Mufti Muntasir Zaman is a distinguished scholar of Islamic law and hadith who combines deep traditional training with contemporary academic research. He completed the ʿĀlimiyyah and Iftāʾ programs in South Africa and holds a Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from the Markfield Institute in the UK. His work reflects a careful balance between classical Islamic scholarship and critical engagement with modern intellectual currents.
Currently teaching at Qalam Institute, Mufti Muntasir is known for his thoughtful, accessible writings and translations on hadith, Islamic theology, and law. Through his articles, reviews, and public lectures, he offers clarity on complex religious questions while nurturing a spirit of reflection, sincerity, and precision in understanding sacred knowledge.
In this discussion, Mufti Muntasir explores how Muslims can integrate Islamic values into their everyday lives, particularly in secular and professional spaces. He emphasizes the subtle, powerful impact of living one’s faith with integrity—through actions as simple as maintaining prayer or bringing mindful God-consciousness into ordinary conversations.
Below is a full transcript of her talk & discussion at Nuun Collective on June 18, 2025.
00:00:00 Speaker Introduction
Mustafa Syed
Mufti Muntasir Zaman, he is a scholar of Islamic law and hadith. He currently teaches at Qalam Institute. He completed the Alamiyyah and Ifta programs in South Africa, and he holds a Master's and MA in Islamic studies from the Markfield Institute in the UK, with a focus on hadith sciences and classical Islamic scholarship. Mufti Muntasir Zaman, he combines traditional learning with an academic research, regularly contributing translations, articles, and reviews. His work reflects a commitment to both scholarly rigor and accessible Islamic education.
And interviewing him today, we have our research chief curator, Anzar Lateef, who is an electrical engineer by trade, but I don't even think he should be an engineer. I think he should focus on what he loves to do, which is be a huge nerd about history. He is the biggest history nerd you'll ever meet. You can ask him any question about any time period, and he'll give you an answer. So yeah, without further ado, Anzar.
00:00:56
Anzar Lateef
Assalamu alaikum, Mufti Sahab. Welcome to Nuun and Hajj Mubarak. Today I wanted to get started by asking you a very important question. How do you look so young?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
I actually don’t know how to answer that question. I’m sorry. I hate to break it to you guys. I'm sorry.
I think every time somebody says that to me, I grow like a white strand of hair. And right now, if I open up my turban, you'll just see like this bush of white hair. So, Jazakallah Khair for that.
But Mashallah, Tabarakallah should be before it and after it. No, but honestly, there's a hadith where Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam says, نَضَرَ اللَّهُ إِمْرَ أَنْ سَمِعَ مَقَالَةِ فَوَعَاهَا فَأَدَّاهَا كَمَا سَمِعَ. It's quite interesting. It's embedded in the intellectual tradition that every science has its own perks and specialties. One of the perks of studying the science of hadith is two things.
One, you get, hopefully, an illuminated face. And two, you live a very long life. Many of my hadith teachers live past 100, and many whose works I've studied. So if anything, I would attribute it to that.
00:02:06 Spark to Study Islam
Anzar Lateef:
Wow, mashallah.
So, Mufti Sahib, you have studied under a lot of Hadith scholars. You have traveled around the world studying in South Africa, becoming a Mufti and a renowned Hadith scholar at a young age. I have to know, what was the spark that led to all of that?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
All right, that's going to take some time. All right, so what inspired me to go on this journey of studying and in particular studying hadith? I think I had somewhat of a typical immigrant family upbringing, although I was born and raised in New York. But my parents at a very early age, you know, mid-90s, late 90s, they wanted me to study hadith. I wish hadith, but they wanted me to study the Quran, do hibdh. And I don't think I had much of a choice in the matter there. I just woke up one morning and I know I was in a hibz madrasa memorizing the Quran. It's funny because I remember when my dad decided to say, anybody been to New York or from New York here? You guys ever heard of Flushing Muslim Center? It's a hibz madrasa, that's where I did it.
And I remember, I think this was like 99, 2000, I'm like eight. And my dad's like, okay, you're going to join a hibz madrasa. And I said, you know, why didn't you ask me before I joined? And my dad just looking at me with this face of like surprise, like, yeah, I'm going to sit down and ask eight year old, what do you think about joining a hibz madrasa? So that I didn't have much of a choice. But then one thing led to another, eventually I'm memorizing the Quran and I noticed that the people around me are studying Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, Fiqh, Hadith and that inspired me to go and kind of take it to the next step because memorizing the Quran, although it's a huge accomplishment, understanding the message of the Quran was always something I hope to achieve looking at my peers.
Again, I'm like a 14-year-old. It's not like I have this philosophical, like, you know, Ghazalian moment where I'm like, you know what, I want to change the course of my life. But I decided, you know what, let me go and study. And at the time, I was studying in Canada. So I went from New York to Canada. And I felt that I wasn't getting the level of rigor in my study that I had hoped. And it was a funny story, I actually got in trouble for, let's just say playing football at a time I should have been playing. I was supposed to be studying and I ended up playing football. And I kind of got expelled, right? And I decided, you know what? Although the teacher said, you can come back, I said, you know what, this could be my excuse to go and pursue my studies further somewhere else.
I had a friend who was studying in the UK and another friend who was studying in South Africa. And I said, you know, bismillah, let me go and study in South Africa. So I'm this 15-year-old, New York-born, Canadian-studied teenager on my way to South Africa. Yeah. You can imagine what that looked like. I couldn't imagine what that looked like. And eventually, you know, your imagination runs wild. Like, will there be monkeys, lions, Simba, Mufasa? Like, what does South Africa hold for you? You don't know, right? I'm this typical ignorant teenager going to South Africa for the first time. And I'm in this madrasah with... give or take 500 students from 60 different nationalities and backgrounds, from Malaysians to Russians to Chinese to Nigerians, Americans, Canadians. And this diversity in culture and interest really opened my eye to something I really never saw as a first, second generation immigrant growing up in the West.
And then one thing led to another. And initially my interests were in philosophy and theology. And if anybody knows anything about hadith, the one science that the scholars of hadith are not too happy about, if you're going to put it anyway, it's philosophy and theology. So I was just sitting down and I'm studying these books of Maturidi theology, right? Isharatul Maram, if anybody's interested. And I'm reading through it and this student, he passes by and he says, what are you studying? And at the time I was, I remember very vividly, I was in my fifth year of study in South Africa. I was about maybe 19-ish. And I was studying the question, the problem of evil from like a classical Islamic perspective. How did they address Husun and Qubh? And the student who was more interested in hadith, he passes by and he's telling me, he's like, what are you doing? And I said, I'm studying theology.
And he told me point blank, you're wasting your time. And I said, serious? He's like, yeah, you know what? This is a subject not that many people are interested in. Why don't you study hadith? And he introduced me to this Syrian scholar, Sheikh Abdel Fattah Abu Ghuda. And I started reading his works and the rest is history. From there, I started reading the books of Sheikh Abdel Fattah Abu Ghuda. I got interested in hadith. But I would say that initial foray into theology and philosophy always lingered on in the back burner as I continued studying hadith with different mashayikh in South Africa and elsewhere.
00:07:02 Further Masters’s Education
Anzar Lateef
So you studied from childhood, studying the Quran, and then you went on to study in Canada, and then you went to South Africa, and you had this interest in theology and philosophy, and then you got into the hadith sciences, right?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Yeah.
Anzar Lateef
So after all that, after studying via the traditional madrasa curriculum, you went on to achieve a master's at the Marksfield Institute. Many traditional graduates don't do that. What prompted this next path in your life after your studies?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
I think this is an interesting question that very often young Muslims such as yourselves—you’ll tackle this. And that is, for the most part, we inherit this tradition, right? That is largely from the Arab world, from the subcontinent, from the Middle East, the Eastern regions, which is very rich, which has so much to offer. But we’re born and raised here in the West, right? Whichever part—whether it’s Canada, UK, America, different states.
And just by virtue of going to high school, by virtue of, you know, listening to podcasts, watching movies, listening to the news—whatever you're doing—you find yourself exposed to certain ideas and questions that, no matter how much you want to bury your head in the ground, at some point it’ll catch up with you. Like, okay, as a Muslim woman, why am I wearing the hijab? As a Muslim male, why do I, you know, keep a beard? As a parent, why do I want my children to develop certain ethos? As a Muslim, why do I eat certain things, not eat certain things?
