Rabbi Michael Beyo and Dr. Adrian McIntyre talk with M. Zuhdi Jasser, MD, the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith.”

A first-generation American Muslim, Jasser’s parents fled the oppressive Baath regime of Syria in the mid-1960's for American freedom. A devout Muslim, he and his family have strong ties to the American Muslim community having helped lead mosques in Wisconsin, Arkansas, Virginia and Arizona. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Jasser and a group of American Muslims founded AIFD which promotes Muslim voices for liberty and freedom through the separation of mosque and state. They believe the root cause of Islamist terrorism is the ideology of political Islam (Islamism) and a belief in the supremacy of the Islamic state. AIFD's primary projects include the Muslim Liberty Project and the Muslim Reform Movement, which was launched in December 2015 and is comprised of a coalition of over 15 Western Muslim Leaders from the US, Canada, and Europe.

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From PHX.fm., this is Conversation with the Rabbi, featuring open, honest dialogue, and sometimes unconventional perspectives on the world we all share.

Welcome to another Conversation with the Rabbi, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Our guest for today's conversation is Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. He is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, author of a book in 2012, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save His Faith. He's committed to a variety of issues that we've discussed on this show. And I'm looking forward to this conversation hosted of course, by Rabbi Michael Beyo, CEO of the East Valley Jewish Community Center. Good morning, rabbi.

Good morning, Adrian, and good morning, Dr. Jasser. Thank you very much for joining us for a Conversation with the Rabbi. I truly look forward to this conversation and again, welcome. Ahlan wa sahlan.

Ahlain wa sahlain. Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you.

We like to start off every conversation by giving our guest us a chance to give us a bit of an overview of their work, their commitments, why they do what they do. Tell us a little bit about that, about the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, why it started, what it's doing, and what brought you to this point.

Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate it. And thank you for all that you do. I came to Phoenix in 99 after serving 11 years in the Navy, and then joined my father in private practice here in internal medicine. Then 9/11 happened and on the front page of the Arizona Republic, after 9/11 on November 4th 2001, was one was a piece that said American Muslims torn between loyalty to the U.S. and loyalty to Islam. And I called the reporters and I said, "Where'd you find these crazy people that you interviewed?" And they interviewed most of the imams in town, including some imams in Tucson, they were blaming Israel. They blamed conspiracy theories. They said al-Qaeda was a CIA operation and that it was all these other conspiracy theories. And I said, "These are normal Muslims, I don't know who you interviewed." So they let me write an op-ed, in which I posited the opposite and a number of Muslims thanked me for it. I said, "Actually, not only are we not torn, terrorism is a symptom of a bigger problem, which is political Islam and that al-Qaeda, Hamas, and a lot of these organizations are natural byproducts of a political ideology that hates the West, that seeks to in an nihilistic way, destroy the West." Well, we had some positive feedback, but also a lot of negative feedback. I was attacked nationally by many of the Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups, including the Council on American–Islamic Relations. I was attacked in my medical organization by local Arab Muslim leaders that did not like what I had to say. And basically, realized we had to form another organization to begin to represent Muslims. That was not part of the Islamist establishment that ran many of the mosques and have represented Muslims for so long in America. So we formed the American Islamic Forum for Democracy in 2003, a year and a half later, we had formed a mission statement. We had a number of sessions for strategic analysis to figure out what we needed to do. And basically, we built a set of principles. We said, "This is not going to be simply to counter terrorism, that's a symptom." we formed on some principles that included defending the US Constitution, defeating radical Islam through the separation of mosque and state, which is a direct attack on political Islam, if you will, and the Islamic State concept. And we said, "Ultimately that you would not ever achieve national security in America, unless we began to have most Muslims lead an effort to dismantle the idea of the Islamic State." And then we had a rally against terrorism in 2004, that was at Patriot Square in which we called it standing with Muslims against terror. And in my book, I talk about that whole endeavor and how complicated it was to have Muslims make a simple statement and how, again, Israel became the focus instead of our rally. And, we basically disinvited many of the folks that wanted to make Israel the focus. We said, it's about Muslims standing against terrorism. And solely, we began to build a body of work against the theological underpinnings of political Islam. I then testified to Congress in 2011 on the invitation by Peter King and have since testified seven, eight times on religious freedom issues. I've served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, appointed by Senator McConnell. And I've done a lot of media work, in which we basically said, "Our mission has three missions at the American Islamic forum. Number one is public engagement on the education about political Islam. And, I think we've been very successful. Trying not to be boastful about it, but I do think that the national conversation shifting out of the terrorism conversation to political Islam and Islamism, where the term Islamist is more common. I think we have some something to do with what that has evolved in the last 19 years since 9/11. Second, our mission is our Muslim Reform Movement, and we can talk about that later about where reform is necessary. And third is, we work with government and academics and others on what is the process and policy that should happen. We have a program called, radical Islam for law enforcement, government strategy. And, things like the Abraham Accords and others are part of really consistent with what we see as domestic and foreign process. And we have a leadership program for Muslim youth called, the Muslim Liberty Project.

