Imam Suhaib Webb is a dynamic American imam and thought leader who converted from Christianity to Islam in 1992. Drawing from both traditional Islamic scholarship and contemporary lived realities, he bridges classical knowledge with modern context in ways that resonate deeply with a wide audience. Through his educational platform, SWISS (Suhaib Webb Institute of Sacred Sciences), he provides essential, accessible Islamic learning for English-speaking Muslims seeking spiritual depth and functional faith.
In his talk, Imam Suhaib explores the paradigm of culture, challenging prevailing assumptions about how faith and identity are expressed in the modern world. He urges listeners to critically examine inherited cultural frameworks—both secular and religious—and invites them to develop authentic, God-conscious cultural expressions rooted in integrity, relevance, and mercy.
Below is a full transcript of his talk & discussion at Nuun Collective on May 2, 2025.
00:00:00 Introduction
Mustafa Syed:
All right, Assalamu alaikum, everyone. Welcome to Nuun once again. Inshallah, we're joined by Shaykh Saheb Webb, who needs no introduction.
Assalamu alaikum, Shaykh. How are you doing?
Suhaib Webb:
Doing good.
Mustafa Syed:
Alhamdulillah. So I guess the first point.
Suhaib Webb:
I'm trying to figure out who that is, bro. Guy looks like GTA from 2004. What happened to me?
00:00:27 Muslim Upbringing & Culture
Mustafa Syed:
We're selling stickers after this. It'll go towards a new projector. All right. So basically, I want to preface the conversation kind of going off of what Anzar said, talking about a little bit of my upbringing.
So I grew up in a small town in the Midwest in Illinois. And there wasn't really a huge Muslim community. So I didn't feel much semblance of a Muslim culture. And one of the biggest examples of myself finding a Muslim culture was the first time I went to an ISNA conference. I went to this ISNA conference in Detroit in 2014. And Sharif, that's actually where I met you for the first time, almost 10 years ago. And that was the first time I saw so many Muslims come together. I saw dynamic speakers. I saw people basically celebrating their faith in such a large space. I had never in America seen that many Muslims together all in the same place. So I reflected on that experience, and I realized that the conventions are not just about listening to lectures, but they're a form of culture-producing events, giving Muslims a space to engage with their community. So I didn't feel this as much again until I moved to Dallas, where we have a huge, massive Muslim culture.
Basically our conversation today is going to be about analyzing that and analyzing how culture works and how we need to, I guess, end of March. So it's actually a very unfortunate statistic for those of us who are Muslim. It's 23 percent of Muslims that are born Muslim in the U.S. They do not identify as Muslim in adulthood. That's almost one fourth of U.S. born Muslims. So, Shaykh, you're someone who has been all over the US and all over the world, and you've seen Muslim people and their cultures. What's your point of view on culture in terms of facilitating and preserving Islam in the U.S., like in these cases where 23% are leaving?
00:02:39 Preserving Islam in the U.S.
Suhaib Webb:
Very important question. So I think before, I think it might be important to define what you mean by culture. So before I answer, in our traditional system of Islam, our traditional education, and this is not to put you on the spot, we have what's called, which means that we should define what we mean before we talk about it. Because all of us have maybe a different subjective understanding of what culture is. So that would mean my answer would be impossible to answer all those assumptions. So before I answer, let me nicely ask you: what is meant by culture?
Mustafa Syed:
What do you think is meant by culture?
Yeah. There's a good quote that I was reading in preparation for this. But actually, before I get to that, so basically, you know, culture, I think, and in the reading I did a little bit before this event, from my perspective, I thought that culture, you know, a lot of people actually can't define it. It's almost like when you see it, you know it when you see it. Basically, it's a culmination of all sorts of things, almost like the human experience. Your language, your practices, the places you go, your beliefs, your ethics, all of these culminate into what can be defined as a culture. And different places embody this in different ways. But I think, Sheikh, you'll know a little bit more about this than I do.
Suhaib Webb:
I have four kids. I keep looking at my phone, that's why. One of my kids jumped in a poison ivy thing. So whenever I travel, as soon as I get on the plane, they do this. And then Maryam’s like, “Every time you leave,” right? So, sorry.
So I think—I’m not going to give the definition now—but the Islamic sort of understanding of culture and what are called norms is so important that it actually forms one of the five major axioms of Islamic law. In Islamic law, we have five fundamental legal axioms that actually everyone agrees on, which is really rare. And that is al-‘ādah muḥakkamah, which means that culture can be a decider.
That plays out in really three or four areas. One is mentioned by Al-Jaṣṣāṣ. Al-Jaṣṣāṣ is one of the great Hanafi jurists. He lived in Iran. He was from a place called Ray, which is now in a place called Sha‘b al-‘Aẓīm in Tehran, northern Tehran. The Hanafis were all over Iran, as were the Shāfiʿīs in Shiraz. He has a text called Aḥkām al-Qur’ān, Tafsīr Āyāt al-Aḥkām. And in that text—it’s just dedicated to all the verses of Qur’an that deal with law.
I don’t want to pigeonhole us into a legal discussion, but I do hope we can talk about the problem of identity and how using the word “identity,” unpacked as it is, actually positions us as Muslims in a problematic place. The same goes with the word “religious,” because classical Islam didn’t designate something as “Islamic.” That is the outcome of coloniality and secularism. It actually categorized things according to one of our three sciences: whether it was faith, whether it was law, or whether it was purification of the heart. These are our three disciplines that formulate the bulwark of the lexicon needed to function as a Muslim.
So, not to get off topic—that’s a great question. I hope that we can talk about, as we continue, why we shouldn’t say the minaret is Islamic. The minaret is permissible. It doesn’t mean the minaret is Islamic. And we have to be careful of Peter Berger. I hear a lot of Peter Berger in y’all’s language—The Sacred Canopy—and, you know, we need to be careful of that book. Maybe we can talk about why. Again, not to be critical, not to be the uncle, not to be chacha sāḥib, but culture in Islam is something which is seen as an imperative for a number of reasons.
Number one: Jaṣṣāṣ talks about when the text is ambiguous, culture becomes a decider. I’m trained in the Hanafi and Maliki schools, but I roll Maliki—forgive me. I love Quduri, but at the end of the day, I’ve already started to Ibn Abī Zayd. These two books we study. But in the Maliki madhhab, we have a great axiom—and forgive me if I’m nerdy, I was told I was supposed to be nerdy—we have an axiom that says al-‘urf ka’l-sharṭ, meaning that custom is like a condition. Very similar to what Jaṣṣāṣ is saying. Jaṣṣāṣ says in Aḥkām al-Qur’ān, based on this axiom, that culture decides. The Mālikīs say that culture is a condition.
Ibn ʿĀbidīn, in his famous Radd al-Muḥtār for the Hanafis, has an entire essay on culture: Why? When does it come into play? Number one: when the text is ambiguous and it has a social impact. For example, when Allah says, “Give them their mahr,” the Qur’an doesn't specify what the mahr is. So what decides what mahr should be? Custom—culture.
Islam, in fact, has culture baked into its scripture and into the teachings of the Prophet ﷺ. There is an essential need for culture to animate the sacred, because you can’t have one without the other. How do you have sacred texts if they’re not speaking to people—what people do, what they employ, how they go about things? Even if you look in the Muslim world, the minaret looks different depending on the region, because there were different needs in each place.
I’m not going to get into the other three types of texts because it gets too complicated. But very simply put, when there is a text which is extremely ambiguous or intentionally left ambiguous—what’s called mujmal fayubayyinuhu al-‘urf—we say that custom (‘urf) acts as the tafsir, or explanation, of that ambiguous text. It helps us understand and apply it.
Another instance where culture plays a critical role is in the work of the Mufti or jurist. As we’re taught, Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal said that one of the conditions for being a Mufti is maʿrifat al-nās—to know the people. That’s why Al-Suyūṭī, in Al-Ashbāh wa al-Naẓāʾir, says it is farḍ (obligatory) on every community in their city to have a Mufti. I actually asked ChatGPT, what was the average distance between cities in the time of Al-Suyūṭī? Twenty-three miles. So every 23 miles, there should be a Mufti. Why? Because he or she would know the unique "pixels," if you will, of their local culture.