And it’s interesting because I just came back from Hajj. And when I went for Hajj, and when I go for Umrah, this happens to me every single time. You go for Hajj, you go for Umrah, and you’re in the midst of this Muslim environment—you hear the Adhan, you see people dressed in a particular way, everything is revolving around Salah. And within a few days, you feel yourself acclimating to like a full-on Muslim identity.
And then the moment you step foot in the airport in Medina or Jeddah, you feel like that first layer is being scraped off. Then you land in Turkey or Dubai, then the second layer is scraped off. And then you land in either JFK, O’Hare, or in DFW, and you feel like you got hit by a nuke. You know, like it goes—it’s like smooth, smooth, smooth—and you get punched in the face by this reality that we have a completely different lifestyle than what many people in the world are experiencing.
So now when I’m in South Africa, I come back to the States, I come back to New York, and I interact with my friends. So as much as I would love to take on this persona of this fully integrated young adult in a Muslim madrasa, I’m always being haunted by—“haunted” is a bit of an eerie word—but I always have to look myself in the mirror and realize there are some serious questions that I have to address.
So then I started reading books by Muslim academics—people like Dr. Ahmad Shamsi, Dr. Jonathan Brown, Scott Lucas—many of these Muslim intellectuals. And I start reading their books, and I’m still in the madrasa. And the first shock to me was just the language with which they’re probing some of these serious questions. Like, okay, we say Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim are the most authentic—why are they the most authentic? We follow one of the four legal schools—how did these legal schools develop?
In my traditional training, yes, these are questions that we addressed, but from a completely different paradigm. Now I’m addressing them from a Western paradigm that looks at history not from a divine perspective, but more from a very secular perspective. And, you know, I’m reading these books and I realize, man, although I’m traditionally trained, there’s this vacuum in my knowledge that I would love to fill in.
And... okay, I shouldn’t be saying this out loud, but I kind of dropped out of school in second grade, right? And I never went back to school—I went to madrasa after that. And then somehow I got my GED—I still don’t remember how I got it. So now I’m trying to apply to colleges and it’s not really working, right? They’re like, “Alright, what do you have to show for? You want to apply to, like, Oxford’s undergraduate program?” And I’m like, “Alright, I did my second grade in Ideal Islamic School in Queens—does that count for anything?”
And they’re like, okay, we have this weird situation where the person’s writing sample is enough to get him into a PhD program, but his credentials should put him back into middle school. And I’m like getting rejected left, right, and center.
And the other problem I was facing is, I’m trying to enter into these graduate programs, but I’m like 18 or 19, right? I’m just about finishing my madrasa. So I couldn’t do it. Until I spoke to a friend of mine, and he was in the UK, and he said in some of these Commonwealth universities, they have this interesting option where merit-based master’s programs are available. So if you can show that although you don’t have a high school degree, you don’t have an undergrad, but you can show that through your writing sample that you have something to contribute, we’ll put you right into the master’s program.
So somehow I showed them some of my writing samples, because I was writing at the time. And boom—they just fast-tracked me from second grade to a master’s program. And then I don’t know how that happened. But anyways, I’m in there.
And fortunately for me—and this is something a lot of traditional scholars are scared of doing—taking that leap into Western academia, whether it’s UChicago, whether it’s Harvard. You have to understand, these are traditions that are extremely foreign to what we’re used to. These are people who, for the most part, are atheist or agnostic. They have a different set of orthodoxies. They have their own scholarship, history.
Now, stepping foot into that is like putting your faith right in the front as cannon fodder. And not everyone’s ready for that. So over the last decade or so—or two decades—what Muslims have been doing in many countries is try to develop this middle space, kind of similar to TISA, where you offer graduate-level programs, but taught by Muslims. So you get the best of both worlds.
And that was Markfield, where I went to study. And they offered that, but it was a learning curve for me. You know, trying to learn how to write critically—critical thinking, academic writing. So over the year and a half, it really helped me to, you know, mashallah, get exposed to the Western academic side of things and kind of create this hybrid with the traditional studies that I have.
And I’ll be honest—it was quite a rocky road. It wasn’t that easy. Like, for instance, just to give you an example: if I’m reading Islamic history, if I’m reading a book, let’s say Tarikh al-Khulafa by Jalaluddin Suyuti, Egyptian scholar, 10th century of our tradition, he’ll talk about the Islamic past, he’ll talk about the Umayyads, the Abbasids, he’ll talk about Abu Bakr, Umar, and the Khilafa from a very confessional perspective.
Now I’m reading somebody like Joseph van Ess, and he’s talking about these same things from a very critical perspective. And I’m sitting there thinking like, man, this person is really harsh. But maybe—is it that I’m too scared of facing the truth? Or is this person really clouding reality with a bunch of academic jargon?
So then I thought, you know what, let me start reading further and further. Then I got introduced to some more Muslim academics. And long story short, that’s where I find myself today to a certain extent. Although that was like 10 years ago.
00:14:54 Solving Current Problems Today
Anzar Lateef
So you mentioned that during your Madrasa days, you were reading Jonathan Brown and Ahmed Shamsi and many others. And before that, you were reading Aqidah books on the problem of evil, like from a more classical perspective, right? Do you believe that your interest in philosophy and your understanding of the problem of evil led to this interest in solving current problems today as well?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Honestly, I would say my studies in theology and philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with it. I feel like there's a part of my brain that I consciously forgot about, and there's all the theological, philosophical studies that I did, and eventually I got into it again. What really led me down the path of asking some of these more serious questions of, okay, there's hadith, there's Quran, but then you have empirical science and philosophy, and how do we create this bridge between the two? What really got me onto that was, ironically, just a study of history. I feel like as I begin studying history more and more, I realize some of the more...
I feel like there's like a tale of two Muslim scholarship. A lot of us growing up, we hear the names Imam Bukhari, Imam Muslim, Imam Nawawi, Ibn Hajar, Shah Walyullah Dihluwi, Ibn Taymiyyah. We hear these names very often and they're thrown around. But when you study their lives much more, like take Ibn Taymiyyah for instance. We often associate him with certain brands or elements of Islam. But then when you study his life, you realize he was a very capable, able scholar of philosophy. He was grappling with some of the most serious existential questions of his time. And then I thought to myself, if they're able to do it there, why can I not do the same for certain questions that are popping up in the day-to-day in my life?
00:16:48 The Height of Adam
Anzar Lateef
MashaAllah, thank you for sharing.
So then after your whole educational journey and you're grappling with questions and understanding and coming out stronger from it, you, and becoming such a renowned Hadith scholar as well, you wrote the book... The Height of Adam at the Crossroads of Science and Scripture. Can you tell us about the book and the work that went into it?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
First of all, I kind of wish I switched the subtitle for the title now that I think about it. Every time somebody picks up this book, they're like, The Height of Prophet Adam. They're like, I don't care how tall he was. Like, okay, 5'6", 5'7", 5'8". I remember when I published the book first, somebody's like, okay, what's next? The Length of Noah's Ark. And I'm like, oh, come on, man. So I'm like, okay, you know what? I wish I put the subtitle first because that's at the core of what I was trying to answer. And that is at the crossroads of science and scripture.
So like, what's the sebabun nuzul of this? How did this all begin? I remember it was 2018, I got a question from my sister-in-law who said, look, I'm reading this hadith that Adam was a 90-foot tall giant. He was created like that in Jannah and then he comes to earth and our ancestors, they were all giants. And I'm going to an MSA event and all these people are really interrogating me on this and I don't have an answer. Can you share an answer with me?
So at the time, there was this famous scholar, Mufti Taqi Uthmani. He has a commentary on Sahih Muslim, famous book of hadith. And I went there and I copy-pasted his answer and I sent it to her. And although she was satisfied with the answer, there were still some questions that were lurking in my mind. I said, okay, you know what? This satisfies this side, but it doesn't answer that question.
And... Alhamdulillah, I got the opportunity of publishing a few books altogether. And my general trajectory of publishing books is I first write a footnote in a book. That footnote becomes a paragraph. The paragraph becomes a paper. The paper becomes an article. And then the article becomes a book. Then the book becomes a footnote. And then that footnote becomes a paper. It's like a weird cycle of life. I can go into detail on why that happens.
But then I wrote this footnote in one of my books about this. And then Yaqeen Institute reached out to me and they said, hey, you know, why don't you start writing some papers on hadith? And I thought, you know what, why not write on this particular topic? So I wrote a paper at the time and I said, you know what, this deserves a book length treatment.