Dr. Jasser, thank you very much for, again, explaining to us the breadth of your work. But with your permission, I would like to start a little bit back in history, because as you said, your work really starts, your public work, not as a doctor, but as a public worker with your nonprofit organization, starts post 9/11. And I would like to take us a little bit back through history, and we know that Jews have lived in Muslim countries since time in Memorial, since Islam took over whatever parts of the Middle East, they took over. There were Jews living there in many of these countries, many of these places. And one thing for sure, we can say is that the Jewish experience under Islam usually fared better than under Christianity for obvious theological reasons. And at the same time, I also, I'm not a strong believer in the myth of the golden age, where Jews had perfect life under Islam. And that is at the core of it, because Islam is not only a faith, but it's a way of life and it is political. So could you please explain a little bit better, what you mean when you say that you want to fight against political Islam? Because Islam at its core, very similar to Judaism, is an all encompassing religion way of life, where politics is part of the religion and we cannot separate the two. We cannot do it in Judaism and we cannot, in my humble opinion, truly do it in Islam. Or if you can please explain to us, what do you mean?

Well, thank you. No, those are great questions. And actually, before I get to the essence of political Islam, I do want to address sort of the plight of Jews under either Christianity or Islam, which is really important. There's no doubt. I mean, a lot of my background in understanding is based on reading Bernard Lewis and Bernard Lewis's book on The Jews of Islam. I've read a lot of Maimonides work. And, he's one of my heroes as a physician, philosopher and theologian, I try to fancy myself in his tradition. So, and a lot of Maimonides work was done under Islam.

Absolutely. All of it. Yeah.

Yeah. All of it. So, there's no doubt that they fared pretty well. But you're right, it wasn't great, it wasn't perfect. There was a lot of reform necessary. And I will say that the problem with Jews, the Jewish community and Muslim majority countries is not just related to political Islam, it's also related to Arabism. I always tell the folks that say that, "Well, Assad is fantastic for Jews or minorities, ISIS is worse, they're the same." There are no Jews left in Syria, long before ISIS ever came. It's because the Baʿath Party cleanse the state of anyone who was rejecting of the Baʿath system, which is a national socialist, fascist party. And, the rates of antisemitism throughout the Muslim majority world are in the 90 percentile. If it's 85%, they say it's pretty good. And I can tell you, 30, 40% penetration of political Islamic parties and ideas tells you that the other 30, 40% are Arabist, are Arab fascists that are like the Fatah versus Hamas, or Baʿath and Iraq versus the Islamist, or the humanist in Iran versus the other sort of national fascists, same thing in Turkey. So bottom line is, there's a combination there of sort of a national secular fascism that plays a role in the antisemitism. Back to the main question is political Islam. At the time we formed the American Islamic Forum, the first person to call me and sort of pull my ear and tell me to come over to her house as my mom, she's like, "Zuhdi, are you trying to say that Islam is not part of your life?" "It's part of our life, it's part of everything you do, it's why you're in medical ethics, it's why you're a doctor." And I said, "Mom, absolutely, we are not trying to separate faith from a person's heart. We believe just like America, that this country is under God that yes, God is a part of everything we do, but it's not under Islam, it's not under Christianity." The reason the word Christian is not in the founding documents is that the central essence of religious liberty in America is a personal practice of faith. They didn't want to have a debate about which form of Christianity and which interpretation. They said, yes, just like de Tocqueville talks about in Democracy in America, the reason you don't need military rule in America is because you have such a faithful devout country. You're not worried about your neighbor committing an act of terror and terrorizing you because they have a moral compass. And I've always said, you can't defeat the dictators in the Middle East unless the general population develops a recurrence, not a revivalism of Islam, but a reform of a deep faith based in God that's morally centered on compassion, and humility and honesty. So, we're not trying to divorce people of their faith, but political Islam by definition is where you have a political party that believes that the identity of the state and its flag is Islam and the legal system, the instrument for that state, the legal instrument is that the Quran is the source, not a source. That's not a nuance, that's a very significant difference. I believe the Quran is a source of law for me, but it's certainly not the source and it's not the primary one. Interpretations are related, etc., so common laws involved, a lot of other things. So an Islamic State is one in which the jurisprudence of the state is pre-eminently run by clerics and everything comes from the Quran versus it coming from reason. And this is I think, a huge distinction and the parties themselves and Islamic parties in essence of political Islam, where the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, or the AKP, or Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan or Hamas. They believe that their platform, just like Republican Party, Democratic, their platform has planks that are related to advancing Islamic law. So to me, that's what we're fighting. If you say, the perfect example is Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, he wrote a book called the Illusion of the Islamic State, devout Muslim. And he said, the front of his book it says, "You can have a state of Islam in your heart, but we do not want an Islamic State." So, that is a very important distinction between believing in your faith of Islam, but yet wanting to impose a quasi, or actually a literal theocracy, like we see in Saudi Arabia, etc. And America, I think is the best place to have this conversation, because it's not a theocracy. It fought against theocracy. And when I testified to Congress, I repeatedly told them, "I'm here because Americans should be able to have a conversation that it is not anti-Muslim bigotry to fear Islamism." "Islamophobia is a construct to prevent us from debating Islamic theology, which we should be doing and I rejected that term and we should be able to have this conversation."

