Dr. Abou El Fadl reminds that God expects Muslims to be the bearers of God's words unto humanity, in a constant state of beautification and doing what is beautiful. God loves those who do beautiful deeds. When God gives us this charge, we must take it seriously such that we become as if a lighthouse of morality and ethics onto humanity; the moral pilots of humanity. Further, he reminds us that God endowed human beings with dignity and those humiliate and degrade others through despotism and ugliness, taking dignity away from people, are whose who are cursed by God and every prophet. This is a call to ethics and justice. This must light a fire under Muslims so that what defines them is a conscientious ethical existence.
Muslims cannot ethically pilot humanity unless we learn first to be ferocious, fearless and brave in confronting ugliness and the unethical and unIslamic. He presents the example of the organized killing of a witness to the gang rape of a 7 year old Yemeni boy, an injustice that fired up days of protest in Yemen, but over which American Muslim "leaders" were silent and in some cases, worse. This was an indication of deep moral rupture and failure. God will not bless or aid us or support the unjust. As long as Muslims continue to be cowardly and equivocal towards injustice, God will not be with us but will leave us to our hawa (whims) and our own destruction.
In the second half, he discusses the deep roots of Islamophobia that led to the massacre in New Zealand (may Allah accept the victims as martyrs). He discusses the manifesto of the shooter titled “The Great Replacement,” which is extremely significant for Muslims to study and reflect upon, or else Muslims could confront another Bosnian genocide or Holocaust.
The manifesto was extremely troubling because it was not invented by the terrorist, but was the title of a book by Renaud Camus, published in 2012, and translated to English, which basically warns that Muslims through natural immigration and geographic processes, ie. marriage, birth, etc., will take over Europe; in other words, "the dark ugly Muslim race will take over the beautiful white European race". The book calls for ugly measures to prevent this frightening thing that awaits Europe. Camus did not invent that idea, but in 1973, John Respaul in his book, Comp de Saints came up with the same idea in a mythologized, thinly camouflaged narrative about how Muslim refugees will take over Europe and western civilization through peaceful means, and in a typically fascist and racist way like The Turner Diaries, called upon France to act preemptively. Comp de Saint itself is cited by Swiss Israel ex-military writer, Bat Ye'Or, who wrote the book "Eurabia". Bat Ye’Or, a Jew who identifies as white, warns Europe that the white race must act preemptively to rid itself of the Arab and Muslim danger. All of this to say that this manifesto was not a tract by an insane outlier but rather, was tapping into a deeply anchored, deep rooted genocidal ideology in Europe and the U.S. The works of Camus, Respaul, Bat Ye’Or and others, and the imagery, language, symbolism of all of these works played a key role in constructing the language and project of Islamophobia. This is critical to understand and study. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law came out with Intelligence Report, Spring 2019 - every thinking Muslim must read this report. Everyone who cares about the fate of humanity must read this report. The report documents a sharp rise in Islamophobic anti-Muslim groups since the election of Donald Trump, and a sharp rise in the funding of these groups, and documents the existence of these groups in every state in the U.S. Also documents very alarming phenomena—role that these groups play in the government. Frank Gaffney and Brigette Gabrielle, well known Islamophobes, for example have established ACT, an Islamophobic organization with deep ties to the U.S. government and key members of the Trump Administration including Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. Hate crimes increased 450% in last year alone. Brigitte Gabrielle brags she sees Trump every week and has been given an open door to Trump.
As long as Muslims and Muslim leadership continues to support injustice, God will continue forsaking us. God does not gaze upon the immoral and ugly. Delivered 22 March 2019.