And as I was writing the paper—because you have to understand, what's the question that I'm trying to answer? The question is, an authentic hadith is telling us that Adam was 90 feet tall and his progeny was decreasing in height. Now, if anybody studied archaeology and science, archaeologically speaking, when we look at some of the remains of humans, at least hundreds of thousands of years tracing back, they're relatively the same height as you and I.
And then when you study science in terms of human anatomy and physics, it's really hard to imagine human beings that large. And I thought, you know what, I have to answer this. But the biggest problem I have is, as I told you guys, I dropped out in second grade. So my science is kachara. Like my science is absolutely horrible. Like I just about know how to do like addition and subtraction and multiplication. I'm just about not getting ripped off in Walmart from normal purchases. So science, math, archaeology was like... out of my imagination.
But I had to really tackle this because I've noticed some scholars who are trying to answer this question—how did they answer it? Like literally a true story. There's a scholar from Morocco who wrote this three-volume book on problematic hadith and he wanted to answer this. And I'm reading this and he's like, yeah, you know what? There are actually archaeological remains of human giants. And these... human giants, our forefathers were like 60 feet tall and 40 feet tall.
But unfortunately, what happened was the Smithsonian, this museum in America, went around the world and stole all of the bones and had them burned and incinerated. So we don't have the evidence anymore. So I'm like, wow, I actually never came across this. And then I look at the footnote and you wouldn't believe, you would not believe what his reference was. Can anyone guess? The Onion. Anybody heard of The Onion before? It was literally The Onion. He quoted The Onion and I said, You know, I'm like, we're cooked. Like, we're done. If this is your citation, The Onion, we're done. And the thing is, this is a published book and so many people are reading it.
So I decided, you know what, I don't want to fall into the same problem again. Let me make sure I do my research, but I don't know jack squat about science or archaeology. So I started emailing a bunch of scientists and archaeologists. I started reaching out to people. And for the next year, that's all I did.
I delved into the science part of it, like putting aside the history, the hadith and all of that discussion. I was going into like, okay, scientifically speaking, is it possible that human beings could be that large? Okay, the square cube law. Are there exceptions? What about dinosaurs? What about, you know, a saber tooth? What about like, you know, tales of giants? And so I really went down that rabbit hole for like months.
Okay, I got that done. Then I had to go down the rabbit hole of archaeology—that, okay, do we have evidence of giants? And if we do, whatever happened to them? I started emailing a bunch of archaeologists. I started going to random museums. You know, they're seeing this guy in a turban and a jubba walking around a museum looking at like dinosaur bones. And they're wondering like, what happened to the guy? Somebody find this guy's family. Maybe he got lost, right?
So anyways, I'm like emailing a bunch of people trying to figure out the specifics of this issue. So that took me a year. And then after—I wouldn't say mastering it—getting to a point where I was confident with that. Alhamdulillah, I had my background in hadith and the science of hadith and fiqh and history. I put the two together. And I would say from like the three or four books that I've written, this was perhaps the most challenging for me in my life.
00:23:03 Journey towards Knowledge
Anzar Lateef
So thanks for telling me why you wrote the book.
So I want to tell you why I read it, actually. And this takes us to our next one. So I read a book because I had heard a summary in a session about your perspective on this hadith, right? So I mentioned it to a former friend of mine, and he ended up takfiring me over this.
He literally called me a Kafir, like an atheist, because as you said, there's an authentic hadith, and what I understood from your perspective is like, maybe the prophet didn't say it, and stuff like that. And also, that's a one-star review on your Amazon advice.
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
It's fine, I get a lot of those. The nature of what I'm writing demands that I'm gonna get a bunch of one-star reviews. We need to get these guys, new and collected, $5 a piece. Everybody go and give me five stars. What do you call it, like a troll farm? The opposite of a troll form.
Anzar Lateef
So after being takfired, I read this book. I decided to read the book for a more in-depth understanding, right? And I found this quote particularly insightful regarding the message of the book: “Unscrupulously dismissing a problematic hadith is a simple task that even an ignoramus can accomplish. The brilliance of an intellectual shines when he can resolve the contention and provide a suitable interpretation.”
This quote, in my opinion, exemplifies your methodology. Anyone can reject or ignore, but a true intellectual will address and engage with what they see as problematic to find a way forward.
So, in your journey, you mentioned that this specific topic was brought up by your sister-in-law, and then you wrote an article for Yaqeen and stuff, right? And then you gained the confidence through various… And you had already gained the confidence in Hadith studies through your… well, through the madrasa curriculum.
Then you said your whole journey of getting the confidence in the secular sciences as well, so-called secular sciences. Can you also expand on that if you can? On this whole journey of how did you not fear being ostracized by your peers?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
his is a very important question that I don't want to make too personal on my life. But I think it relates to so many people over here. And what is that? You grow up in a family. Your family has certain traditions, habits. The people around you, your local masjid has certain traditions and habits. And you find yourself evolving, growing. And at some point, you realize, I need to make certain changes in my life. I want to do certain things differently.
When you try to explain that to your family, when you try to introduce that to your family, you get one of two reactions, right? More often than not, it's a visceral reaction that, you know, why are you doing this? Why are you saying this? Whether it's something as simple as, you know what, I want to go out of state for my college education or I don't want to be a doctor, I want to be an artist or like, I don't know, I feel like my passion is to study Islam as opposed to becoming like a lawyer.
Whatever it is, like oftentimes when we want to challenge certain established norms, it can become very difficult, right? And that is true for any field or any society, any area.
For me in particular, this book honestly did cause some rifts because there's a famous statement which says that people's most ardent enemies happens to be their own ignorance. So when I wrote this book, word started getting around just as an FYI, so people don't misunderstand what my main contention in this book is.
There's an authentic hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari that says that Adam was a particular height. My response to it is, there are three ways of understanding this. One way is, let's interpret the hadith in a way that perhaps can reconcile science and the hadith together. My second approach was, perhaps the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam never said this. And the third is, you don't have to have answers for everything. You can even just say, Wallahu A'lam. And that was my conclusion.
But however, word started getting around that, okay, this person is criticizing Sahih al-Bukhari, this person, he's bending backwards just for the purposes of science and all that good stuff. And it did cause a degree of pushback.
And it was a learning curve for me because I'll tell y'all this, not every time you get ostracized or you get pushed to a particular corner is it a bad thing for you. Like when I was getting pushed to the corner and a lot of people are like, hey, why are you saying this? What are you trying to achieve? What about what the scholars are saying?
It gave me a moment of pause and made me reconsider. Is it possible that I'm going too into one direction and giving too much credence to the science? And then that allowed me to reevaluate the middle ground.
But on the other hand, it showed me that, okay, this is a very important crossroads for me. That not between science and religion, but between should I try to say something that will be helpful for people I feel are struggling with this, on the one hand, or should I just stay quiet and not really air my views?
And I thought, you know what, it's important for me to make sure I did my due diligence because anybody can air their views, right? I can come today and say, you know what, based on my reading of Islam, it's perfectly fine for people to not pray and pay zakah instead. Or I don't have to fast, I can drink water and eat bread and that should be enough.
I can come out with the most ridiculous views just because I want to, but getting that pushback really opened my eyes to the importance of qualification and consultation.
So my next step was, I'm taking my book to different scholars and telling them, hey, this is what I'm saying, do you agree, disagree? And the general consensus was, we agree with you, but we're too scared to say it openly.
It was at that point that I realized, you know what? If the only pushback is not that this is like heresy or this is like anathema. The only problem is I don't want to go open about it. Then you know what? Let me take a bullet for the team and let me be open about it.
00:29:20 Inspiration Behind the Book
Anzar Lateef
Wow, mashallah.
So you mentioned you were questioning whether you should air these views or not, and all the other scholars were like, oh, I agree with you, but don’t tell anybody.
Was there any personal experience that made you realize, like, as Mufti Muntasar Zaman, it is my duty to actually go out with this? I mean, you can literally live in comfort and not tell anybody about this and not face any backlash.
But was there a personal experience that caused you to be like, this is something I must do. This is my duty?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
For the fear of sounding like Superman or Batman, like somehow I had this moment of like I’m gonna save the universe or like I invented the wheel. I mean, I don’t think it’s that dramatic. I just wrote a book on hadith and science, right? Inshallah, it was beneficial for other people.
I didn’t have to make this like life-threatening decision of like, okay, I’m gonna write this book and there’s gonna be like a target on my back. Well, there was a bit, like a social media target for whatever that’s worth.