So, culture is a must. Without culture, we don’t have the functionality of religion.
00:10:05 Culture in Islamic History
Mustafa Syed:
JazakAllah khair, Sheikh. So again, I read this quote—actually, you mentioned earlier that culture is an imperative. That reminded me of a paper titled Islam and the Cultural Imperative by Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. In it, he writes that historically, Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly. In that regard, it has often been likened to a crystal-clear river. Its waters—representing Islam—are pure, sweet, and life-giving, but having no color of their own, they reflect the bedrock indigenous culture over which they flow. So in China, Islam looked Chinese; in Mali, it looked African. Sheikh, could you tell us more about how different cultures adopted and engaged with Islam throughout history?
Suhaib Webb:
Can you read the quote again, sir?
Mustafa Syed:
Yes. Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly, and in that regard, it’s been likened to a crystal clear river. Its waters are pure, sweet and life-giving, having no color of their own. They reflect the bedrock, the indigenous culture over which it flows. In China, Islam looked Chinese. In Mali, it looked African.
Suhaib Webb:
So it's a quote of Dr. Omar Fuqabdallah, good, very respected elder, alhamdulillah, and teacher. I might add a cadence to that. And again, I don't want to seem like the angry gore in the room. I wouldn't say that Islam is culturally friendly. I would say that Islam is culturally engaging. And there's a great quote of Sheikh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah who says that Islam is like polish. It comes into a situation and amplifies what's best and sort of covers, if you will, what's worse. I personally, in these kind of situations, like to refer to revelation. It's like revelation does a great job of helping us frame sort of how we are. Because... The Qur'an notes that our role in society is one to be contributors, as Dr. Omar mentions, but also to be agitators. So Allah says about the Prophet ﷺ, We sent you as a witness. We sent you as someone who brings glad tidings, but also who warns. So I may be able to cooperate societally, civically, in areas that are enhancing the overall good of society, but at the same time I should be enraged at the mass murder of George Floyd. I have a prophetic responsibility to take on injustice and inequality at a systemic as well as private level. So there is a duality to our role in society. And that allows us to have prophetic balance. And that's the danger of being co-opted by the left and the right. We're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're Mohammed-y. And that emancipates us from sort of the secular kind of entrapments that we find. So I agree in a conditional way. But at the same time, our primary role as people is to enhance the good as found to be Sharia compliant and to reduce harm. And so that means, as the Prophet is described in the Quran, as a contributor, but also an adversary to evil. An adversary to what's wrong. So that we find ourselves in a balance here within society. So I think he's talking about the positive side. I would also say that Something today is he was reading Iqbal. You know, if you're a leader, you know, I know these poems of Iqbal. Subhanallah. And I know he was reading Shakwa. I said, Subhanallah, he's going to read the whole Shakwa? I'm going to start making Shakwa because we're going to be here for a long time. But Iqbal is a poet who writes in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. So if you speak Arabic, you heard Arabic words like wujud, mawujud. He was using words that are Arabic. And then Chayturi, Azizam, I speak some Persian so I can hear the Persian in there. That poem embodies really who you are now. None of us can trace anything Islamic that we are wearing or talking or saying that is exclusive to our own culture, whether here or back home. A Muslim, whether they know it or not, is embodying centuries of contributions to where we are to the extent that the thobes you're wearing, brothers, are made in China. I'm serious. Maybe the tariff is going to kick in, the thobe is going to get more expensive, but I’m just saying. The jilbab you’re wearing is made in China or made in Bangladesh. So we are actually embodying this whether we like it or not or know it or not or aware of it or not. We are very much a product of generational contributions from different societal angles.
00:15:34 Immigrants vs. Native Culture
Mustafa Syed:
Exactly. And coming from that lens of us being a product of different cultures and different contributions throughout history, a lot of us are children of immigrants—of immigrant Muslims to this country. So as children of immigrants, we interact with two cultures. Some would say at least two cultures: the culture of our parents, which evolved in a sense to preserve Islam, and our local culture here, which developed without Islam really in mind. So this clash kind of leads to a dichotomy.
Suhaib Webb:
How did it develop without Islam in mind?
Mustafa Syed:
Well, I’m talking more about Western culture. I think some would say that it perhaps developed without Islam necessarily in mind in terms of broader Western culture. No, no, no, no, no, not that. So in America, can you tell us about you know, a little bit about this dichotomy and a little bit about like, you know, how we should, I guess, like engage with all of this.
Suhaib Webb:
So it'd be very difficult for me to reflect on that. I'm not the child of immigrants from recent times—I’m the child of immigrants from Ireland who came in 1631 as an indentured servant. Terrence Webb, that's my uncle; he's buried somewhere in Virginia. So I would feel like I'm being that white guy who steps into a place where I shouldn’t be. Maybe I can reflect as someone who’s seen it from the outside and served in the community and then also as someone who embraced Islam.
Yeah, I think we have to be very, very careful even with the words we use. I don’t like the word “immigrant”—not because it’s a bad thing, but because of how it’s been adopted historically in America, all the way back to Lyndon Johnson, even in the 1920s against the Irish as a pejorative. Now we see in the United States a green card doesn’t necessarily have the same power it had before January 6th or whatever. So I want to emphasize something here. I believe—and this is coming from someone who taught in the academy—that we should refer to four sciences for terminology. And that’s it.
Number one is the Quran. Number two, of course, is the Sunnah. Added to the Sunnah is the Seerah. I personally don’t have a problem with weak narrations in the historical accounts of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam because they’re not a source of law, and our ancestors left them in the Seerah for a reason. There was obviously an academic decision made over centuries to keep them there. So the Quran and Sunnah is one. The other three are theology—and what I mean by theology is not just as found in the Quran, regardless of what theological school you may adhere to or learn. All three Sunni schools in particular, and then Shi’i theologies, contain a plethora of words that help us understand the moments we’re living. We don’t need to employ words like “Islamic” or “identity” or “religious.”
Number two is fiqh, law. Sometimes in our community, everything is law. Dr. Sherman talks about that in his book, now Islam and Secularism or something—he talks about Islam and the Islamic secular, like fiqh-ing everything out. There’s not a rule for everything for a reason: the majority of actions have no rule—they’re permissible. So our legal history, our legal system—whether it’s dealing with the actions of people, which is fiqh, or the theory of law, which is usul al-fiqh—that’s also an important reference for terminology.
The third is tasawuf, taskiyatun nafs, purification of the heart. We have our own, and Sheikh Mikael has done a great job capturing classic terms—not because I want to be anachronistic or live in the past; the past has its problems—but I think we should take those terms and see how they work now instead of immediately adopting terminology from outside and imposing it on us. Because what you may inadvertently do is secularize us by imposing a set of definitions and ideas that might be... And again, I’m not trying to put that brother on blast; feel free to put me on blast—I’m not that sensitive, don’t worry.
For example, the minaret is not Islamic because it’s not unique to Muslims. Non-Muslims have built minarets in the Muslim world. Sometimes the term “Islamic” is used and invoked to create division where none exists. So if we talk about law, we say the minaret is something commendable; that implies the whole community can be involved. Or “this is Islamic dress”—there’s no such thing. Ibn Taymiyyah says there’s no such thing as Islamic dress; clothes belong to everybody, wear whatever you want.
I remember when we went to Egypt in 2004, a brother from Oklahoma was with us. He saw a man with a big turban and a white galabia, Sudani style. The brother greeted him in Arabic, trying to talk, and the man said, “I’m not Muslim.” The brother said, “No, you’re Muslim, but you’re wearing a turban.” The man said, “You’re crazy, even we wear turbans, bro. I’m Christian.” He had tattoos and everything. The brother was like, “What?” There’s no Islamic dress.
