “you know how they train elephants at the circus?” And I was like, “No, and what are we talking about right now?” Like, the question kind of hit me out of the blue. He said they take heavy lashes and they whip them. They whip them because even as an infant a baby bull elephant if it gets loose it can trample a half dozen people in no time, right? So they whip them, whip them, whip them. And they take heavy chains to the point where it binds the metal binds into the leg of the animal piercing its flesh. And they tether those heavy chains to iron pegs in the ground or to heavy poles so that every time that animal tries to run, it is whipped and it learns that it has been immobilized that it can't go anywhere that resistance is futile. Yeah, don't go to the circus, first of all. And don't go to SeaWorld either like, this is the same thing. But Mahmud continued he said but once that animal has been broken it can grow to be an an elephant that weighs a couple of tons and you can keep it in place by even just having a semblance of a lash and just making a cracking sound in the air. You can take any insignificant cord and wrap it around its ankle you can take that insignificant cord and tether it to any insignificant peg and that fully grown elephant will never run and then he said to me do you understand why I'm telling you this parable? So I ask you. Do you understand why I'm telling you this parable? I'm asking you a question. Okay, so why? What is the meaning of it?
Attendee: Yeah, because we've been convinced into these systems that these are the only things that we can operate out of. And then you know these are like the mental shackles that have been placed around us. It's like an analogy to that—you just put any like piece of twine and the elephant will think that it's like a chain.
Butch Ware: Yep, exactly. Absolutely. Bob Marley said it, right: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” The reality is that the biggest obstacle between us and freedom right now is us if we actually understood freedom is not just possible. It is inevitable. Every single faith and philosophy in the human tradition shares that simple truth at its core: all empires fall. All empires fall. Every single one—no exceptions. At the end of Surah Maryam, what does God say? Warning Quraish: have you not wandered through the Earth and seen the ruins of those who were more exalted in power and wealth than you? And then God—God loves talking tall—God says, do you see any sight of them now? And do you hear from them so much as a peep? رِكْزًۢا rikza. Do you even hear—do they even say boo? They don't make no noise now, do they? They're gone. The Romans gone. Egyptians gone. Nimrod gone. All empires fall. You have internalized defeat to where you think that it is impossible for you to win when in point of fact it is inevitable that you will win. It doesn't mean that it will be easy. It does not mean that it will come without struggle. It does not mean that it will come without sacrifice. But it will come.
And that is why they condition you to accept their limitations on the possible because then you will keep yourself in chain you will keep yourself a slave. I've got to get this job because I've got to do—and then everybody decides that they're going to look out for thems and sell out the next man. Freedom is here. It is inevitable. It is coming. The question is: what will come after the fall of Empire? It's not “will Empire fall?” It's “what will come after it?” And that's the reason why, in all of these gatherings, I'm trying to remind people that this is not about what we are tearing down but it is about what we are building. It is about offering an alternative to this exploitative and extractive system that has diminished our humanity for the last 500 years. In the Wolof language in Senegal they say that the child of Adam does not release that which his hand is holding until he is reaching for something better. So much of our activist work has been built on deconstruction and criticism. Construction of a beautiful future, of an alternative to this, is the principle affair. Because we actually have everything that we need for every single human being to be fed, to be clothed, to be sheltered, to be educated. All we actually have to do is reallocate the resources that we already have. To reorient the priorities that we have. So that instead of trying to get maximum profit we get maximum benefit. This phone right here—they could build a phone today that would last a hundred years, easily. But they build one that breaks every two years because that's the way that they can make the most money. Well, what if we incentivize fulfilling human needs and fulfilling human potential instead of fulfilling billionaires bank accounts?
You guys remember Star Trek? Star Trek—there's all different colors of people and they speak different languages and they come and go even—though somehow English is spoken in every corner of the universe (we won't go into the linguistic imperialism star star Star Trek right now it's going to mess with my metaphor—but humanity is all one world, right? Everybody has the things that they need, okay? And believe it or not like that is actually possible. It is actually possible. If the United States of America was not busy torturing and tormenting all of humanity with its massive resources and instead was providing an example on how to care for its citizens. If we stop spending $1.3 trillion a year on—what is already the biggest military that has ever existed in human history—our military spending is the equivalent of the next 10 countries on the list. If we put those resources into building community here—I read recently that there are actually six empty housing units in the United States of America for every homeless person that's on the streets. Because capitalism requires artificial scarcity in order to drive up price literally every single homeless person could have two houses. But our priorities are not arranged in that fashion.