No, honestly, I do feel, personally, not all views should be aired. I have a lot of views and I’m not going public with all of those views because I feel everybody has this journey, this journey of development where you’re thinking and you’re criticizing and you’re critiquing and researching.
I wasn’t comfortable to air all of my views, although I found some of them to be helpful, until I was comfortable and confident that my views were well researched and peer reviewed. So I think it was more of a selfish reason. It’s not like I put on a cape and I said, let me save the world.
It’s more like, man, I did like four years of research. Let me just put it out there at this point. I’m not going to… you know, just delete the file and like have a tear go down and go like for the betterment of the ummah, I’m going to delete this.
I said, listen, I wrote a book. Let me publish it. Let’s see what happens of it. So I decided to go forward with it.
Funny story, by the way, I remember, like I said, I dropped out in second grade, right? So like typing, writing, English composition, a lot of this I did on my own.
So when I was writing my first book, I was still learning some of the short keys like control Z, control A, you know, copy, paste.
So, my first book was on the science of hadith. And like, are the collections of hadith a reliable and accurate representation of the Prophet’s words and deeds?
So anyways, I remember I was in South Africa writing and still like poking at the keyboard, figuring out how to write like a caveman.
And at some point, I figured out command A is select everything. Command C is copy and then command V is it to paste.
So anyways, I’m figuring all of this stuff out. So I put command A and I selected everything, but I forgot the next step. And then I pressed like a letter and I saw the entire book in front of me just erase and vanish.
At that time, I didn’t learn command Z, which is like undo. So like, my entire book, it was like a whole year of work, just like, got erased right in front of me.
And I’m thinking like, like literally, the book is gone. I could have just command Zed it.
So I’m thinking like, okay, what’s the best way to do this? Maybe if I close the file, and I open it up again, it’ll give me the option, do you want to recover it?
And let’s just say a book was lost at that point, and I never had a book again. I could have done that with this book, but I decided not to, and eventually I published it.
By the way, I know how to type and everything. This was just like 2013.
00:32:50 Empirical Sciences
Anzar Lateef
Dang, that’s a loss.
So…
It is very rare for the common person to hear about ulema engaging with hadith in the context of biology and archaeology.
Were you the first to engage with the content of hadith based on the empirical sciences? Or were there hadith scholars in the last 1400 years that were doing this as well?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
I think the only benefit I have of making it seem like I'm the first person, although by no stretch of the imagination am I, is just social media. I just happened to post my research on Twitter and Facebook, and I think most people's memory is circa 2020. If you go back up on your Facebook feed, if it doesn't exist and never existed in humanity.
So yeah, I'm by no stretch of the imagination the first person to explore this question. If you look at some of the earliest scholars of hadith like Imam Bukhari, Imam Muslim, Yahya ibn Ma'in, they grappled with this question as well, but there was a reason why they didn't do so very openly.
So if I want to talk about scholarly engagement with this issue...
By the way, is everybody feeling hot? Over here, am I the only one? I know I'm wearing like a hijab over here so it's kind of like my fault. Like I should blame myself. But like, is everybody okay? There's a fan over here. If everybody's okay, like I apologize for the heat in advance. I'm not responsible for that.
But go and buy some more notepads and inshallah we can have a... we gotta up the game and start selling some more stuff. We'll have the brothers sing some more poetry, inshallah, and put a hat over there and hopefully we'll get some more funds.
No, I like to divide Islamic history into three parts. The first half of Islamic history, the second—you don't have to give it to me, by the way. I didn't mean that so you take it away from 300 people and just give it to me. Let them enjoy, it's fine. I'll melt away over here on my own.
So basically, when I look at Islamic history, I like to divide it into three parts. The first 700 years, you can talk about the early period of Islamic intellectual history. The second 700 years, the second part of Islamic intellectual history. And then I look at the modern era, circa 1850 and beyond, the advent of modernity.
In the first 600-700 years, Muslim scholars were really grappling with these same questions. Like, we're not the first people to think about the problem of evil. We're not the first people to talk about the existence of a creator. We're not the first people to talk about gender norms. These were questions that scholars grappled with.
But the early Muslim scholars grappled with it much more subtly than others only because they had some concerns of it being abused.
Then when you start looking at later scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Hajar, Suyuti, Shah Waliyullah, they start addressing this much more openly.
And then you have the modern era where it's like an open game where everybody's grappling with these questions.
The challenge though is—and why people think that I somehow made this new contribution although I never did, I just happened to write it—is that in the English language, we have this weird dichotomy.
We have this weird dichotomy. You have people who've gone to one particular extreme and because we're being recorded—I don't want to take any names over here—but let's just say some people have gone to one particular extreme and they're like, "Okay, what is the arbiter of truth? What is my... what do I consider to be the be all and end all?" And for them, it was science, morality. So they would say evolution—we really don't care what the Quran and Hadith have to say. As a Muslim, my first priority is to privilege empirical science. My first priority is to give preference to whatever philosophy has to say. And you have that entire group, and I'm talking about in English, and they have written a lot on this.
And then you have a second group of people who went to the opposite extreme. And they're like, "You know what? To hell with all of these scientists, these philosophers, they just drank the Kool-Aid of the modern West and secularism and all these isms, and you can't trust them and who cares about them. We need to double down and hold to our tradition and just translate what we've already been, what we've inherited."
And then I realize I'm like, you know, I walk into this middle space and I'm like, "Wait, hey guys, like you can hear your own echo. Like there's nobody here." I'm like, "You know, why don't we come to the middle ground over here?"
In Arabic, this discussion is happening. In Urdu, the discussion is happening. In Farsi and all these languages, they're coming to this middle ground.
But in English, because we've only started writing more popularly in English from the 60s and the 70s and much more common in the early 2000s, it's only now that we realize, you know what, why don't we come to this middle space?
And that's why I started writing and I noticed that people are, you know, there's a need to publish on this.
So to answer your question, no, I'm not the first one. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of scholars have addressed it.
In the modern era, people have and continue to address these issues. It's just the middle ground between one extreme of over-privileging science and philosophy and archaeology and the other extreme of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This small little lacuna that I'm trying to fill—there aren't that many people doing it. There aren't that many people who are writing accessible [works]. Perhaps that makes it seem like somehow, you know, I'm donning a cape and trying to save humanity, where in reality, I'm really not.
00:38:23 Controversy in Society Today
Anzar Lateef
And in that regard of finding this middle zone, and of course there’s a lot of writers throughout Islamic history and in all the other languages, you write down in your book, on page 8, that hadith scholars engage with and often critique the content of hadith based on the empirical knowledge that was available to them.
The precision of this form of engagement sharpened as their knowledge of the empirical sciences grew.
So... throughout your book, you quote various examples of such, right? So clearly this engagement was common amongst hadith scholars in the past.
Why is it something so controversial today? Like you mentioned the two extremes, but I mean, obviously like the other extreme makes the whole thing controversial.
But why is it so extreme for even a middle path, like even finding a middle zone? Like, why is it so controversial?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Before I answer that question, by a show of hands, how many people are still following along? How many people are still with me? All right, good. I just want to make sure I’m not losing people along the way. I know it’s kind of hot in here and the subject isn’t the most accessible. If I’m confusing anybody or you need some clarification, feel absolutely free to raise your hands.
If you’re feeling hot, I’ve got a suggestion for you. You can go buy a notepad over there and use it as a fan. That’s one way of feeling better, but you have to buy it, otherwise the fan won’t work, I’m telling you.
But anyways, everybody with me so far? We’re going to get to the prompt soon, don’t worry. If I lost anybody, feel free to raise your hand. I’ll go back a few steps or all the way to the beginning again and hopefully lose nobody. It’s a bit of a deep subject and I hope that everybody’s able to benefit.
All right, so to answer this question: this is a question some of you may have thought about in the past. And that is, why is it that when Muslim communities, particularly in the West, they get pushback on certain issues? That why do you do certain things? Or why aren’t you doing certain things? Instead of engaging with it, in some ways we retreat to our comfort zone.
There are two answers to this. Do you guys understand what the question is? Everybody with me? Anybody not with me so far? You can raise your hand. Yes? No? Okay. I’ll buy a notepad for you if you want. I’ll buy a second one. Two fans work better than one. Yes? Sorry, yeah.
So the question is this: when we look at some of the questions that often face the Muslim community—whether it’s evolution, whether it’s why do you not accept certain scientific issues, or whether it’s something like the hijab, or whether it’s dress code, or whether it is gender norms—the moment you express a critical voice, oftentimes you’ll find people in the masajid or in our communities, instead of welcoming critique, they tend to have a very negative reaction and they retreat back into this comfort zone where they feel silencing the question tends to be a better response than trying to engage with it.