So sometimes coloniality not only imposes economic, political, and military handcuffs on us, but also intellectual ones—specifically through terminology. That’s why the first thing Allah taught Adam was what? Terms, names, how you think. A Muslim unfamiliar with the lexicon found in Quran and Sunnah, theology, fiqh and usul, and tasawuf will be trying to live in Texas like Adam if he had no names—the inability to understand what? I’m not saying that to bring you down; I’m saying it so you can say, “Yo, I gotta get busy.” I want to inspire you.
For us as new Muslims, I can’t reflect on the diaspora experience—it would be unfair. But I have seen this battle between the uncles and aunties—the khala and amm and cha-cha and cha-chi—and the young people. As I’ve gotten older, I realize all my children are from interracial marriages. There’s good in both. There’s a lot of “hair” in what comes from overseas. The West sets us in a way—Trump is a cantankerous figure, Stephen Miller is a less benign form of anti-immigrant rhetoric packaged in bravado, but it trickles down to even less benign and explicit forms, still harmful.
We look at how come we don’t have a word instead of “fobs” (fresh off the boat)? Why don’t we have a word for those born and raised here? That’s a pejorative. Why is it always “that looks bad” but “here looks good”? I think having someone like Dr. Yasser is good. Someone with that experience like Abdul Nasser is good, Murphy is good, Mustafa Primal is good because they’ve dealt with what you’ve dealt with.
For us new Muslims, it’s very different because we’re trying to acquire religion and parse culture that’s being forced on us that’s not our culture. That’s a lot to take on. Sometimes you don’t know if it’s religion or culture. That battle is there, but—and I didn’t want to answer this long, sorry—you gotta be careful what you amputate from back home.
As a father of two children whose mother’s Lebanese and Iranian—my mother’s Iranian grandmother—I’ve never seen anyone in salawat mode like this woman. It changed my whole view of that situation because of how she could read Quran and make salawat upon the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. She died at 96. When she was in hospice, she said, “Turn me to the Qibla.” They did. She said, “Allahumma salli ala Muhammad,” and died. I thought, if I could go out like that, just get me to the Qibla, forget the salawat.
Compare that to how my non-Muslim relatives died. They didn’t smoke enough weed in Oklahoma, didn’t get Jack Daniels, didn’t get to go to the casino on the border—that’s how they died. The juxtaposition of these two different types of death is striking. Every time I meet a Muslim who has lived a righteous life, they die with dignity. That’s a habit she got from childhood, seeing people around her make salawat.
I had a sheikh in Egypt who was blind, memorized the Hanafi madhab, all the poetry, all the language. I read a famous poem to him. He couldn’t see, but he would make poetry about my children—Shifa and Malik would come into his house and he’d drop bars about them. I said, “Shaykh, I’ll be rude, but you’re blind—how do you do this?” He said, “My mother used to play in Al-Azhar; she was blind. I have genetic blindness. She taught me everything you hear now.” I said, “How?” He said, “Because she would play, she would hear, and after years and years, like how we learn ABCs, she learned and memorized and became a scholar.”
My sheikh from West Africa, Senegal, learned 13 qiraat from his sister—not his father. I asked how. He said she just used to read.
So there is a unique marriage that needs to happen, and a critique of what works culturally here and overseas. And if you think about this room, you’ve synthesized it beautifully—we’re like in a hipster coffee shop reading Iqbal. This is a beautiful marriage we’re seeing with a white convert from Oklahoma in Texas. I’m not even allowed in Texas because I’m crimson and cream for life.
Isn’t this in itself a beautiful thing? I would say in your interpersonal relationships, be very careful how you see back home. If it’s dismissive and arrogant, you’re infected by the false universal of America. If it’s “all America’s going to hell” or “these Americans are shouting,” that’s too much as well. We want to find that balance.
00:28:15 Prompt #1: Islam’s Preservation in Culture
Mustafa Syed:
Jazakallah khair, Shaykh. And so one thing we do here at Nuun is that we love to make people write. That's what our organization is named after. It's named after Surah Qalam, right? Nuun wal Qollami wa ma yastroon—Nuun by the pen and that which they write. So we're going to head to our first prompt, actually. There we go.
Basically now, and again, we're working our best on adjusting our structure to try and push very meaningful reflections and push very meaningful responses to the prompts that we do. So we're going to give you guys a little bit more time to write, like five whole minutes, but we're going to ask that everyone keeps silent for just these five minutes. Really get your thoughts out on paper. You know, reflect on the question that's being asked, and the question that's being asked is—and they were trying to be a little different, you know—because so many times you go to a lecture and you have to take everything at face value. Here, we want you guys to engage. So we're asking you guys: do you agree with this premise that Islam is preserved via culture? Do you agree with this premise, yes or no? And we want you guys to reflect on that and to write it out. And then, inshallah, you guys can discuss with people around you. But our leadership, they'll give you guys a signal for that.
Kamran, you have a timer? Yeah. Kamran’s going to do it. Ok. All right. So you guys can go ahead and get started. And then, again, silent writing time for the next few minutes. Thank you.
Okay, we're going to pick on people to answer this question. We'll do one guy, one girl, and we'll go back to the discussion.
00:29:53 Prompt #1 Discussion
Attendee #1:
So I really like this prompt because personally I come from my mom's Ethiopian and my dad is white. So I have like two different cultures, but I really align with my Ethiopian culture because my mom raised me. In Ethiopia, the culture there, the people are mostly like half Christian and half Muslims that live there. And so Islam came later on when it comes to the history of Ethiopia and stuff like that. So I think the culture there is kind of like its own thing because it involves Christian values, and I think with the Muslim values, it's not really aligned with that type of culture. Like, a lot of the things I had to unlearn when I truly started to seek knowledge and stuff like that. So for me, I would say yes and no just because of the history that comes with that culture. But I'm sure everyone has their own experience when it comes to this. I think it definitely depends on what country you come from and what they practice.
Attendee #2:
I actually think the premise itself is flawed because it's kind of hard to say that Islam is preserved by a culture or culture in general when culture is such a volatile thing that's always subject to change. Whether it be through the social landscape, the political landscape, the economic landscape, even your cultures back home. Like, I went back to Bali like a year ago and it's completely different than what it was when I left. American culture changes like every day based on the TikTok trend. And so expecting something so volatile to preserve a practice and a belief is a little unreasonable. If anything, culture is more of a sponge that absorbs Islam and then Islam kind of essentially keeps what it should keep and gets rid of what you should get rid of. But I don't think it's reasonable to say that culture can preserve something like Islam.
00:32:07 Prompt Reflection
Suhaib Webb:
I have to speak Amharic because I live in D.C. I had no choice — I had to learn the Ethiopian language. And she’s correct. My neighbors were Ethiopian Christians, and they would do Ramadan with us.
The idea of Islam is really challenged within, I would say, convert communities here or new Muslim communities, and in places like Ethiopia and Malaysia where that flow is there. So I agree with what you’re saying. I think the point you’re making is valid, but at the same time, without culture, you wouldn’t have Muslims. You wouldn’t have the practice of Islam because many of those practices require a community, and a community naturally brings culture.
But you said something very profound — that Islam filters cultural expressions. The Prophet said, “People are like metal,” meaning gold and silver. How do you get gold and silver? You have to filter. So Islam filters culture.
One thing I want to say, and I say this without sounding mean — and I have resting imam face, so don’t think I’m mad. My wife tells me I’m always mad, but I’m just chilling, thinking about the ummah, thinking about Iqbal. And congratulations to Bangladesh — what’s happened there in the last year is impressive. I was invited by students there, so I’m looking forward to going.
For those of us who embraced Islam, many of us — I can’t speak for everyone — but most people I’ve grown up with, Islam is an adventure, excitement, something to be in awe of, and something to constantly discover, like Easter eggs, metaphorically.
I feel sometimes that with born Muslims, Islam is calcified, almost like a great piece in a museum. Like, I really don’t care what Islam did in Andalusia; I care what Islam does in Oak Cliff. I could care less about what Islam did in Samarkand; I care about what Islam is doing in Sherman. Because the Quran says, “Tilka ummatun qara kharat” — those old communities are gone.
