How Do We Respond? Part 2 – Shaykh Hamza Yusuf – Sandala Productions

How Do We Respond? Part 1 – Hamza Yusuf

How Do We Respond? Part 2 – Hamza Yusuf

This is the second part of the blog I posted on November 4, 2010, laying out ways in which Muslims can respond to the problem of anti-Islamic sentiments in America, which I wrote about in my earlier blog “When You’re a Statistic” posted on October 17.

4) Seek common ground with conservatives too. As Muslims, we don’t have a political party. We are morally committed to a sound ethical system that demands an uncompromising adherence from us. The principles, ethics, and values that demand our allegiance do not fit neatly into a particular political school of thought. Thus far, too many Muslims have tried to ally mostly with the Left, but in the current dialectic, the Left is unlikely to win the battle for the hearts of Middle America, especially when it comes to accepting Muslims as full-fledged members of the American tapestry. But there are many intelligent and influential people within the philosophical conservative movement, and some of them know what Islam is and some don’t. We need to make strategic alliances with them and recognize that we share a lot of common ground, as we are also concerned about losing moral foundations in an increasingly secularized, and even worse laicized, world that is downright hostile toward public faith. For example, the conservatives are as troubled as Muslims are about the predominance of premarital and extramarital sexuality, the breakdown of the family, and the proliferation of pornography and drugs. On the other hand, the truly progressive Left and not mainstream Tweetle Dee Left to the Tweetle Dum Right, despite its moral ambiguity on many such personal and social issues, has a far better track record of standing firmly against warmongering, arms proliferation, and American aggression in countries where we don’t belong – but there is also a progressive Right that we forget about best embodied in Ron Paul, who is one of the most outspoken critics of warmongering and American foreign wars and misadventures. So in some things, we are more with the Left and in others we are more with the Right, which puts us somewhere in the middle, as we comprise the Middle Nation.