Is that clear? That’s very often the case in many communities.
And why is that the case? I want to give two answers.
The first one is more of a sympathetic answer. I think it’s important for us not to be so harsh on ourselves and our communities because in a post-colonial world, you have to understand this inferiority complex.
Dr. Sherman Jackson talks about this in one of his papers, that we have this double consciousness that we often struggle with. Imagine you’re an immigrant who comes from a different community—whether it’s Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, India—and you come to the West in the 90s, and you have this reality, you have this existence, and now you’re trying to raise a family in Dallas, Texas, or in Detroit, Michigan, or in Queens, New York.
And you’re beginning to realize, whether you’re a scholar or a layman, that we’re not equipped to really answer these questions. And you don’t want to look weak. So when somebody’s pushing back, the natural response is, let’s shut down the question—not because we’re scared, it’s just that given our new post-colonial reality, we may just not have the answers.
And it will take a new generation of people to grow up in this society who kind of learn both sciences and both worlds and are able to provide a more coherent answer.
So the first thing I would say is I don’t want to be so harsh on our uncles and aunts and our imams and community leaders because trying to tackle these very serious existential questions is not easy.
Imagine coming to your local imam and telling them, “Hey, can you explain Islam’s stance on sexuality?” And he’s like, “I don’t even know what that word means. Don’t say that word in the masjid, it’s haram,” because for them this is like a completely different universe that they’re trying to explore.
The second reason is what you call the floodgate argument. That if you try to probe a question even a little bit, it’s like you give a finger, they’re gonna grab the hand.
It’s that if I start entertaining these questions, there’s this fear that this army of liberal, atheist, agnostics will come and take over our masajid—which is completely unfounded—but that generally tends to be, and sometimes for good reason, you’ll see that certain spaces are co-opted by people with certain agendas.
So now to answer your question, I feel it’s the responsibility of this generation—you and I who were born and raised over here—we understand what it means to be American, we understand what it means to be part of the West, we understand Islamic history, we understand Western history, we understand the questions of morality while we have a firmly rooted commitment to Islam, and particularly the scholars amongst us, to really tackle the bull and take it by its horns.
Anzar Lateef
Exactly.
I 100% agree, Mufti Saab.
That’s so enlightening.
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
By the way, I’m sorry if I’m giving very long-winded answers. If I have a two-minute timer, please just put a timer over there. I’m sorry. I know we haven’t even gotten to the first prompt and I’m yapping away. I apologize for that.
00:44:57 Prompt #1 Abandoning Engagement with Islam
Anzar Lateef
No, no, we're on schedule.
Okay.
But what you said about the post-colonial anxieties and this fear of breaking away—because of this, I think that we've sought these rigid definitions of Islam where we've basically turned not just the core, but a lot of these prayerful matters into unquestionable tenets of the faith.
And to question even something like the height of Adam, or whether the Prophet really said it, it’s like, what are you doing? You're destroying the whole tradition.
Another example from your book, in one of the footnotes, you mentioned Shah Waliullah’s opinion on the splitting of the moon.
Now, Shah Waliullah—whom you mentioned earlier today—is one of the greatest scholars of Islamic history. The majority of the Muslim world owes their conception of Islam to him. I think South Asia makes up a huge chunk, as well as South Africa and many other areas in the Muslim world.
But he didn’t believe that the splitting of the moon story was authentic. And if you were to mention that to somebody today, they’d call you a heretic. Like if I say that, I’m called a heretic. It’s like, oh, he didn’t believe the moon split, and he interpreted the Quran accordingly—what are you using?
But because of this fear, this post-colonial anxiety, people have resorted to this comfortable dogmatic approach where we don’t question anything. We just listen and go on.
And I believe your work stands as an antidote to this phenomenon of dogmatic approaches. By engaging with hadith critically, you demonstrate that Islam is not a stagnant repetition of inherited knowledge, but a living tradition that invites inquiry and engagement.
Islam is not about passive acceptance but about an active and thoughtful relationship between humanity and the divine.
And with that, I would like to go to prompt one.
So Prompt One: Do you agree that we’ve abandoned engagement with Islam for a dogmatic understanding of it? If so, what are some consequences of resorting to a dogmatic understanding?
Dogmatic meaning when you don’t question and you just listen and repeat.
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Let me simplify that for you in second grader’s terms, since I’m from second grade.
Basically, the question, the prompt is:
Do you feel in your personal life and in your communal life as a Muslim—either individually, or going to your masajid, or speaking to your families—that we’ve adopted this approach of blindly following everything we’ve inherited without questioning it? Whether it’s the way we pray, our history, our fiqh, our aqidah—do we find ourselves just accepting things without questioning?
Is that the case? Or do you think we’re more on the other side, that we’re too critical?
If either, the question is: what are some consequences of resorting to a dogmatic understanding?
In whatever capacity—whether it’s family ties or family-related matters, like “I can’t imagine my son or daughter not becoming a doctor or not taking a degree”—that dogmatic approach, particularly to Islam, have you witnessed it in your life? If so, what do you feel are some of the negative ramifications of that?
It’s like silent writing for five minutes, and then discussion after.
You see, that’s a trick. You can’t write if you don’t have a notepad. And when you come here, they tell you no notepads are allowed in this event.
So you get the final conclusion, right?
00:48:20 Prompt #1 Discussion
Mustafa Syed
Okay, who wants to answer? All right, there we go.
Attendee #1
As-salamu alaykum, guys. So my answer, what is it? So the question is pretty much asking, do we take everything at face value or are we just questioning everything? I feel as though we've reached a point where both is happening simultaneously.
So to elaborate on that a little bit, we've reached a point where we've accepted everything at face value and we blindly just question everything. If somebody says, oh, it's from an authentic hadith, they show us the hadith, they say, all right, it's from a hadith. So if the hadith says so, we go with it.
But on the flip side of it, we've also reached a point where if something goes against the hadith or if something is like deliberately haram somebody says okay show me proof. They will question you, they will counter you, they will like they will question you to no ends and no avails.
So I feel as though we've reached a point where both is happening simultaneously and a line is hard to be drawn because where do we draw the line on that? Where is the balance between both sides of that spectrum?
Mustafa Syed
Now a sister. All right, I see a hand in the back.
Attendee #2
So I kind of took the question a little bit differently. Like I kind of said, when I first started learning about Islam, there was so much to learn. And so there was just so much information that I was trying to absorb.
Because I wanted to learn things so quickly, I kind of just took things as they were—not really questioning it. So I guess when you’re not being more intentional with your learning, you can come into like a dogmatic understanding, like just listening to everyone telling you what to believe.
If you’re not being like—what am I trying to say—if you’re not careful, it’s very easy to fall into that. Or just like a more unanimous example is like when your family is telling you to do something, and you’re questioning why you’re supposed to be doing that thing, and they feel as respecting that you shouldn’t be questioning them.
But it’s just like you’re just curious to know, like, to understand what it actually is. So yeah.
Jazakallah khair.
00:59:46 Prompt #1 Discussion
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Mashallah, both very profound observations. Hopefully you can keep the timer in front of me in case I go on for too long.
To the first point, I think that is a very good answer to the prompt because ultimately there's no such thing as one reality. Everyone's reality is different. If you grow up in a certain family, perhaps in that family, everything is being questioned.
If I'm going to college, if I'm going to university, if I grow up around people of a particular background or mindset, we may be hyper skeptical. And in many circles, that tends to be the problem where anytime something comes our way, it's fake news or like, I don't trust it, I'm going to question it until I satisfy this insatiable desire to get to the bottom of things.
So I think that is the correct answer, in my opinion, that the prompt is, do you agree we've abandoned engagement with Islam for a dogmatic understanding of it? I think the answer is, who is we? Who are we?
Because certain families, even the most basic things cannot be accepted. I remember I had just finished studying and I was in my local masjid in New York and there was somebody who followed the Maliki fiqh. And I'm sitting down talking to him about the Maliki way of praying salah where you call it sadal, where you let the hands on the side as opposed to folding it.
And this one Imam, he passes by and he says, tell this person to stop asking and talking about too many things, asking too many questions and talking about too many things. And in my mind, I realized like this is such a legitimate question and engagement that we're having.
