Transcripts For CSPAN2 Omar Saif Ghobash Discusses Letters T

CSPAN2 Omar Saif Ghobash Discusses Letters To A Young Muslim February 25, 2017

The only other excuse is if youre a homicide or narcotics detective. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. Im one of the coowners of politics and prose, my husband is right there. We hope that by the end this event you will not be stuck here in a snowstorm. We are pretty confident you will get out okay but we are delighted to have all of you here. Before we get started, i think, many of you have been to events here. Just a few housekeeping reminders, if you have a noisemaking device and can silence it now, we would be grateful for that. The way this will work is our guest will be in conversation before a bit and then theyll be happy to take questions from the audience. We do have microphone set up right here. We really would love it if you make it to the mic so we can record the questions and that would be very, very helpful. At the end of the event there will be a signing at this table and kind enough and will expedite the signing and expedite you being able to get through and out of here and will also make our staff very happy. At the end of a long day so we appreciate that. This is the first week of events for 2017, we have an incredible calendar coming up, we really urge you to look at our website and also if you would like a hard copy of our january calendar its up at the information desk and also in the front of the store. Lots of really good stuff coming up and one of the things we are most excited about is that we are launching, i think, some of you may know if you read our news letter and emails, we are launching a series of teachings this month that we expect to be ongoing through the winter ranging across a variety of subjects really to try to educate and inform people about some of the challenges our country is facing, some of the issues that are going to be on the forefront in the next potentially years and hopefully also if you have an interest in a particular issue or a cause to give you some ideas and guidance as to what you can do as an individual or as part of a group to help make progress on those particular issues. This sunday is our kick off at 2 30, 2 30, i think, its going to to be on Civil Liberties and we have incredible panel coming. David called the executive director. Mike walledman who was the speech writer for bill clinton is now head of center in law school and offered many books about Voting Rights an constitution and todd cox from the naacp. We are excited about having those guys, phenomenal experts and hopefully seeing many of you and more on sunday afternoon. We will also be doing on womens rights at january 20th at 4 00 p. M. , you can look at the website for more details on that and we will have more upcoming things. Lastly, we do have a display of books recommended for those teachings, if youre interested its up at the front of the store. Im done, with that part, now for what youre actually here for. I cant say what an honor and delight today host embassador omar tonight here at politics and prose. I think some of you know, hes the united emirates embassador to russia and assumed the position in the ripe old age of 37. But i was thinking about this today going through certain learning more about him. To think of him solely as a diplomat and even one in such important post is to understate his wideranging interests and good works in addition to representing this country overseas hes also now an author, that much, i think, you already know because hes going to be speaking tonight about his new book, letters to a young muslim and i will get back to his books in a second, first a brief mention of some of the other experiences and projects. Embassador earned advanced degree in math at the university of london and went onto found several legal and financial counties and opened art gallery and project focusing on the promotion of arab literature. He was the driving force that led to to the creation of Campus University in abu dhabi. He spent five years in nepal and switzerland as a climber of very tall peaks, all of this experiences including fluency in languages and most Important Role as father are at work in letters to a young muslim. Book is a election written to his own children, efforts to show them and i quote how to be faithful with islam and deepest values and as well chart their way in complex world. You note that the book is written for your children and also with young muslims, young men and young women in mind and i might suggest if you dont mind that this book also ought to be required reading for nonmuslims too. Any one who reads it will gain tremendously from your view that people from all backgrounds have again to borrow your words, a duty to think in question and engage constructively with the world, those are wise words from wise man. I think some of you know marcus from his various roles here in dc and he was executive editor and now runs a small Investment Company on media technology, so marcus, thank you so much. We are delighted to have you both and you have the floor, thanks for coming. Thank you. [applause] and thank you all for being here tonight on our cold washington night. I dont know if you know this, normally in washington if you get dusting of snow they shut the schools and shut the government, we avoided disaster. Its a great honor to be here with omar for the reasons said, hes a deeply thoughtful man who is courageous in his thinking and by that i mean we live in a time for which you all know politics are deeply polarized, people get arrested, jailed and worse for thinking thought that is dont converge with the mainstream and omar in this stands out for willingness to take nuance and positions of issues in our time. One of the things that lisa didnt mention which, i think, is highly relevant in understanding omars world view is that he was born very much into the early days of the world that we are living in today and born in 1971 which was the year that his country the United Arab Emirates was founded and he has grown up as the region modernized in that region. His father who was the foreign minister of the uae was assassinated in 1977 when he was 6 and i think that experience as much as anything if they read this book clearly informs his awareness of the intolerance and violence of islamic radicalism and his personal exploration following his fathers death as arab, muslim and father to two young sons shape it is