Thank you. I'm going to try to unpack a lot of the things that you said, and one of the things that strikes me was you use the term Arabism. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I presume, and I may be completely wrong that you are hinting that there is, that within the Muslim world, that made of, I believe it's a billion and a half people. So it's a lot of people, you have people of all walks of life, of all different cultures and backgrounds, from Asia, all the way in Asia, all the way to Europe. So, what do you mean when you talk about Arabism?

So to me, Arabism, there's the mildest forms in which are, I think one of the main pathologies of the American State Department is run by a lot of Arabist that were genuflecting to the monarchs, and a lot of the other fascists that ran run the Middle East. But Arabism is to Arabs, what Nazi is to Germans. It's basically a belief of the supremacist idea that the Arab race was selected to lead Islam, that the Arab language is a predominant language over everybody else. My father and my grandfather left Syria, because of what the Baathist Arabist did to destroy that country. And, Gamal Abdel Nasser was the classic Arabist in Egypt. He tried to unite Egypt and Syria, but he was basically a fascist that believed in the supremacy of sort of trying to unite the Arab world. Now of the 1.67 billion Muslims, 400 million are Arabs. And, the Arab states were divided up after World War II. And a lot of what happened was the failure of nationalism. So nationalism in and of itself, if you look at the European experiment, I completely get it when many of my Jewish friends fear nationalism, because a lot of the democracies reverted back to some of the horrific fascists in history from the early 20th century. But successful nationalism is what our work is at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy is. Successful nationalism is like America, where the flag has a meaning in which our troops are moral troops that serve to liberate. Like yesterday, recently was June 6th. Our troops went to Normandy to liberate Europeans from their oppressors, not to colonize them, not to imperialize them. So our flag was about helping others achieve the ability to get closer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to be closer to being free as individuals and through liberation. So this is really, even though the Baathist literally in Arabic means the liberating party, the actual on the ground definition was one in which they nationalized every... My grandfather lost his vehicles, lost his business. It was stolen by the government. He was in prison for three years, and then my father escaped to Lebanon and came to the U.S. They fought against that fascism. So Arabism itself is one of the reasons why the conspiracy theories are abound, and just like many fascists in the far left or far right will use religion as an opium, as Mark said, many Islamist movements work closely with these. Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas was based in Damascus for 17, 18 years. And, he worked closely with Assad. And yet when the revolution started, they pulled out and started to side with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood against Assad, because supposedly now they were going to get rid of the secular fascist of Assad, even though they were working with him. And now, we see Hamas fueled by the same people that fuel Assad, which is Iran. So, many of these extremists will work together. They're two sides of a coin, but that coin is one of fascism, be it Islam fascism of political Islam or secular fascism of Arabism.