That person's critique is coming from a place of pure ignorance. But on the other hand, I remember going to certain events. I remember I was once invited to this missed event near Columbia University. They rented out a hall. And I had these people coming and asking me such fundamental questions about Islam, which was fine.
But when I gave a follow-up answer, they start questioning the answer. And then when I gave an answer to that, I realized that there's something more serious that's at play over here. They're not looking for answers. They're suffering from this hyper skepticism, which honestly can never be satiated.
And have we abandoned, you know, engagement with Islam? For some of us, we're way too critical. But in many other circles, we just follow whatever comes our way. So if our parents are telling us to do certain things, when somebody comes to us with something slightly different, we feel like we're drowning, we start to panic, we're not sure what to do, where we should actually try to engage.
But then you raise something very important, which I think is at the heart of this. And that is... where's the line? Like, where's the line between accepting things at face value and being critical?
Because on the one hand, mashallah, the sister brought up a very important point. And that is, if we somehow get too comfortable, we may just blindly accept everything. But if we want to be critical, there has to be some qualification.
So Allah tells us in the Quran, فَاسْأَلُوا أَهْلَ الذِّكْرِ إِن كُنْتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ — The general default of people who are unqualified is we need to seek out scholarship.
So if somebody comes to me and says, the fiqh has to be in a particular way. Your theology has to be in a particular way. Islamic history is such and such. I should be critical in the way I engage with it. But I have to be critical based on knowledge that I either know or I ask somebody who's knowledgeable or I refer back to somebody who's knowledgeable.
If I don't do that, honestly being dogmatic may be more helpful than me exploring areas without qualification and getting lost.
In fact, one of the scholars you would say, what is the biggest calamity to befall the Ummah? He says, half a physician, half a scholar, and half a grammarian. Because one of them destroyed your tongue, the other destroyed your body, and the last one is the worst of all of them, he destroyed your deen.
So having qualification is that.
So there's two or three tiers.
Tier one, where I'm too lazy to do research on the topic, it's better for me to just stay quiet and just refer back to scholarship.
Number two, I do research. It's enough to pick between opinions, but not hold an opinion. In that case, I can kind of choose between, okay, this fiqhi opinion or this theological position.
And the highest here is, I've done the craft and the work, and I'm willing to go down the need to study and give a proper answer.
I think I'm like five minutes over for that. Anyways, I hope that provides some commentary.
00:56:00 Dogma in Religion
Anzar Lateef
All right. So speaking of dogmatic approaches, the first mention in your book of dogma, of dogmatic approaches, has really nothing to do with how we approach Islam, actually.
In your book, you describe the worldview that holds science as the ultimate arbiter of defining reality as dogmatic scientism.
This clearly shows that dogma is not limited to what we traditionally call religion.
Why did you feel the need to make this point?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
It's so important for us to not stereotype religious folk, right? We often look at the stereotypical uncle in the masjid or the aunt in the masjid who has nothing to do but rabble and yell at people.
Well, maybe there's some truth to that, right? Like, I'm not gonna deny that reality. But dogmatism, what happens is, in our minds, when we think about critical thinking, when we think about intellectuals, you think about Richard Dawkins, you think about scientists, you think about your teacher, your instructor, your professor of philosophy.
These are the people who come to our mind. But just because people can put on a veneer of intellectual thinking, it does not mean that they'll fall into dogmatism themselves, right?
I have a friend who currently just passed his PhD. He got his PhD in biomolecular science. And he was telling me how enshrined evolution is in the academy that even the most critical thinking intellectuals of his university, when he tries to push back on it, you can see how upset they are, as though you're burning down their church, as though you're critiquing their religion.
So the same people who are crying about religious dogmatism fall into it themselves. Ultimately, Islam is trying to promote a level of healthy critical thinking which allows us to find the balance between, on the one hand, exploring the unknown but doing so with qualification.
00:58:10 Secular vs. Religious
Anzar Lateef
So basically, you're saying that these dogmatic attitudes people have where they take these worldly claims as axiomatic, as something so obvious that there's no point in questioning or proving it.
It's no different from what other people call traditional, like what is traditionally called religious dogma, right?
So then is there really any difference between, so to speak, "secular" and "religious" if the dogmatic approaches are the same?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
So this is an important question. Do we have something known as religious and secular? These terms, religious and secular, are born out of a very particular religious experience among Catholics and the Protestant revolution. The term secular and the term religion are very weird terms that it's very hard to speak about.
Islamically, we have what is known as the deen and dunyawi binary, where there are certain things that are religious, like the Quran, the Hadith, the way you pray, giving charity, respect to your parents. And then there are certain things that are considered disworldly.
For instance, what you decide to wear, what you decide to eat for breakfast, do you want to go to the gym, not go to the gym. These are certain decisions that aren't really impacted by religion.
There's two parts to this. First of all, what's the question? The question is, when we talk about blindly following, dogmatism, is this something specific to religion? Absolutely not.
You can be a dogmatic vegan for all that I care, right? Like, you're so dogmatic about it that, you know what, this is my way of life. Anybody who doesn't follow it, I'm going to critique them. You can be a dogmatic gym rat that if somebody decides not to, I don't know, do bench presses, he's a loser. Or if you're not doing cardio in a particular way, you're wasting your life. You can be a dogmatic artist or painter.
Dogmatism is a human problem where we decide that we like something, we pursue something, and everything else is either problematic or unacceptable.
Now, is there a binary between religious and the secular? Islamically, these terms are loaded, but I would say for sure you have three tiers.
You have what is considered disworldly — like I said, what you dress like, what you eat, what your dietary decisions are. Islam isn't going to force you to have falafel for breakfast or have za'atar as a side. Islam isn't concerned too much with this.
The other is your prayer, your zakah, your dua, your reading of the Quran. That's religious.
But then you have this middle tier, which is kind of, it can be religious if you have the right intention. That I'm going to sleep at night. Islam doesn't care if you're going to sleep at 8 o'clock or you're going to sleep at 10 o'clock. But if I decide to go to sleep early so that I can wake up for fajr.
Islam doesn't care if you decide to go to the gym or not. But if I want to get healthy so I can spend more time with my family, so that I can pray better, so that I can be more connected with my religious obligations, what was once considered quote-unquote secular dunyawi now picks up a level of religiosity on a secondary level.
01:01:27
Anzar Lateef
So in other words, this so-called religion versus secular binary doesn't really impact us. And it's a very Catholic idea of the world, right? This whole separation into religious versus secular, sacred or profane.
In your book, you combined the study of hadith, which is quote-unquote religious, with biology and anthropology, which are quote-unquote secular, to have a more holistic understanding of conceptualizing Islam.
With that, as Wali recited in the beginning, there is the poem from Iqbal, that last line in Payam-e-Mashik.
Now, please forgive my pronunciations, Wali. I am Desi.
Iqbal was really into German philosophy, and he was really into Nietzsche and all of them. So people were asking him, like, where in the Sharia is this? Where in Islam is this? Why are you into this? Why are you studying all this?
And he was like, every mulk, every dominion, every field — every mulk is a mulk of ours because it's a mulk of the God of ours.
And like you said, anything that is dunyawi, from the food you eat, from the clothes you wear, from everything, it has a potential to be dini, like with the intentionality and everything, right?
So can you please give some impact on that?
Oh, and there's another quote by Akbar as well: "All that is secular, therefore, is sacred in the roots of its being. There is no such thing as a profane world. All is holy ground."
As a prophet so beautifully puts it, the whole of this earth is a mosque.
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
By the way, Holy Ground is the name of the flyer. I was telling them, like, they said, mashallah, this thing was RSVP’d very quickly. I said, because it looks like I just dropped a mixtape based on the flyer. If you look at the flyer, it’s such a dark, like, “I’m coming for your money,” right? But mashallah, I like the aesthetics of it. I don’t know who the designer is, so no offense to that guy, but I really like it.
Anyway, before we get to the prompt, I know that’s going to be the next thing, I do want to drive this point home.
In Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, there is this separation of religion and secular. It’s actually rooted in the biblical concept of the spirit and the flesh. There’s this idea of the spirit, and then there’s this idea of the flesh. You know, “give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, give unto God what belongs to God,” this complete separation.
But as Muslims, we do not believe in a mutually exclusive relationship, meaning that politics is purely this world, secular, with no religious connotation. The Quran and Hadith is purely this religious experience that has no worldly connection.
The best evidence of this distinction between secular and religious being a product of this Catholic experience is the concept of monasticism. You have these people who completely disassociate from the world and live in caves because there’s a separation between the spirit and the flesh.