But each of those expressions, when we look back at the architecture or how they contributed to worship — for example, the mihrab is not from the Quran and Sunnah. These things come through communities coming together to culturally practice Islam.
Here’s a good example you have yet to see in America — largely because of the engagement of Salafism, which has sometimes waged war on cultural expression under the name of bid’ah (innovation) or hyper-traditionalism, which also rejects cultural expressions by saying “this is not from the tradition.” Both views are very much imagined.
I say that not to attack either group. When I lived in Egypt — I don’t know if you have any Egyptians here — every morning on the way to school, even policemen conducting traffic would be reading the Quran. Everyone on the bus was reading the Quran. Even people who didn’t look religious — like more Amr Diab than Shaykh Husri — they were reading.
You might judge by appearances and think these people aren’t religious, but they were really engaged with the Quran.
In Malaysia, every Thursday night, people gather at the mosque to recite Yasin together. All the kids there basically read Yasin without any problem.
Where is that culture of Quran in America among those who embrace Islam, or even among you?
So what he said is powerful, but there is a cultural component. Islam doesn’t need culture, but Muslims use culture to articulate expressions of Islam. That’s why that axiom — that culture can be a decider — exists.
So yeah, these are great points, just some nuances to think about.
Like here in America, we worry about — no disrespect — things like music, entertainment, even coffee shops. I love coffee, just don’t burn it above 180 degrees.
But where is the focus on religious cultural contributions — like Quran, like dhikr? We were hit with the “Bida disease,” where everything’s considered bid’ah, and that shut down, especially among new Muslims. It got shut down and hampered in a way that now our children don’t even know the Quran.
00:37:41 Culture vs. Religion Dichotomy
Mustafa Syed:
I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned that — how people were almost fighting themselves by stifling their religious practices, labeling them as, like you said, “this doesn’t fit.”
In that same vein, you also mentioned earlier a clash between cultural expression and religion, right?
A lot of people say, “Oh, there’s no culture in religion. Religion exists just as it is.”
Can you share your reflections on that dichotomy — the culture versus religion dichotomy?
Suhaib Webb:
So if we look at the historical and anthropological record—not just through the lens of religious sciences—wherever Islam has gone, it has not subdued people in the way the West has subdued people. Wherever Islam went as a political, military, and economic force, as a conqueror, it did not command people to abandon all their cultural expressions.
As our brother said, it filtered and polished.
For example, I became Muslim, but my family—every Saturday—they’re big OU fans. They get together, cook ham and more ham, smoke fat blunts, and drink Johnny Walker Red all day. I can still watch the game; I just don’t partake. So immediately, I’m adjusting my cultural thermostat, dictated by the teachings of religion.
All of us, when we start new jobs, feel that worry. I worked at AT&T once, wondering how I’d navigate the space as a Muslim—Salah, the parties, the networking events. Club soda with lime became my go-to. We begin to negotiate.
The idea is: we can’t function without cultural expression. But I want to talk about how the challenge is that we’re looking for religious answers through a secular glossary. That’s why I started my talk this way.
Even religious people—this is not an attack on anyone—I’m not attacking Salafis or traditionalists—but sometimes culture isn’t “Bid‘ah” (innovation). Religious practices can be innovation, or rather heterodoxy (I prefer that word). But how you dress, talk, and eat? Remember, the default ruling on culture in all four Sunni schools is permissibility.
Islam did not come into society saying it needed to change your culture, address your culture, or remove it.
Even Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb maybe went too far, painting Islam like a fascist ideology forcing everyone to wear taubes and turbans—but Islam didn’t care about what you wear, bro.
New Muslims here experienced that too, because many of us were ignorant of Islam at first. Our imagination of Islam in the early ’90s was very much driven by Malcolm X.
You need to appreciate this: for ’90s generation ex-Muslims, our sage, our Abduqar al-Jilani, our Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyyah, Rabbi al-Adawiyah was Malcolm Shabazz. That’s who he belonged to. That’s why his family is loved and protected. People want to start working with Farrakhan? We’re like, “What? They killed our uncle.” We’re sensitive about that.
But on the other hand, what I’ve seen with Muhajireen Muslims (I prefer that term over “immigrants”—it’s the Quranic term) and their children is that they imagine Islam through the colonized secular system they were taught and shown as social, political, and economic agency.
If you want to get right, be white.
So now Muslims name their kids Noah. Do you see what’s going on in Gaza? You should name your son Salahuddin.
The challenge is that we have to sift through this.
Sometimes secularism—in its conservative nature—is far more brutal and harsh religiously than religion itself.
For example, you can say someone who drinks is not religious, but can you say they’re not Muslim? You see that? Islam is actually less limiting than secular understandings.
So as new Muslims, we battle this. We respect the older generations who come from Mecca, Masr, or Rawab Hindi, but what they tell us can sound more like Peter Berger or John Locke than Islamic orthodoxy.
Trying to imagine Islam through the lens of Malcolm X is difficult. So marrying that is why I think it's important. I always say the default of culture is permissibility, man. And it's very important for your parents. I'm a parent. I got four of them. God help me. And sometimes I have to, I've never told my daughter to wear hijab. Never in my life. Never told my wife to wear hijab. Never in my life. My daughter wore hijab by herself. And I didn't tell her, oh, congratulations, you wore hijab. You do that for Allah. That's a choice you make. And I know as a woman, there's a lot of pressure on you. And I know how a man, big six-foot-five country boy, can come across, especially when he's imam. Because people, my daughter grew up, oh, this is the Bint of Suhaib. No, it's not Bint Suhaib. This is Shifa. She's her own person. So I've seen in my own children this need to remind them that cultural expression falls under the general lens of permissibility. And oftentimes it's confused by either the enthusiasm of new Muslims that's uneducated, built on the lens of Malcolm, or the imagination which is very much informed by the secular, through the secular education system that has infiltrated the East, by Muhajireen. And I think in some ways we share in this. Whether you're born Muslim or you're legacy Muslim or you're new Muslim, we got upgraded later on, that parsing is hard. It can become difficult. So in that line, you talked about the value of engaging with all of this.
00:45:24 Maintain Sanctity Between Religion & Culture
Mustafa Syed:
So in that line, you talked about the value of engaging with all of this. But kind of like what one of the responses was earlier, how do we, I guess, find that middle path? How do we maintain the sanctity of religion when we're trying to form new cultures? How do we prevent this moral relativism in the pursuit of culture? And you kind of mentioned earlier we should formulate our understanding based on the sciences of Islam. So could you maybe give us some examples on how we can put all this together and really create that synthesis?
Suhaib Webb:
But kind of like what one of the responses was earlier, how do we, I guess, find that middle path? How do we maintain the sanctity of religion when we're trying to form new cultures? How do we prevent this moral relativism in the pursuit of culture? And you kind of mentioned earlier we should formulate our understanding based on the sciences of Islam. So could you maybe give us some examples on how we can put all this together and really create that synthesis?
So don't sleep on the statement when I said that culture falls under permissibility. What does that mean? We say that something, in fact, there's a great, the second axiom of the five major axioms of Islam is that the origin of everything that is untexted is permissible as long as it's beneficial. I made it as a rhyme for you. The origin of everything that's untexted, meaning not in the Quran, not in the Sunnah, is permissible, is permissible unless there's a text that says it's not, as long as it's beneficial. So the origin of things that are untexted is permissible as long as they're beneficial, as long as it accomplishes what we call one of the goals of Sharia — preservation of the mind, the intellect, preservation of religion, preservation of family, preservation of wealth, preservation of dignity. These are the foundations of Islamic law.