It is not going to be easy. The forces of darkness and of selfishness will fight back but they know how fragile they are and that is why they are coming with repression to college campuses. That's why they're trying to get people fired from their jobs. They tried to get me in October. Open letter to the University of California, Santa Barbara. He's a virulent anti-semite. I just quoted Rabbi Hillel for God's sake. So this is the thing is that if everybody continues to make those individual decisions on what's safest and in your own best interest then we’re all dead. And yet, if we all spoke up with one voice—they don't have enough pigs. And that's what they're afraid of. That's why the repression has come so heavy. It’s because they know what happened in Bangladesh, when the students just wouldn't go back. Fall Babylon fall. That's it. They know that it is literally days away. Days away. As soon as y'all free yourself in here. And that's why they keep trying to stem the momentum. But it is inevitable.
1:33:20 Prompt #3: If not now, when?
Butch Ware: Ah, actually yeah, that sets up pretty well the last of the questions. If not now, when? If not now, when? I don't think this one needs much explanation. So write at the top of your page “if not now, when?” and then answer with this: “we will take action now, because…”. 5 minutes 55 seconds.
1:40:11 Discussion on Prompt #3
Attendee #9: As salamu alaikum. We will take action now, because otherwise simply never happen. If you wait for the right time, a right place, a right person to get the job done. Then those dreams of change and peace will be just that.
Attendee #10: Salam. If not now, when? If not now, when we will take action? Now, because, while there are decades when nothing happens we are approaching the weeks when decades happen. The world is about to have major changes America has solidified its status as an empire in Decline and the federal government may not may lose the federal government may lose any power at holds within the next 100 years and we need to make sure that our Dallas Muslim Community survives the aftermath because cities Outlast Empires and we must ensure that the New Order doesn't depend on the impression and exploitation of anyone let alone ourselves.
Attendee #11: Just very short. It’s the fallacy that we have a “tomorrow”.
Butch Ware: That's right. Who told you there’s a tomorrow?
Attendee #12: I just put down what came to my mind first so I'll just say: If not now, when? We will take action now because our community is on the brink of destruction, as prophesized by our Messenger ﷺ. Other empires have made a feast out of us and they're going after our countries one after the other. There is no power that can hold us back if we're united and it wouldn't be the first time that we take control.
Butch Ware: I'm going to take the microphone here for a simple reflection. Political organizing plays a particular role in this moment. Malcolm X, my role model and hero, once said, “Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.” He also stated, “We are not outnumbered; we are out-organized.” Many people don't know that, for example, Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party ran for elected office, and Aaron Dixon, the Seattle captain of the Black Panther Party, ran for office in the Green Party. True revolutionaries have always recognized the value of electoral politics as part of the struggle. They’ve never believed that electoral politics is the entirety of the struggle, but they never fell for the idea that your vote doesn’t matter. If your vote didn't matter, the Civil War would never have been fought. They wouldn't have killed so many just to stop Black people from voting. The vote definitely matters; it's just not the only tool we have for change.
We can't think that voting alone will solve everything, nor can we assume that any one political party will solve our problems. Movements are bigger than any political party. Kwame Ture, another student of Malcolm, reflected on this by saying, “People usually mobilize around issues, but revolutionaries organize against systems.”
Now, let's dive into the distinction between mobilizing around issues and organizing against systems. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, I criticized the Muslim community for its failure to stand up for the sanctity of Black life. I warned that there would come a day when you'd want my people standing at your side, and you shouldn't expect us to be there if you don’t stand with us now. Well, that day is here, and we are reaping what decades of anti-Black racism in the Muslim community have sown.
Those who should know better—who understand that Blackness is an oppositional ideology in the face of white supremacy—are often unwilling to take a stand. They ask, “Where were you?” and while they're right to ask, they are wrong not to act. Our responsibility to fight against injustice should not be transactional. It should be based on what is right and necessary.
However, we cannot ignore the factors that have led us to this moment. If this community wants to be a voice against Islamophobia, racism, and anti-Palestinian sentiment, it needs to clean its own house first. Because every one of you knows that when it comes to issues of money, marriage, or mosque boards, Black folks are often excluded. Can I get a witness? As long as you harbor and foster anti-Black racism, as long as you remain silent in its presence and refuse to tell your relatives to stop using derogatory terms, you have no right to speak about Palestinian liberation. That makes you a hypocrite.
This moment demands action. We have to act now—not just externally, but internally, first and foremost.
Returning to Kwame Ture's point—while many of us mobilized around issues in 2020, we must remember that mobilizing does not create a movement. Even with Team Blue in power, police have killed civilians in greater numbers every year since 2020. We put people in power who claimed to be our friends, but they have acted as anything but. Malcolm said, “You put them first, and they put you last,” referring to Black people and the Democrats. If you swing an election without getting anything in return, you’re a chump.