As Muslims, the Prophet ﷺ actually said to a person who came to meet Aisha and said, “Explain to me the ibadah of the Prophet.” Aisha’s response was, “You know, this is his day-to-day experience.” They responded by saying, “What? That’s all the Prophet does?” The word that was used is يَتَقِلُّونَ — they felt as though it was insignificant.
When the Prophet ﷺ found out about this, what he did was he went onto the pulpit and said, إِنِّي أَتْقَاكُمْ وَأَخْشَاكُمْ لِلَّهِ — “Don’t think you understand religion better than me.”
One person found out that the Prophet got married and said, “I’m going to live a life of celibacy.” Another person found out that the Prophet slept that night and said, “I’m going to spend the entire night doing ibadah.” Another person found out that the Prophet spent time with his family, and this person said, “I’m going to spend all of my time and my wealth in the path of Allah.”
The Prophet ﷺ grounded them in this reality that there’s no distinction between the religious and the secular. Rather, there are three tiers.
You have the hukuq and the rights that you owe to the first tier — what you eat, your family, you have to do that. Then you have the religious tier. But there is this bridge that is needed where you put science in conversation with religion. You put your family responsibilities in conversation.
Like, to give you an example, I got one of my students who came to me the other day and said, “Listen, I got two offers. I got an offer from medical school in Brown University or do I go to Florida?” I said, “Look, this is really a mundane choice that’s up to you, but Islam does play a slight role in this,” and that is which of the two will be more conducive for your Islamic livelihood.
If you find yourself going to Florida and getting stuck in the party life, maybe it makes more sense for you to go to Brown where you’ll have better company. So again, we face these questions all the time: Where am I going to college? Who am I going to marry? What am I going to do? What name am I going to give my child?
They do seem like very profane questions, but Islam does play a role in how we go about making these decisions.
I still have 30 seconds, so I beat the clock.
01:06:58 Prompt #2: Interacting with Islam
Anzar Lateef
Exactly. And that’s exactly right. This religion versus secular binary has impacted us as Muslims because we use this word “religion” to describe Islam. We say, “What is Islam? Oh, it’s a religion.” And subconsciously, we ascribe this Western definition of religion onto Islam, which impacts how we...
So the second prompt is: How has the religious versus secular mindset impacted the way you view and interact with the world and Islam itself? How has your separation of things as either religious or secular, either sacred or profane, impacted the way you interact with the world and view Islam and interact with everything?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Let me just elaborate on the question very quickly.
One of the struggles that we often have as young professionals in the West is this compartmentalizing of Islam where I'm going to college, I'm going to school, and my Muslim identity goes into my backpack.
Now, how has that distinction between Abdullah or Zainab in school or Abdullah and Zainab in work versus Abdullah and Zainab in the masjid or at home impacted the way you interact?
And maybe you don't experience that compartmentalization. Maybe that's not your experience. You can write on that as well.
So, five minutes of silent writing time.
Mustafa Syed
All right, who wants to go first? Okay, I see one person in the back.
Attendee #3
For me, I grew up as a Christian.
And so I think this question of the religious versus secular mindset was really… profound in a way.
Growing up Christian, there was too much freedom. You could do whatever you wanted as long as you attended your Sunday service.
And in that, I think we naturally as humans want to, with too much freedom, do everything. And we’ll do everything.
I think that reverting to Islam brought me structure.
So in that religious versus secular question, I was wanting that structure so that I know there are things that I can’t do.
I mean, being a visible Muslim, I’m not really… There are places you really shouldn’t be.
Like, if you’re probably in a club, they’re going to be like, “What is this girl doing? Like, there’s alcohol. I thought she couldn’t drink,” you know?
Yeah, that’s my perspective on it.
I think in that way, we should be appreciative that there are things that we can’t do. We should want to represent Islam in the best possible way.
But that’s just my perspective as a revert.
Yeah. Inshallah.
Mustafa Syed
All right, now one of the brothers
Attendee #4
All right, now one of the brothers.
My two cents on the topic is basically I noticed that when it comes to balancing religion versus secular, I and a lot of us tend to get kind of lost in the style, so to speak.
Like, we're always focused on—for those of us who have jobs—we're like, use our pictures, buy the latest car, buy cool clothes, stuff like that.
And I've learned not too long ago to just have a balance in religion versus secular by creating systems and reminders.
Basically, one thing I like to do is I like to listen to nasheeds and listen to different Islamic scholars online.
And then it'll kind of just... so every time I get too distracted by the dunya, I'll just do those things and use them as reminders to focus more on going to Jannah, the deen, things like that.
And then it creates more balance.
And, like, I kind of just had a stronger deen, basically.
Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:02 Prompt #2 Discussion
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
I just wanted to comment on the sister's point first that you know sometimes there's a famous Arabic proverb that says sometimes you begin to appreciate a thing by looking at its opposite. So somebody who grew up in a very Christian upbringing where there is this separation between the spirit and the flesh, that physically you can do anything because Jesus died for your sins as long as you show up at church on Sundays the rest is free to go.
We don't realize how negatively that can impact discipline and structure in your life.
Whereas from an Islamic perspective, we have a somewhat more holistic approach to our faith. That Islam can kind of guide us even the way we sleep—that I'll sleep on the right side—it will guide us on the way we enter the bathroom, our cleanliness, our hygiene. For many of us who live in a very godless and unstructured world, it provides us with so much clarity.
You know, like I remember once I was coming back from South Africa and I was sitting next to this elderly South African lady. She just saw the way I was dressed, so she assumed I was a Muslim and she started talking to me about politics, Islam, justice. I quoted this one statement of the Prophet regarding justice, how that if you find somebody being oppressed or oppressing you, stop both of them. It's a decently sized hadith.
After I mentioned it, she started tearing up and she said that, you know, that's the most touching thing I've heard regarding religion.
And I said that, you know, one of the reasons for this is our Prophet not only does he teach us how to pray, he also laughed with his companions. He hung out with them. He had fun. He had a good time with them. He showed them career choices. He showed them what it means to be a father, a mother, a child.
And as Muslims, we learn not to compartmentalize when we have that in mind.
01:13:02 Non-Beneficial Knowledge
Anzar Lateef
So one way that I've actually seen this manifest around people around me is instead of religious versus secular, people instead replace it with beneficial versus non-beneficial. Like, there's like, oh, beneficial knowledge, and then there's not beneficial knowledge, right?
But in your book itself, your book itself is an example of how we Muslims can find deen-y benefits in all Duniawi topics. Like, your citations mention, of course, the various scientists, various biologists and archaeologists, but you also mention atheist philosophers, and you mention like Daniel Dennett and stuff, and then you also mention various Muslim scholars and non-Muslims.
And one of the citations is also your three-year-old daughter. You credit her with one of the... She's in the category of scholars. Okay, okay. Scholars include... My three-year-old scholarly daughter.
So in this, how do you address this whole concept of non-beneficial knowledge?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
There is this discussion. What's the timer? Okay, just let me know. It's becoming a nice game. I'm like trying to make sure I beat the clock.
So this question Islamically, there's a dua. Allahumma inni asaluka ilman naafi'a. I ask you for beneficial knowledge and I seek your protection from knowledge that is not beneficial. And the scholars explain that beneficial knowledge can be that which is beneficial for your akhirah or it's good for your dunya as well. Unbeneficial, harmful knowledge is that knowledge that is harmful for your world as well as your akhirah.
Like so for instance, this is a random point, but I was speaking to my cousin the other day, just like three or four days ago. I was in New York and my relatives were over there. I was speaking to my cousin and he's like, I want to move to Dallas. And I said, oh, mashallah, you know, I noticed that there's this huge hijrah happening for Muslim communities. And I said, okay, where are you going to move to? Near Epic or near ICI or near Valley Ranch? And he's like, listen, I never heard of those terms before. I said alright then why are you moving to Dallas he says and I'm trying to quote him more particularly he said that the fortnight servers are now in Dallas. Any fortnight guys over here anybody okay good mashallah it looks like we have a lot of uh over here anyways so he told me that that because the servers have moved today I said listen I don't understand anything you're saying but if you're gonna do you're gonna do a hijrah to Dallas my suggestion is just tweak your intentions a little bit, right?
Supposedly you'll make a lot of money doing this. In my textbook, that is the definition of harmful knowledge, right? Where you know everything about Fortnite and there's nothing beneficial over there. I'm not saying it's haram. That's up to you and your creator and your personal life if you want to waste your time watching a bunch of costumed people running around beating each other up. You can tell what I think about it, but that's between you and your creator. But that's what we call unbeneficial knowledge. Knowledge that's not too beneficial.