So what does that mean? It means like if I'm an uncle, right, and you're wearing a Kyrie Irving jersey, that should not even bother me, man. That's permissible. I had a number of African Americans contact me and say, look, man, I got braids. I went to the masjid, and this dude told me braids are bitter. I was like, what? There were Sahaba that had braids. There were Sahaba who had Afro hair. They had braids. Some of them had what we considered even like dreads. Seriously. But my question is, coloniality is a monster. And many of the fiqh opinions that were crafted in the last 200 years were very much about being anti-colonial. And it fit that moment. Like in India, if you look at some of the fatwa, don't dress like the British, don't look like the British. It made sense because they understood that that outfit meant power, that that outfit meant subjugation, that that outfit meant that I have now surrendered myself to something. I get it. It doesn't have the same meaning now. We call it takhrij al-mana'atan fatwa. I got to make sure it has the same meaning.
So I don't care, man, how you dress, as long as it's not, you know, haram. You know what I'm saying? I could care less. And so the uncle that's checking the young man for wearing a Kyrie Irving jersey, it should be a Jason Tatum jersey, to be honest, but I get it, right? Who cares? Or, you know, sister, your clothes. What about my clothes? My wife told me one time, a lady comes in, sister, you know your clothes. What about, I just, I don't know. I just don't like how they look. That ain't your business, right? Because we have a greater mandate as a community to bring prophetic light to people, we don't have time to get caught up in things that are permissible. It's permissible. It's permissible. It's permissible.
So I'll give you some examples of what I meant by using our... We have three wells that we refer to generally in sciences: Aqeedah, Fiqh, Tazkirt al-Nafs. Theology, rules for devotion in life, and purification of the heart. And you have thousands of years now, thousands or more years of scholarship that's developed this, unpacked, engaged cultures, engaged societies. You know, Al-Hasla Basri was asked about a community where the Muslims came, the whole city became Muslim, but they married their sisters. They were all married to their sisters. So they wrote to Hassan al-Basri. He had his own madhhab. He said to him, man, these people, these guys, they're marrying two sisters. And then they said, in some cases, the sisters are marrying each other and living together. This is in Iraq and Kurdistan. And now what we know is Khurasan, Afghanistan. You know what he said to them? Leave them alone and let Islam settle. Like, give it time.
When I became Muslim, there was a brother who used to shoot heroin in Oklahoma. And I remember one time, he taught me how to pray. So one time, I could tell the lines on his, I'm a former, you know, organic pharmacist, so I could tell that there were lines on his arm that indicated he was doing something. So I said, hey, man. I think, you know, there's something going on with you, man. I was a farmer's market, you know what I'm saying?
So he said, I told the police one time, "It's a farmer's market." He arrested me. But I was 16. He said, "Man, alhamdulillah for Isha." I said, "What?" He said, "I used to call him sheikh." Like, sheikh, right? He said, "You know, because from Isha to Fajr, I can gnaw it out, man. I can shoot heroin." And see, this is what I meant by the unique adventure of conversion. My best friend became Muslim with me. I took him to the masjid to make wudu. We used to be drug dealers. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a dime bag of Indo. Indo comes from Indonesia—cultural synthesis. You know, he said to me, he used to call me Wax. This is Oklahoma. He’d say, "Wax, man. Just one more, bro. Just like, let's just roll up one more, man." Man will lie is the hardest no I've ever said in my life. I said, "I can't do that. I can't, man. I'm Muslim now. No more dope game." That's what Tupac said, "Can't do it."
And he said to me—and I saw him throw $500 of weed in the toilet, man. I almost cried for real, but at the same time, I said, you know, these are things you might not know about us that we experience. Brother bringing his girlfriend to Fajr? No, because there's this—because we experience the organic engagement of religion, emergent... I'm looking for an intellectual term, emergent religiosity. We emerge. It's not imposed. It's kind of like a process, right?
So I remember the brother with the heroin. I said to him, and he passed away, may Allah give him Jannah. He made Tawbah. He was a few years before me. He was older though. And he said to me, "Don't worry about me. Allah will clean me up." Because he knew that I was, you know, I was young, thundercat, man, 19. You know, hurrah, hurrah, I'm ready to go tear him up. "How you gonna teach me salah, man? You got train tracks on your arms, man." You know, I'm going heavy. And he says to me, "Allah will clean me up, brother. Just let me keep praying." And then, alhamdulillah, he came out of it.
So number one, our sciences that I'm going to talk about quickly are very much rooted in the engagement and emergent religiosity of Islam socially, culturally, politically, and economically. One of the challenges that we have now is we are taught to imagine Islam—especially if you're a legacy Muslim—as a cultural epic to be imposed on a situation without taking into consideration the cultural particulars that have to be there for you to achieve one word: hikmah.
And that's why our scholars say, when I used to work in Dara Iftah, I trained as a mufti in Dara Iftah in Masriya. You know what they used to tell me? "How come all the Americans never want to come and talk to you?" You know why? Because they know they can't get away with nothing. Because if you come to me from America and you start, yeah, I see them train tracks on your arm. Okay, I see the green on your finger. I'm going to know what's going on with you. But if you go to the Egyptian sheikh who can barely speak English, you can pull the okey-doke on him, can't you? And all the Egyptians want to go to me and not go to the Egyptian sheikh. Why? So they could get away with stuff. They're not going to get away with it religiously. They're going to get away with it using what? Culture.
So when you look at the classic Islamic text, sometimes you may even come across opinions like, "What the heck is that?" They're dealing with a specific thing that we might not be able to relate to. The challenge that you have as a legacy Muslim—and I don't mean this in a bad way—is that suddenly you're expected to almost like a template. You're supposed to take a template of Islam and bam, but Islam don't work like that, man. As my brother said, Islam is going to be filtering and there's ebbs and flows.
So number one, we'll start with the Quran. I gave an example last night on Black Lives Matter, nafas. Right there, you go to the Qur'an, nafas. Powerful word, those who breathe. I can't breathe. Where were we on that? Allah says, "Do not kill those that breathe." Because the most sacred thing we have in our body is what? When you die, what happens? What leaves you? The breath.
Where were we on that? We're too busy caught up in trying to appease the liberal left or the far right and make them feel like we're good, we're safe, we're fine, I'm more conservative than you are, I'm more liberal than you are, and we forgot to be prophetic. In other words, we became imbalanced. You can't do it. Don't get off balance. You can't be prophetic. We made you a balanced ummah so you can bear witness. That means without the balance, there's no witness.
Number two, from the seerah of the Prophet, many people talk about, can we work with this group? Can we work with this group? Can we work with sinners? I mean, do you think you're in Jannah, bro? Like what is this kind of fascism? Muslims have worked with sinners since the beginning. The guide of the Prophet on Hijrah was what? He wasn't Muslim. Imagine the person who guided Abu Bakr and Sayyidina Muhammad is not Muslim. That shows you there's a powerful understanding of how to work.
And when the Prophet goes to Mecca and his camel stops, this is at the height of their hatred for him and Sahih Bukhari, and he points at Mecca and says, if those people ask me to cooperate to do good, I'll work with them. Ibn Qayyim said that means the Muslims can work with anybody because there's never been anyone worse on the face of the earth than those who wanted to kill the Messenger of Allah. There's no sin in America you can tell me is worse outside of shirk. We have no problem working with shirk people, by the way. We're not sensitive to shirk. We're not sensitive to kufr. But we've allowed ourselves to get caught up in their cultural wars and to see our cultural concerns through their lens.
So, quote-unquote, the Muslim that has issues can't be religious is now equated within the mind of the Muslim that's been secular. They are not Muslim, but we're not khawarij. We don't believe people leave Islam because of sin, as Al-Tahawi mentions, it's aqidah. So when the Prophet says, I'm going to work with them? That's crazy! The redeemability of people is never given up on by the Messenger of Allah. That's why Ar-Razi says, when Abu Talib died, that was in Mecca. The order not to pray for him is in Surah Tawbah, which comes in the 13th year in Medina. That means that the Prophet was praying for his uncle's redemption for almost 16 years, or 13 years, because that's the heart of the Prophet.