narrative in this book. What i thought i would do is maybe just start off by talking about how you came to write this book, what motivated you and what youre trying to establish with it because we were just talking before you came out here about how this is not a theological treatise, much more than that. For the larger world, lisa was talking, those who are not muslim, its important to bringing understanding to an area of the world and to religion thats become so central to our political experience. Thank you very much. Its a great honor to be here. I told the owners before speak into the mic. I shall. [laughter] thank you very much. You didnt hear any of that. I will start again. This is my favorite bookstore in dc and, i think, its one of the last standing bookstores in the world . Yeah. [laughter] a great honor to be here tonight. There were a couple of things that need to be clarified. Im not putting forward a theological position and i was asked by some key figures in the middle east whether i had checked with religious scholars on the appropriateness of what im saying and i respond to it by saying im actually writing in spite of them and to take a position visavis the religious scholar and im not asking for religious scholars to tell me im on the right track or not. Im not talking directly about dock dock doctrine or prescriptions. Im advising my two sons to think about taking a particular position of the wall before they begin to think about the particularly religion they belong to. Thats a position that i havent really heard being discussed but the idea came out of the realization that they seemed to have solved the problems and they know to make the case, they will pick sunni than islam. What they tried to do is take a step back and say, being a muslim in todays world where we have so much information about competing, we are all in the same position, why would i stand up and say im a su in, ni as opposed to being a shiite. I was born into a sunni family and brought up as a su in, ni sunni family. Peaceful spiritual side of islam all the way to violent, aggressive isis which i also believe is a certain kind of expression of islam. Inappropriate one and illegitimate one but nevertheless it comes from the source documents. The only way to come up with an understanding to be a muslim today is to come back to something fundamental and say our humanity is what informs our reading and if you are finding for some strange reason that all of a sudden the quarante leads you to slave, rob, kill, then theres something wrong with you. Its too much of a coincidence that you as a young male thug have found a religion that actually supports your positions and instinct and passions. Thats what im trying to say, before you come to the text you need ive run out of let me take you to the title of the book which is youre writing it as a letter, as a series of letters and this is so your sons. Why did you take that approach and youre clearly trying to help them to understand a lot more than, you know, these decisions between other strains of islam. Youre taking on sort of the whole underpinnings of the religion and say you must not be rigid about it. What are you trying to accomplish . To be honest, i was never really interested in taking the personal approach and if you read the book you will see that its actually very personal. I had written what i tried to i tried to write a more of a manifesto kind of sort of a guidelines for young people to think about and more understanding of these questions and my publisher said it was all great but very few people would read it and so i will tell you honestly, they suggested that i think in terms of a series of lessons, and so i rewrote the book entirely between march or may, march, so over the course of two months, i used the tool of addressing my oldest son and it was remarkable that it actually released tremendous amount of energy and i was able to write continuously and actually a lot of the many lessons were not included in the final version, so thats where that came from. My son claims it was my idea but now that i have written it, it feels like im doing public therapy sessions for myself working through the issues of my childhood. Before but youre also doing in a sense public therapy for your religion and i heard an idea e enunciated that islam is in need of a reformation, a martin luther. I dont think its fair to be honest. Kind of top down instruction given that we reformed it. To ask for reform of islam is suggest that i have some kind of deep though theological understanding, traditionally have held respect in our islamic muslim society. Actually learn about the people that they are guiding and perhaps understand that the flock has changed from the tenth century when most of us was illiterate and today in the 21st century when every one of us has information and knowledge, i think also that the clerics they have a specialized area of expertise. What im asking them to do is think more broadly about the moral questions that each of us faces in multicultural societies. Its not longer the society of seventh century arabia. Its very dangerous , i think, to continue with believer or nonbeliever or friend or foe inside or outsider specially when youre bumping into all kinds of people all day long. So i would like for this to be the start. If this was the start of a set of dialogues between clerics who really have others of knowledge and youth who are the ones who are really asking the questions and if there to be not a meeting of minds but at least an expression of interest in each other to find out, you know, what each can contribute to the moral questions of the middle east in particular but to the muslim world in general. What does it take to get that dialogue going . Obviously in the u. S. Is concern about islam and extremism and i think the u. S. And people in america would generally share the view that it would be great if islam was more focused on a modern Multicultural Society and not focus on seventh or eighth century. What does it take to get that dialogue going, what does it take to get islam to modernize in the way that you write about in this book. One of the things that i think is important is the position of muslims in america. Muslims in america the protections of the law. They have an expectation that they can speak freely. Many different from many muslim countries where theres the idea that we need to put in laws, they are very interesting because they seem to be structured to end all