Unscripted #19 | Fried Chicken vs Knife Crime | AbdulKarim & Abdul Jaleel

Alhamdulillah that brother Abdul Jaleel, at 26:29, mentioned tackling diseases of the heart such as showing-off and self-amazement, in the youth. It is these diseases that when left unchecked develop into arrogance, self entitlement, envy, lack of empathy and insincerity (or maybe the insincerity comes first?), to such an extent that the individuals end up with not just some negative personality traits but with full on personalty disorders that are difficult to treat and that wreck the lives of friends, family and colleagues. Alhamdulillah, he sees the connection between his youth work and his Islamic knowledge about tarbiyya, diseases of the heart, the soul as well as psychology and spirituality, and Dr. Salman Butt also referred to how these accelerate problems of the ego and nafs. This is the point I tried to make about some of our imams not having the knowledge of psychology issues to resolve conflicts caused by people with personality disorders such as narcissism, sociopathy and psychopathy. I’m sure brother Abdul Jaleel would welcome further knowledge from imams regarding diseases of the heart and in-shaa Allah the imams would benefit from his insights into people’s personality disorders.

At 1:19:00 brother Abdul Karim mentioned how migrant parents might not understand the social landscape that their children have to navigate and how we should help them. Their response is understandable but it’s sad when 2nd generation Muslims born and/or raised in the UK who understand the social landscape and the temptations that their children will face through school, college and university are willing to risk their children’s duniya and aakhira for the status and financial gain that keeping them in these institutions brings.

I know that some Muslims don’t look at this from a personal benefit perspective but feel that there is a benefit to the ummah or the religion by having all of these Muslim professionals, but at what cost? To all those Muslims who were happy for Nadiya Hussain to win the Bake Off and represent Islam, where are you now when our sister is struggling to hold on to her Muslim identity because she took a footstep from the footsteps of Shaytan that many of us cheered and even prayed for? We even have ‘local’ Muslim imams giving fatwas permitting the wearing of uniforms, in certain professions, that mean removing the jilbaab and replacing it with a shirt and trousers. Dr. Salman Butt mentioned the issue of ‘gheerah’ or possessive jealousy over one’s womenfolk but where is the gheerah when we are happy to show off our sisters to prove to the disbelievers that we are good with our women because we have niqaab wearing Muslim scientists or hijaabi Muslim nurses? I thought that one of the characteristics of the ‘right group’ was not ‘fearing the blame of the blamers’ (Qur’an 5:54)? Before, our Muslim men were happy to stand on a stage and acknowledge the efforts of their women who had helped them achieve what they had achieved BEHIND THE SCENES. Now, we fear the blame of the blamers are are resorting to parading our womenfolk in public.

At 32:55 Dr Salman Butt said, “…In that they had something called ‘new speak’ where the new vocabulary of that time is so reduced that the idea is you know if you don’t have certain words in your vocabulary you can’t think or do those things…” A bit like the word ‘disbeliever’ (kaafir) being phased out and replaced by the word ‘non-Muslim’ (ghayr Muslim)?