Number two or number three, theology. Transmodernity cannot explain trauma. C.S. Lewis wrote a great book, The Problem of Suffering. Where do we find meaning in struggle? Where do those Ghazans and those people in Kashmir find meaning in Sudan, in the Congo? Where do they find meaning through struggle? Through the lens of Tawheed. The more I'm tested, the greater the what? In Namad Usri? There you go. There's one from theology.
Number two from fiqh. Too many examples. But for every action I do, there is a potential ruling. And that touches on everything around me. So I have to be very careful and responsible how I live. But also I don't have to be so uptight. So for example, I'm trying to navigate culture versus religion in my family. Everything is permissible unless it's a text. Okay, I'm good now.
Third, tasawuf and tazkiyat al-nafs causes me to look into my inner self. You know what secular society has done? They've replaced all of the religious sciences with their own hip sciences. For example, self-improvement is now tasawuf. But that's not tasawuf. Something very different. So I can look into the science of tazkiyat al-nafs and understand my soul and understand my attachments. Sheikha Yasmin Mogahed writes about this beautifully and correct myself internally to make sure that my heart, my tongue and my actions have equilibrium.
Four sciences, five sciences we can use now to discuss anything happening in our world. And they have their own definition. Like last night we talked about fear and hope. I was giving you a definition of Qushiri and Al-Ghazali of fear and hope and how that impacts. And I said it in the khutbah: Are we looking at the world to Islam or Islam to the world? Am I looking at myself to Islam or Islam to myself? The right one is Islam should be at the forefront. But to do that, I need to know. I have to learn to improve myself.
00:59:44 Prompt #2: Dallas Culture in 10 Years
Mustafa Syed:
I think that's a lot to reflect on, which is good, because we're going to head to our next prompt. If someone could hit the slide, inshallah. So we're going to not speed through it, but a little bit shorter than last time, just so we stay on track with timing. So the question is, picture Dallas in 2035. What signs would prove a healthy, authentic, and we coined this term Dalai, Muslim culture? What are some things you'd like to see as staples of Dalai culture in the next 10 years? And take into account everything that Sheikh was talking about with reflecting on the sciences of Islam and all that kind of stuff, but also give maybe some practical examples of things that you'd like to see.
So we'll do, Kamran, three minutes, three minutes of writing, and then maybe like two minutes of conversation. So we're going to go kind of quick. We're gonna do one response this time, from the guys or the girls.
01:00:45 Prompt #2 Discussion
Attendee #3:
I said that communities being able to connect with each other, even with different opinions and beliefs, because even being Sunni and Shia and stuff, when Sunnis are here, someone’s Shia, even if we don’t show it, there’s that kind of judgmental sense in us, like, oh, they’re Shia kind of thing. Or like being able to come together and talk about actual inner struggles without shame and stuff like that, and also culture groups mixing and actually expanding because most of our friend groups are like, oh, just Desi, and then like Arab — everyone’s more separated even though we’re all Muslim and we’re all a part of the same ummah.
Attendee #4:
So we were thinking, like, I think one of the ways Dallas is known for is for our masjids. We have tens and tens of masjids, and even the local ones are constantly expanding. Obviously, it’s important for us to fit people during Tarawih and everything. But one of the things we want to see in 10 years is that we Muslims are known for opening schools and being pioneers in education. Now, I think the other thing that we will be known for is our coffee shops, which is great obviously, but what we were thinking is having schools open to the general public. It can be led by Muslims, but it can have students from all backgrounds. And then us being successful in education would actually show the general public that Muslims do have knowledge that can relate to anybody from any background. So I think it’s important for us to not only thrive in Islamic education but also secular education. And the other thing we would say is having libraries or coffee shops that have a little bit of bookshelves and everything. So yeah, that’s what we envision for 2035.
01:02:56 Suhoor Fest Culture
Mustafa Syed:
And Sheikh, kind of in the lens of that and talking about what our culture should look like, a lot of our cultural production seems very capitalistic almost. We have things like Suhoorfest, etc. Is this necessarily a bad thing? But how can we maybe—kind of what she was saying in her response—how can we grow beyond these things as a community to guide that cultural production towards something more robust and more meaningful?
Suhaib Webb:
These are great questions, mashallah. First of all, I just want to say thank you to all of you for being here also. It’s very invigorating, very great to see, you know, and thank you guys for organizing. And that’s my man. I don’t know, my man owned a coffee shop from years ago, alhamdulillah.
So I think like you ideally, right, you want to have a community that’s rooted in broader religious values. And I alluded to it earlier about sort of how referring to the lexicon of our sciences can save us a lot of trouble. And I can give you one example.
Oftentimes when you talk with Muslims, their imagination of unity is one of a neoliberal utopic idea of unity. Like, why don’t we all have E together? Because we don’t have to. Like religion is not asking us all to have to eat together. And so that clashes with the secular idea of Wakanda, right? It’s got to be perfect. Islam is not asking for perfection.
And so it recognizes that oftentimes in negotiating culture and the growth of culture, there are going to be areas where we don’t have to have unity, but we have to have practical unity. So like when someone came to Imam Ahmed and said, would you pray behind someone who ate camel’s meat and didn’t make wudu? He’s like, would I not pray behind Malik? Like the Malik is, we don’t say Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim in Salah. But if we are the Imam of a Shafi’i or Hanbali Masjid, it is recommended that we say Bismillah.
So I want us to be very careful about the idea of Islamic. Like it doesn’t need to lead to fascism. And unfortunately, many of the modern Islamic movements, and I respect them, whether they’re Ikhwan or whatever, I respect them generally, but the more cancerous forms of Islamic movements, like the jihadi groups, for example — like ISIS wanted to kill me and Yasir, they put me and Yasir in a magazine together, a hundred grand. I told my wife, you married a centerfold girl, right? They had me as a center, it was better than that pic, that’s for sure. Iraqi jihadis got better pictures than you, man, right?
But the point is, what they wanted to kill me and Yasser for was they said, we don’t agree with what they teach. We’re not teaching anything that’s not founded in the tradition or supported by scripture. The Ba’lawis, yesterday I went to the Ba’lawi zikr. We don’t make noise and stand in our crew, but with them, I’m just doing it, man. Stood up, everything. It’s beautiful with the brothers making dhikr, alhamdulillah.
So I think sometimes our expectation of what culture is going to look like, we have to be very careful that we understand there’s fluidity and there’s going to be dynamics to that culture.
The other thing is I think you’re already doing this. Like, no offense to Dallas. Y’all new to this. Go to the Bay Area, man. The Bay Area was Dallas 30 years ago. Chicago was Dallas 50 years ago. The DMV is a quiet Bay Dallas Chicago. You can’t go anywhere in the DMV except you see a Niqabi at Costco. Adi knows. Or you see someone in a turban or a toub. Like, our Costco had halal meat back in 84, bro. When it was called Sam’s Club. You know what I mean? So it would be good to even go and look and see sort of how they’ve manifested.
But I do agree, and it’s very difficult — the Catholics say there’s no priest in capitalism. It’s very hard to untether our work from money because money is the qibla of where society is today.
And it’s gonna sound strange, in order to escape being hinged to money, ironically, you need what? Money. In order to escape riba, you need money. That’s how it works.
Dave Chappelle has a great quote. He says, money is the fuel of choices. And those people in Sotokaf, when they came out of the cave, what’s the first thing? They needed money.
So we can’t separate it, but we have to make sure that we begin to think about it ethically. Like I gave a khutbah on how not to be a gentrifier with a J. Jin in New York and in D.C. How do we begin to tackle?
Because I would say this — is our theology in America, and brothers, you know this — TikTok Ox and Instagram homies and YouTube cats, is the theology that we see debated now amongst Muslims on YouTube, is it a theology that’s dealing with the past or dealing with now?
We don’t even have a resume outside of, that’s why we love Malcolm. Malcolm sort of inadvertently takes on all these great theological discussions without being a theologian. Racial supremacy, social stratification, right?
I think that if you really want to build culture Islamically, you have to untether yourself from being Sufi, Salafi, Ash’ari, Maturidi, Athari, whatever you see yourself on those classical frames — hold on to it, no problem. But don’t allow it to stifle solving the problems of now.
