Join us this week on our Unscripted podcast #24 with Babar Ahmad
Watch his first video interview in 3 years since returning back a free man from the United States. “The only man who can probably talk about jihad without concern because everything he has said has been said already in the law courts during his 10 plus years of trials” [paraphrased]
They speak about the London Muslim scene in the 1990s, insecure Muslim men denying their vulnerabilities, his alter ego known as the Singing Dentist, the war in Bosnia, mental health, fake social media scholars and much more.
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Source: www.islam21c.com
3 Comments
Should read ** psychological elements…..
Seriously need to turn off predictive text…!!
Maa’sha’Allah very interesting podcast, it’s nice to see the physiological elements of trauma discussed, we are not machines we are humans with all our vulnerabilities. JazakAllahKhair to all.
At about 32 minutes Dr. Salman Butt makes an interesting point about us Muslims in the UK also having our ‘fair share’ of psychopaths and sociopaths, the numbers possibly being around 30 000 and 120 000 respectively (if western statistics can be applied to Muslim populations). I would also add narcissists to the list and would suggest that they are more of a problem in our Islamic institutions in the UK than they are abroad in conflict zones as they tend to find their way into the management teams of Muslim schools or into mosque committees: leadership positions in which they are extremely exploitative and even unproductive.
Recently, I came across a TEDx talk in which a western lady addressed the growing problem of having such a large percentage of such people (specifically narcissists) in the workplace and how workplaces could deal with them. As Muslims, we know that many of our failing Muslim schools and other institutions like mosques are often due to certain toxic individuals at the top but there is no concerted effort to deal with them or to even address the issue. Instead, we watch our hard earned cash, that was used to purchase buildings to turn into schools, mosques and Islamic centres, go to waste as these institutions fail or are never allowed to reach their full potential.
We have the system of Shura in our religion and the lady’s solution was firstly to ensure that the really pathological and extreme individuals are weeded out but it requires having an awareness that such people actually exist. Only then can we ensure that we work with other productive Muslims to not allow these people to take over our institutions. With the less pathological ones, her solution was more about managing their behaviour rather than rectifying it (the success rate of western psychotherapy to rectify the behaviour is very low) but as Muslims our Imams and Muslim psychologists must work together to help these individuals as for us it’s not simply a case of ensuring that our workplaces are productive but these people have diseases of the heart that are destructive to their families and communities in other ways too as well being detrimental to their own after-life.