However, Islamically, as we quoted Iqbal earlier on, anything, Nabi SAW says, wisdom is the lost knowledge of the believer. Wherever you find it, you take it. If you're able to make something more purposeful, meaningful for your religious growth, then something as basic as pottery, something as basic as painting can be your expression of your faith.
You know, subhanAllah, I know people who are into spoken word. Like that was their strength. Like the Shu'ara, Hassan ibn Thabit, he was a Sha'ir. But then when he accepted Islam, he used his poetry to praise the Prophet to defend Islam. So that's an example of someone taking something that's very profane and mundane such as poetry and then using it for Islam.
I have friends who are into spoken word. You'll see a lot of these rappers who accept Islam, a lot of them then they take their talents are musicians. They take their talents and they use it towards an Islamic cause. Like Yusuf Islam is an example, right? Where he was a famous musician and then he's using that towards an Islamic cause.
So to answer the question — Am I good on time? That's saying, wait a second. That was a minute and 30 seconds. I saw you bring that down to eight seconds, all right? Listen, you cannot change the clock. I was pacing myself. There was a minute and 30. This way I look back, there's eight seconds left. Listen, I'll give the mic freely, man. Here, take the mic back. I'm joking, I'm joking, it's fine, it's fine. Hopefully I answered whatever question was posed.
01:17:34 Expression of Islam
Anzar Lateef
Oh, no, you did, mashallah.
So regarding that, regarding that, the way I personally see it is like Islam has an individual aspect and a collective aspect. There's the individual Islam as truth and then there's the collective Islam as civilization.
Like this individual Islam as truth is your own personal journey to getting close to Allah and achieving the best akhirah. Like I can, yes, I can take a teacher. Yes, I can read your book. Yes, I can take a guide. But in the end, it's my individual choice to accept it.
But then there's the collective Islam. There's the Islamic civilization where it's the anthropological, sociological, psychological phenomena of preserving and propagating the deen in order to maximize reverence for Allah and His Prophet.
It involves art, ethics, aesthetics, science, philosophy, da'wah, community building, culture production, etc. Anything that involves more than one person.
And you were mentioning pottery. You were mentioning painting. You were mentioning the musicians. You were mentioning all of these, right?
How can we ensure that our passions, from art to cooking, from engineering to gardening, from fashion to the natural sciences, whatever our passions may be...
Like, for example... Raheem is recording. His passion is videography. And is him not spreading an expression of Islam?
Or you were talking about the flyer. Neba designed those flyers, right? And inviting people to come. You shouldn't have said that name. I apologize a hundred times in advance.
Isn't this artwork not an expression of Islam?
So how can we ensure that whatever our passions may be, how can we ensure that they're expressions of Islam?
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Everyone understand the question? All right.
How do we ensure that everything that we do, from painting to pottery to trolling people on YouTube and TikTok or like whatever it is that you get a kick out of, Fortnite or whatnot, how do we make our so-called mundane habits something more religious and Islamic?
First of all, I want to be very clear over here, and I don't want anyone to misunderstand me when I say this. Islamically, there are things that are primarily dini, primarily faith-based. Reading Quran will always be purely in the category of the religious.
Again, I'm using this in very basic terms. Reading the Quran will always be something that connects you to Allah in ways that doing pottery will never connect you to Allah.
Reading the hadith, praying salah, crying to Allah, this category of the dini is something that is inseparable to our understanding and commitment to Islam.
That said, because of a hadith like actions are based on intention, we have this potential of taking the most mundane things and infusing within it a more Islamic concept.
Like for instance, I gave you the example, videography for instance. Instead of going around and I don't know, taking pictures of pigeons flying in there, which must be really cool, or the architecture, the non-existing architecture of Dallas or like whatever it is, you're going around and doing that.
Like that's not haram, but it's not like that's your ticket to Jannah either. But using your time for something that's more Islamic, something that can draw people.
Like for instance, I have friends who travel a lot. But they made this point that whether I'm going to Greece, whether I'm going to Turkey, whether I'm going to Saudi, I'm going to take pictures and then I'm going to post about it and try to find relevant hadith. Try to talk about the creation of Allah.
By bringing that twist into something that is otherwise mundane, now gives it a secondary element of being Islamic. Does that make sense?
So I want to be clear here that if my job in my profession is videography, me going around and taking pictures of Masajid doesn't equate, again, I'm not trying to put you in front of the camera, but like just taking pictures and doing all of that doesn't equate to reading the Quran.
But unlike the secular binary of religious versus secular, it doesn't mean it's bereft of reward as well.
And the key is two things. How do I make my mundane practices something more Islamic?
Intention. Intention is the most important thing.
When I'm going to work in the morning, I can either go to work or I can say I'm going to support my family. Something as simple as that would make me crunching numbers in the most boring job alive around, or counting pills as a pharmacist, or meeting patients as a doctor, when my intention is I'm going to support my family as a caretaker, and that was the responsibility Allah has given me, goes from being something mundane to something rewarding.
When I'm composing poetry, when I am editing videos, when I'm doing things like that, and I try to do something with the intention of drawing people closer to Islam, what is primarily mundane now can take on a flavor of Islam as well.
01:22:38 Prompt #3
Anzar Lateef
JazakAllah khairan.
And that brings us to prompt three.
Every one of you has a passion, right?
And as Mufti Sahab said, there are those rituals and beliefs that are purely Islamic.
But Islam is more than those rituals and beliefs.
Like all these passions, like the videography that Raheem does and all these things, like everything that you can make Islamic, these are all like expressions of Islam, right?
Islam encompasses more than just rituals and beliefs.
What is a passion of yours that can be your own expression of Islam?
01:23:16 Prompt #3 Discussion
Mustafa Syed
Okay, we can have two quick sharing, so who wants to go? About how they can turn their passion into a form of expression.
Attendee #5
As-salamu alaykum. So, Ferrit Sanders' prompt, I connected it to one of the classes I have to take from my major. And it’s about the articulations of what words you pronounce and where it comes from the certain letters. And lately I’ve been connecting that back to the Quran and where the words in Arabic come out from. And instead of looking at it as something I’m just studying, I like to connect it back to the Quran like I said in order for it to be something meaningful and that goes back to that thing you said earlier about the middle tier in Islam about taking something of the dunya aspect and connecting that back to the Islamic meaning of it.
Alhamdulillah.
Mustafa Syed
We’ll do one brother or we can do another sister.
Attendee #6
I had to, I’m Anzar’s mom. So no, I was, my passion, I mean, when I do that, I’m really passionate about it. So I volunteer at work with hijab on. And you know, in my mind, I’m thinking, see all the, because in TSA, I have tough time, right? So now when I’m volunteering, I always keep in mind all these people, you know, who think we carry bombs, you know, now they think that I’m compassionate. I mean, not that I am. I’m representing a community who’s compassionate, who care about, you know, all these people around us, all these white people in order.
Mufti Muntasir Zaman
Both on the tajweed point because I’m mashallah like a tajweed Nazi so I love tajweed — we can talk about that at a separate time — but to the sister slash auntie’s point I think honestly sometimes to infuse a level of Islam in your work could be as simple as wearing a hijab.
As simple as making sure your conversations in your workplace are a little bit more consciously Muslim. Like for instance, I’ll give you an example. Sometimes I have a group of non-Muslim friends, we’ll play basketball for instance, or we’ll go do something. I’m very conscious about making sure that I pray salah in between the game.
Like that is something I’m very particular about even though there’s like two hours left for dhuhr salah I could easily go not interrupt the game go home and pray salah but I make it a point to tell them listen I’m gonna need a five minute break to go and pray — to show to them how and how important Islam is in my life that I’m willing to stop something that I enjoy so that I can go and pray.
And doing this for a few months I’ve seen the impact of something as subtle as praying in the middle of a game had on them that then they started asking me like hey tell me more about Islam and mashallah one of them just accepted Islam recently. So again we don’t even realize the way we can impact people.
In your case, just speaking to people in your job. But for us, just stopping for Salah or mentioning Allah’s name or talking about why we make certain decisions because we follow the Prophet ﷺ as a role model.
Mustafa Syed
JazakAllah khair Mufti Salah.
I think that’s a very beautiful way to end off this very insightful discussion. So if I could first have a round of applause for Mufti Muntasir Zaman.
Alhamdulillah.
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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