We have Pharaoh and we have Qarun living in Austin. Elon Musk is Qarun. Pharaoh is Trump. And if you don't see it that way, then what are you reading? When you read, so to you, if you read about the shirt, or you're reading about a kidnapped child who is physically abused, part of the prison industrial complex, right? That's how I should read. So it took half is Musa. Why can't Moses be quiet? Why can't he be quiet? Why does he say that? Because he knows a prophet cannot be silent in front of injustice. That's why even Hajar puts that under the section on Qadah and Qadr. Because he knows that a prophet cannot be muted in the face of injustice.
Why don't we read it that way? What kind of dog was it, bro? Where was the cave? Really? Where was the cave? Like that's what you got from the story? But why is he unable to remain silent in front of murder? Because prophets have Isma. They cannot hide when something wrong is happening. We're watching murder. We're watching entire population of children in Gaza being starved to death. And these people want to tell us that we came from a history of barbarity and jihadism? Really? Be quiet, bro. Because all of us right now, if we could, we would change that situation.
Why can't he be quiet in the face of property being destroyed? That's why we should be very careful. If we're protesting, we shouldn't be destroying property. We have a certain prophetic sort of guidance here. Why does he have to see that those people paid for their work? Because where is our voice now on fair wages in this country? Every single major prophet, almost all of them are immigrants. They were forced to migrate. Why have we not tied that into the discourse now about all these poor people, my homie, my neighbor in Maryland and his beautiful wife, Jessica, who's sent to El Salvador without due process. And he was told he could stay. And he has an autistic son who's six years old that no one talks about.
Do we forget that the Prophet ﷺ lost his father? So I would say, how do we untether it as best we can? It's to do what I just did. I did it on purpose. How do you go back and ask yourself, if I'm going to think about my situation right now on campus, what story of the Quran talks to this moment? Like when you write now, you're reflecting, you're introspective, right? When I'm going to look at the situation around me, what verses of Qur'an, hadith of the Prophet, awrad of the Salihin, aqwal al-arifin fit this moment? Then I can go ask the Shaykh, you know, this is what I think speaks to this moment. Can you help maybe enhance this? Can you help?
Look, every time we come, we just talk. When's that going to change? Well, you guys will tell, hey, this is the idea. Is this what we're going through? Does this verse work? Does this ayat work? Does this statement work? Does this fiqh work? Does this theology work, right? But if we don't have that exposure, I think that's why Qalam is so important, so strategic here, right? If we don't, and Tissa, if we don't have that exposure, then we don't, what are you really learning when you learn? You learn the vocabulary. You're learning meaning, and that informs who you are. So I would say that is the key. I keep saying that over being able to go into the wells.
Vincent Lloyd has a great book called Religion of the Field Negro. Incredibly brilliant Catholic theologian, black man, highly inspired, obviously, by Malcolm. And he talks about the cleansing nature of religious terminology.
01:12:48 Greatest Examples of Muslim Culture
Mustafa Syed:
So my next question is, where is the cave? No, I'm kidding. It's the last question I'll ask before we head to our final prompt, because we're getting a little close to Maghrib. And I have to preface it with a little bit, like a one-minute story. Long story short, some friends of mine and myself, we were visiting Sheikh Suhaib when he lived in New York. And I thought this was a very profound experience because he took actually time out of his schedule to come and meet with us, to come spend time with this small group of guys from Texas.
In that interaction, we were getting food and different things, and somebody like an unhoused, a homeless person, came up to us and started asking for money, etc. And Sheikh Suhaib actually went and took this person to go and get food. He went and bought him food, actually. I thought that was such a profound example of someone embodying Muslim culture, you know? And so basically, I wanted to ask Sheikh, like from your perspective, what’s one of, if not a couple of examples of the greatest examples of Muslim culture and the way that people have embodied Islam that impacted you as an individual?
Suhaib Webb:
So why did I get him food, though? Anybody that has any type of street smarts, why did I not give him money? Her—as a her, actually. Why did I not give her money? She’s going to use it for primos, man. And, you know, Johnny Walker Red, man. She’s going to use it for haram. So that’s why I bought her food, right?
And I think that’s how we find the balance of what religion says to do. We should never say no to someone if we have the ability—if they need food, right? In the Quran, the Prophet said to feed people. So that’s not coming from me. Sultanul Ulama Izzeddin Abdul Salam said, every good thing a Muslim does goes back to Sayyidina Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. We are embodying teachings of the Prophet.
So the first greatest, most inspirational example to me is Sayyidina Rasulillah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. As someone who embraced Islam—again, not to say we’re better than anyone else, that’s not why I’m saying this—we feel like the Prophet’s here, man. Like, we actually live like the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and we know he’s not dead. He answers our salawat, and it’s authentically reported, especially on Friday, it’s a good time for dua right now, by the way.
And so we function very much as though we are with him. You’ll be with who you love. Allah make us lovers of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And the Sahaba used to love to be with him. One of them said, “Ya Rasulullah, when I’m with you, I feel so good. But when I go home, I realize you’re going to be Maqam Mahmood, and I won’t even be with you in Jannah. I will miss you in Jannah.” I wrote a poem, Jannah tibidunik naru — my heaven without you is hell, Ya Ahmad.
So first, for me, it’s how the Prophet did it. The Prophet says to him, who comes back and conquers Mecca, and then they say, “Destroy the Kaaba. It’s built on the wrong foundations.” He uses culture. He says, “What? Ya Aisha.” It’s related by America in the Muatta and Muslim in the Sahih. He said, “If it wasn’t that your people just became Muslim, I would do it.” He takes into consideration his flock; he understands his people.
The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, when the young man came to him and said, “Can I kiss my wife in Ramadan?” He said, “Nah, man.” The old man, yeah, no problem. Because a young man’s energy, young woman’s energy is a little high, man. Young people, older people. That’s why Allah says Mawadda wa Rahmah. Mawadda is physical attraction; Rahmah is psychological attraction. So we physically are in love with each other when we’re young, but we grow to psychological love as we get older and our physical power wanes.
So the first is Sayyidina Muhammad.
In America, I would say, number one, Dr. Jackson has always been, for me, someone very inspirational. We might not agree on everything, which is great. I don’t believe relationships are about agreement. You should marry who you can hate. Because you love everybody. Right? But what I mean is marry the person that you can argue with enough, but you’ll love, because without arguments, it’s boring. Seriously, right? It’s not Virgin River. That’s garbage, man.
There’s going to be some differences that actually help you learn more about yourself and grow as a person. And through that sort of adversity, you find yourself. I tell people to marry not who you can hate, but who you can argue with, right? Who you can discuss things with.
So Dr. Jackson.
The other one I would say is Imam Siraj. And I feel like Imam Suraj doesn’t get his flowers, man. But for you guys, Imam Suraj was our Abu Salimah. Man, we used to trade his cassettes. I know Generation Z, this thing called cassette—you’ve probably never seen it—unless you went back home, you saw cassettes, right, with the Quran on it.
And so we would, man, we were femen for Imam Siraj. I was in Oklahoma; I listened on a little cassette recorder in the masjid and he was like, “Brothers, don’t be on welfare just because you became Muslim.” For us as new Muslims, that’s like, “Yeah, I need to have financial autonomy to be a good Muslim.”
So I think Imam Siraj has been a great, great example.
And then I’ll say my parents, even though they’re not Muslim. My parents are people very Church of Christ. You know what the Church of Christ is? The old Church of Christ, no pants, no shorts, no music, right? None of that. I used to wear a suit to church, man, with a clip-on tie, church on Sunday, church on Wednesday.
