Imam Zaid Shakir - Functional or Dysfuntional Islam?
Published by Haseeb June 22nd, 2006 in IslamHere is the latest talk from the Zaytuna Podcast:
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Source: Shoeb’s Blog
“We fail to see Islam as a religion, and in the 20th century, we have a lot of these semantic gymnastics. So we say, for example, we don’t convert to Islam, we revert to Islam, without really thinking about what we are saying. You revert, or something reverts back usually to a previous known state unconsciously. So we say, “The child reverted back to his bad habits”, so the child isn’t conscious of what he’s doing or what she’s doing. Whereas conversion involves a conscious decision. This person converted to Communism, he or she studied it and then made a conscious decision to embrace it. So I came here and I was doing an interview, and the interviewer said “When did you revert to Islam?”, I said “I never reverted to Islam, I converted to Islam, I made a conscious decision to become a Muslim and I didn’t unconsciously revert back to a state that’s not even known to me.” How can you revert back to something you don’t know. A person might say “Every newborn is born in a natural Islamic state”. That might be true but he or she doesn’t know that, isn’t conscious of that. So the parents made that child a Jew, Christian or a Muslim, thats what they are conscious of. So they reverted back to that? So we get into these kind of semantic things that are designed to manifest our sophisication, but they are only making a mess for ourselves individually and collectively…”
- Imam Zaid Shakir
I’ll admit I always used to say convert and I change to using revert a few years ago. Convert always made more sense but I leaned towards what was more politically correct.
We do get caught up in sounding to pretty sometimes without thinking that we might screw it up more. Like African-Americans vs. Black. I prefer saying, man, these black brothers are awsome and show so much love as opposed to sayin African-American, cuz most of them have no idea about Africa anyway. Wallahu’Allam
Wasalaamu’alaykum
yeah but if you calling them black offends them then you should say african american. What if someone referred to Desis as Browns… not very flattering…
I prefer “revert.” Being Muslim feels so natural to me. I had believed in much of it all along like mankind’s inherent goodness, but was told to believe in other things that matched Christianity, like Original Sin.
And, as Mr. Lindh’s father said, “I told him once that maybe he was always a Muslim, because he had clearly found something important for him there… I don’t think you’ve really converted to Islam as much as you’ve found it within yourself; you sort of found your inner Muslim.”