Now the Muslim community is learning what Malcolm taught the Black community in the 1960s—you’ve been played. Fundraisers have built beautiful suburban mosques, but what has it accomplished? They kill you with impunity and then tell you to vote for them. You are treated worse than a chump; they don’t even see you as human.
If we do not organize against systems, the current genocide in Gaza will unfold just as the Floyd uprising did. There will come a time when a ceasefire or arms embargo is achieved, but the Zionist entity will remain an apartheid state. And those who were merely spectators, their hearts broken by suffering, will forget once the immediate crisis fades from view.
We must transform this moment into a movement. We can no longer just mobilize around issues like police brutality, only to see an increase in that very brutality. Mobilizing around Palestinian liberation often focuses on ceasefire, which is not enough. We must organize against systems.
As a historian, I can tell you that every successful modern revolution begins with political party organizing. Political parties can help channel and structure resistance, and they play a foundational role in revolutions. We need a bloodless revolution in this country, and it is within our grasp if we organize and embrace this moment.
A mere 30% increase in voter registration in the 18-to-29 demographic could lead to significant change. This demographic overwhelmingly opposes genocide, and there is only one non-genocidal party available nationwide. That’s why I want to invite my brother and colleague Eddie Espinoza, who is running for statewide office here in Texas, to share a few words.
It’s not just about using your power at the ballot box to change top-level politics; it’s about building grassroots movements and supporting local politics. As Fahad pointed out, we are custodians for the future. When I read the Quran for the first time at age 15, I learned that in the Islamic tradition, we do not have dominion over the Earth; we have stewardship. This means we are accountable for how we care for it.
Eddie Espinoza is running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, a position crucial for ecological conservation and responsible stewardship of our natural environment. Let’s hear from him now.
1:57:04 Remarks by Eddie Espinosa
Eddie Espinoza: I’m Eddie Espinoza, the Green Party candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner. Contrary to what the name implies, the Railroad Commission regulates the entire oil and gas industry in Texas. Much of this involves fracking, a process that produces huge amounts of toxic wastewater, some of which is radioactive. This toxic wastewater can seep into our freshwater sources, endangering our drinking water.
Effective climate action is essential for the survival of life as we know it. The recent devastating storm was exacerbated by global warming, as droughts and flooding occur globally. The only way to combat global warming is to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. While Texas is already a leader in clean energy, the full transition is being obstructed by greedy fossil fuel insiders who prioritize drilling over our environment.
We need independent regulators on the Railroad Commission, which is why I'm running with the Green Party. We don’t take PAC money or corporate donations, so you can trust that we work for you. The Green Party represents people, planet, and peace. But that requires your donations, support, and, most importantly, your votes.
If either Dr. Stein or I receive just 2% of the vote, the Green Party will gain ballot access in Texas for the next ten years. But we’re not just aiming for 2%; we’re playing to win. If we can convince 28% of Texas voters, we may very well flip Texas.
2:01:50 Closing Remarks by Dr. Butch Ware
Butch Ware: That’s right, Eddie. I haven’t discussed the electoral campaign much until now, but Malcolm X built the Organization for Afro-American Unity to express the political aims of his movement. I see my opportunity within the Green Party to reflect our values as Muslims and as stewards of the environment and human rights.
This is your chance to shape history, not just be subject to it. The Muslim community is being offered a position of ethical and political leadership within the third-largest political party in the U.S. Reflect on that!
This opportunity is unprecedented, especially with Dr. Jill Stein running for president again at 74. She won’t be running in 2028, so who do you think will lead the Green Party ticket then? You’re looking at him.
You have the chance to help elect the first Muslim president of the United States—if you support me as the first Muslim Vice President. This can be achieved with about 34% of the popular vote. If we go from polling at 1.5% to 5%, we could reach 15% quickly.
The American people are not fools. They can recognize quality, morality, and goodness. So let’s get organized and make some noise. Your time and volunteer efforts are crucial. By registering with the Green Party, you’ll help us gain visibility, and the more noise we make, the more our numbers will grow.
Thank you to our hosts, the Nuun Collective. I can’t take questions now as I must move on, but I appreciate your attention. Thank you!
Disclaimer: Material published by Nuun Collective is meant to foster inquiry and rich discussion. The views, opinions, beliefs, or strategies represented in published media do not necessarily represent the views of Nuun Collective or any member thereof.
Note: This transcript has been slightly edited for readability.
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