My grandfather was a preacher in Troop, Texas, Church of Christ in Troop. And so I saw my parents, even though different religion, but very much—and not politically—they were liberal, not politically conservative, but religiously conservative, and they kind of managed this very well to the extent that I became Muslim. My mom said, "I prayed to Jesus and you became Muslim." I said, "Well, Jesus is trying to tell you something." But I think also my parents really did a good job of modeling. And then my wife—my wife is born Muslim in Northeast DC, which is a hood Iranian. So she got the Sunni, Shia thing. By the way, the whole Sunni, Shia thing was exacerbated after 1979 and brought on more in the recent conflict, and you have to be very careful as a Sunni and Shia and to appreciate, yes, we differ on a lot of issues but also sometimes Sunnis aren't aware of what happened historically to the family of the prophets. You have to be aware of this, you have to study as a Sunni history—our history. You read in Sahih Muslim when Sayyidina Muawiyah told Sa'ad to curse Ali. That's in Sahih Muslim, in the narration. You don't have to get sensitive now. That's in Sahih Muslim. Get mad at Imam Muslim, not me. And then Sa'ad says to him, "The one who is most beloved to the Messenger of Allah." So there are things that sometimes Sunnis have blind spots. As one brother told me, Sean King told me, "I became Muslim. I went to class. They stopped to Sayyidina Ali. I went to another class. They stopped to Sayyidina Ali." He said, "What happens after Sayyidina Ali?" I said, "Yeah, brother. It's a lot there, right?" But even our own Sunnis, we have unfortunately been neglectful of the family of Rasulullah and demanding justice for his family. It doesn't mean you're Shia. We have our differences theologically and fiqh-wise that are very difficult, but we had pragmatic unity through history. And oftentimes the murders and the massacres that happened—whether it was the 700 Malikis who were killed in one day by the Fatimi in Egypt, the Safouis when they came into Iran—they slaughtered the Sunnis. We notice, right? And we see now Sunnis, whether it's in Pakistan or anywhere, there's been violence in Afghanistan against the Hazaras. We see this, right? Oftentimes, these are much more the outcome of a political project or an identity project, not a theological project. So I would say as we move forward, we have to think about practical unity. And I'm just going to leave you with this: keep doing what you're doing. Be inspired today. Don't feel like you have to achieve something monumental. Just be a good person. Make salawat upon the prophet every day. Say la ilaha illallah every day at least a hundred times. Be good to people because you naturally... I'm sorry to take a lot of time. But you embody something that you don't understand because you're born with it. You're born with a gift. To be a Muslim is to be born with a gift that you didn't ask for. That's why Hidayah is from what? Hadiyah. Gift in Arabic is hadiyah. And I, as someone who wasn't Muslim, used to watch you. We had a guy, I played basketball for Blake Griffin's father, inner city high school, called John Marshall. Now it's nice, but back then it was mashallah, tabarakallah. And I remember there was a guy, we couldn't say his name. May Allah forgive me. We called him Salim Salim. We couldn't say his name. We're from Oklahoma, bro. We don't speak English. So we called him Salim Salim. And he had a sister. And we used to watch them. We were 100% USDA approved Kafirs. And we would watch them. And even as bloods, we would say, "Don't mess with them." There's something about him, it's sacred. It was very strange. And yo, his sister's cute, man, you know, she's cute, right? I was 14. I didn't say this, I didn't say this. My wife said it, I didn't say it. And then one of the brothers was like, "Man, her daddy, Alibaba, man, he will cut you to pieces, boy. You talk to that girl." So we had a—we might have been wrong, right? And it was rooted in some really problematic, but it led to ihtiram—that we had respect for him. And I remember there was a guy one time making fun of Salim Salim. I don't know what happened to Salim Salim. I don't even know his real name. And I remember the whole school, like, "You don't mess with Muslims, man. You don't mess with the Muslims because they will come and kill all of us." Not terrorism, but we understood people in the nation. I had a girlfriend before I was Muslim. Please don't let my wife get mad about this story. I'm already in trouble. She's a millennial. I'll be throwing millennials under the bus. But it's so easy to. I like Generation Z. But I had a girlfriend. I was a Muslim. I was reading the Quran. I was in her house. And she was cooking bacon. I said to her, I can't have that bacon. No pork on my fork, strictly fish on my dish. Right? Big Daddy Kane. And then she said to me, why? Why, baby? I said, I'm Muslim. She started laughing, man. She said, you? You're Muslim? No, no, you're not Muslim. I said, why? She said, my uncle is Muslim, and he don't live like you. This is not, and I said, Allah is working on me. Allah was working, I was very young. My wife, I was not mukhalaf almost. Okay, so don't get mad, baby. And I remember I said, what do you mean? She said, Muslims don't have girlfriends. That's haram. This is in the projects in Northeast Oklahoma City. And she told me, Muslims live godly lives. So it's something that you don't know you have. So don't burden yourself to, I've got to create a culture. Nah, man, just keep making coffee shops, bro. Just keep being you. And don't allow people to necessarily box you in in your religious expression. That's not organic. You're going to grow into who you are. It'll make you a better husband, better wife, better parent, better person, and a conduit of prophetic rahmah. So I want you to leave inspired, man. And don't allow our community to bring you down. Sometimes they do it. They don't mean to, but they do. They hold you back. Every time I give a khutbah, mashallah, brother, mashallah, lakin. I hate that lakin, man. If I ever find lakin, I'm going to kill him. Like today, I read with a different qira. The brother came to you, he's like, Wallahi, man, your khutbah can shams. But brother, you do not read Quran. I said, man, it's a different qira, man. So don't let people bring you down. I want you to leave. And you keep doing this great work that you're doing. It's meaningful. It's powerful. Writing, reflecting, introspection, writing prompts. This is a beautiful thing. But don't force it. And then one day we'll see here, Dallas, the marriage of Barak and Brisket.
01:26:10 Prompt #3: Analyze Your Culture
Mustafa Syed:
Right? It happened. I think that's a great note for us to end off on and just head to our last prompt.
Sheikh, you said anything you do can bring change. It doesn't have to be super monumental. Likewise, anything we do can impact those around us—our local culture.
So what we want you guys to do—and actually, we'd like to give short callbacks to our previous events as well. Go back to that slide. Basically, you can read the quotes here. But Sheikh AbdulNasir, when he was here with us at Nuun, he talked a lot about locus of control—like what you can actually impact.
And Sheikh Yasir, in our last event that we did in Ramadan, he said a really profound quote:
"What we do for the next 30 years will dictate Islam for the next 300 in this country."
So, if I can go to prompt three...
We want you guys to think about this:
Analyze the culture of your family, friends, and spaces in your locus of control. Then name one passion of yours and one concrete way that it can seed lasting Islamic culture here in Dallas.
Everyone got a card, right? We want you to write it on the card. Because what we're going to do is put them all together. If you don’t have a card, we have some extras. Two minutes to write, and then we’ll break for Maghreb. That’ll mark the end of our interview session.
So again, JazākAllāhu Khayr, Sheikh Suhaib. We really appreciate having you. It was a lot of fun. I think this is the first time a speaker has pushed back on the interview questions, I think that’s amazing.
Suhaib Webb:
No, no, I was refining. What the brothers say, filtering, filtering.
Mustafa Syed:
But I think that’s one thing that’s really great about what we’re trying to do here, that spirit of engagement. Actually questioning. Saying: “Wait, maybe you can adjust the way you're asking your question.” And I think that’s something really profound.
Inshallah, you guys can answer this, I think it provides a lot more depth to the conversation.
Suhaib Webb:
It’s important that you look, and we learned this in the academy, right? Any terminology that’s being used. You examine it well. And you understand it. Like “Islamic”, you ask, where did that come from? It’s a very modernist term. It’s a very modern term. It’s a very post-colonial style of religious.
And that allows you not to be constantly a jerk, but you want to think constructively and critically.
So I wasn’t trying to model being just a contrarian, but I also wanted to make sure that we’re refining. And I’m hearing these theorists we study—like I know Peter Berger, and I have serious issues with The Sacred Canopy as an idea. But that’s not our conversation here. But at the same time, there’s a lot of good that came from it. Peter Berger is a genius. The book The Sacred Canopy.
So forgive me if I was overly critical.
Mustafa Syed:
JazākAllāhu khayr
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