Premiered Nov 2, 2020, Interview with Imam Yasir Qadhi on ‘The Thinking Muslim’ Podcast: Difficult Questions About the Situation in France.
Question
But I think it would be remiss of me not to mention the events currently unfolding in Niece. Yet again, France is subject to another set of murders. Initially, reports suggest that Muslims may be involved. You said that after the killing of Samuel Paty, that Muslims should stop condemning. Yet after today’s attack you did condemn these crimes. But doesn’t that condemnation imply some level of culpability on behalf of the Muslim community? Can you explain your thinking behind this, Sheikh?
Yasir Qadhi: To be precise it wasn’t that I said we should stop condemning unconditionally. I was contextualizing and saying that we need to understand where that anger is stemming from. And that the onslaught of terror that France & Europe – and I did, even in the hutba (sermon). I explicitly said that what that individual did was wrong. So we need to be a little bit more careful because we have so many different demographics that we’re dealing with. It’s well nigh impossible to say something that’s not going to offend one demographic. Which means we need to forget about offending or not, and we need to think a little bit more to speaking the truth, speaking the reality. So we are now caught between a rock and a hard place. We have, on the one side, our own Muslim community that has been burnt and scarred. That Our Prophet PBUH has been ridiculed and threatened… They have just been completely rinsed out for the last decade and a half. Always having to condemn, always having to be on the defensive, and they are simply tired. They really are tired and they have every right to be tired. For how long are we going to be expected to, as you said, condemn or apologize on behalf of somebody that has nothing to do with us? The narrative of radical Islam, the narrative of Muslims and Islam has an inherent problem with violence. And even the more broad-minded amongst them, even the more tolerant amongst them, are saying “okay, the majority of Muslims are not terrorists but the majority of terrorists are Muslims”. They have bought that narrative. And we need to work to challenge that narrative of the mainstream. We need to understand their narrative and then work to change it. The way that’s going to happen is by getting out of our safety zone and bubble from within our own community and to acknowledge that, you know what, they have been miss-fed a series of lies and narratives that is incorrect. In order to battle that we are going to have to say things that – I don’t like to apologize for what happened. I don’t. It’s not my business to do that.
Shaykh Yasir Qadhi is a Pakistani-American Islamic scholar, theologian and preacher. Since 2001, he has served as Dean of Academic Affairs at the Al-Maghrib Institute, an international Islamic educational institution with a center in Houston, Texas. He also taught in the Religious Studies department at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently the resident scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center in Plano, Texas.
Qadhi has written numerous books and lectured widely on Islam and contemporary Muslim issues. A 2011 The New York Times Magazine essay by Andea Elliott described Qadhi as “one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam. Qadhi was previously affiliated with the Salafi movement but has since left the movement and now identifies as a Sunni.
Yasir Qadhi Picture: screengrab from YouTube Yasir Qadhi