debate and you have to make sure that you get on the right side of the law and i think the muslims of america should really take advantage of the situation here and the academic freedom, intellectual freedom to really begin to take a lead on the direction of global islam and to contribute to the debate taking place in the middle east and ara b language. Im not saying that these are ideas that are reforming or modernizing, they are really providing clarity. So, for example, i talk about the role of the muslim individual. I got criticism by somebody online where they said that the individual a western concept and therefore is not legitimate and shouldnt be brought into the dialogue about islam. I noted that myself that the person has used facebook which is a western tool, maybe thats not appropriate term, its [laughter] its a product of western society. He was writing in english and writing as an individual and we thought these are basic conceptses that we need to work out and to think about. I also think that its interesting that we have the focus on the group and the idea of the individual threatening to the group. I actually think that they complement each other and right now the focus is on the group which formed almost an empty body built of many people with little personality. I want to raise the level of quality of group by beefing up the individual in the muslim world. Relate today that, there are two interesting many interesting elements in your book. A couple of things i want you to talk about. Wasnt is your view and understanding of women and islam. You write how you have an older sister, i guess, who you describe her in very impressive terms and the way you write about women and the role you think they should play in islam is not i would say the conventional understanding of the american audience of what women and islam might expect. Can you talk a bit about how women should be treated in islam. Should be treated . Thats [laughter] you know what i mean. Yeah, i know what you mean. [laughter] apologizes. Well, we have a whole bunch of communities in the middle east in particular and i worry sometimes that in the spread of islam we are actually exploiting some of the local cultures and practices of the of the middle east and im not sure thats a great idea nor do i think its particularly its particularly appropriate. I can speak from the perspective of morality where women are given all kinds of freedom, by which i mean they are given equal freedoms to males and actually in practice what that means that women have the chance to really prove themselves and do in fact, they do a much better job in the males in our society. I think we are now more worried where our men are doing and where they are doing with their time, they seem to have a certain kind of sort set of expectation that is are completely unreasonable. In that sense certain societies within the middle east are pushing forward on kind of womens rights and womens empowerment really. In the emirates we have a whole bunch of cabinet ministers who are women and they are they are doing an amazing job, much more interesting than the male members if i can say. My sister, she essentially brought me up and she has that kind of control over me that only an older sister can have. You will hear in clerics that women are weaker and unable to make decisions, i enjoy mountain climbing and my mountain climbing guide is a swedish woman 53. I have fallen from my position and hung in the air knowing that shes actually controlling the rope and making sure that i dont fall to my death. I will pull her with me, of course. Thats important. I think we need to think in terms of something that ive also spoken about. We have the idea that moral perfection took place in the seventh century. And those are traditions to say that the first three generations of muslims were the perfect form of muslim in through all time. I want to introduce the idea, at least a discussion about what it means to be more ally perfect or morally excellent and i have an understanding of how we can do that if we are using concept of the seventh century, are we not allowed to develop the concepts . Thats the way i put to the clerics. It makes me wonder whether we are on the right track and i had a very interesting i was very interested by the talk around the religious where he was asked about black lives matter and he was disparaging and his analysis of black lives matter, boiled down to my understanding about the way in which African Americans raised their families and their commitment to responsibilities and commitment to family life and their inability to do that. He made it a moral, personal issue. The criticism was directed at him because he wasnt taking into account structural matters and racism and injustice and i thought to myself this is a great opportunity. He didnt say those are unacceptable categories, he said, im sorry, i didnt think of those things. So these are concepts that have come outside of the kind of the concept that is have come out of islam. I thought, this is a fantastic opportunity to begin to look at our own reactions and to realize that actually we recognize structural injustice even though it was never part of islamic kind of theology. I have no idea if i answered your question, but there was an excellent answer in there. [laughter] the other thing i will ask another question and i will open up because im sure there are many questions from the room from the book, you talk about silence in the book and how, if i understood it correctly, religion imposes a kind of silence of people, acceptance imposes a kind of silence and nonthinkingness from people and you talk about your own your own youth and there was a period in your own youth when you were weighing what direction to go and you founded the sway of more dogmatic religion. How that plays out and how you think that gets ended. I picked up on the silence issue. At around 15i decided that i didnt really have any opinions anymore because it was so difficult to reconcile, you know, having a russian mother, but having strict rigid dogmatic views of the world through islam at the time. At the time i was 14, 15. And so i decided to leave and i took a timeout of about 20 years. [laughter] three of those years were completely silent. I had absolutely not to say, i did my work and i did my exams and up until the age of 19i had no opinions. Now i think i have solved that problem. [laughter] i think the

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