So my question is, I've actually two questions, maybe the same, it's the same question or two sides. What are supposed to do regular good, moral Muslims, that are the majority of Muslims in the world, what can they do to have their voice heard? I truly believe that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are good, honest people. Like the majority of people, of any religion. They want to wake up in the morning, provide for the families, have a good life, but we don't hear of them as much. When there were demonstrations in various capitals of the world against Israel, or specifically against Jews. I did not hear unfortunately, voices of Muslims that were shouting against those antisemitic voices. And I'm not talking about legitimate debate over Israeli government policies, I'm talking about straight antisemitism. I was talking a day to a friend of mine in New Jersey that I haven't spoken to him in a few weeks. And he was run down during those days of the demonstrations in New York and New Jersey by somebody, because he is clearly a Jewish rabbi. And now, he's lying in bed, in a hospital, all broken up. So these things happen and they happen very close to home. My kids were attacked about a year ago when I and they were walking home from a synagogue. These things happen all the time, all over the world. So I'm talking about straight antisemitism, where are the voices of the majority of Muslims?

This is why our reform work is so important is, my podcast, REFORM THIS! is about that. I just did an episode on antisemitism last week, because you don't take folks that are sort of raised and brought up in these cultures. You're right, most of them are moderate. They're not terrorists, but they haven't to say that the majority of them are Jeffersonian Democrats with an enlightened reason philosophical education would be absurd. That has not happened. Reagan had a great quote in which he said, "It takes one generation to lose freedom and that's after you've had it." And those societies, they were enlightened societies until the 12th, 13th century. Yes, for 700... If the recipe of Islam was bad itself, as a recipe, you would've not had six, 700 years of enlightenment and 4,000 different schools of thought of Sharia. But now, the problem, the disease and Bernard Lewis' other book, The Crisis in Islam or What Went Wrong? was another book he had. If you look at what went wrong, he talks about there's been six, 700 years now, especially 400 years of Ottoman arrest of enlightenment in which Arabic was outlawed. You can't reform Islam without taking the... It was like when the Catholic Church wanted to control Christianity and Catholicism, it outlawed Latin. It did not allow the laity to understand the language of the scripture. Same thing happened with Islam. Most Muslims, let alone the one billion that are not Arabic, the majority of Arabs don't under... I mean, I speak Arabic fluently, and yet the Arabic of the Quran is extremely difficult, so I was blessed to have a father that translated it. And I was able to look at the passage that says, "Do not... That supposedly the Saudis translated as, "Do not take Jews as friends," when in fact the word is not friends, it's ʾawliyāʾ which is related to a witness in a legal proceeding for a family court, which yeah, you wouldn't take Jews or Christians. So God cannot be conflicted in which in one chapter, he says, "We can marry a Jew to be the mother of our children and not have to convert her." And on the other hand say, "She can't be our friend," that doesn't make any sense. It's an intentional mistranslation by Salafi literalists that want to demonize Jews. And that needs to be reformed. So the millions that came to the west that now you see are not demonstrating, that are not manifesting a Western love for their other minorities are the ones that have not had a civil society that allowed critical thinking, and questioning authority and a society that was ... Even though they knew and the best thing I've seen happen in the last 20 years, was the Arab awakening of 2011. You finally saw millions in the streets rejecting the oppression, and the socialism and the terror of the States of Egypt and Syria and Libya. And Iran had its awakening in 2009, but it didn't take hold with its revolution, but in Lebanon and elsewhere, we've seen a lot of this. Now unfortunately, because there was no civil society, the Islamist after a year or two, started to take over. Because not only internally, they had the mosques in which to radicalize the population, it wasn't the majority, but it was a plurality that were radicalized. Then you had Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia initially, not anymore, but initially for years when the revolution was starting to radicalize and feed Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS and others, which made them much more dominant in the revolution. But all I can tell you, from where we sat, we said, "You know what?" This is an opportunity for us to say, "You know what?" "Muslims in the West have a unique responsibility, you can't do the work that we're doing at AIFD in Syria or Egypt, you wouldn't last a month in doing that, but here you can, we have no excuse." And yet, most Muslims that see us, they pat us on the back and they say, "Oh, I'm glad you're doing what you're doing," but then they don't help us because they're afraid to get targeted or whatever it is, number one. Number two, even though they realize that most of the media they listen to, be it Syrian media, Al Jazeera, out of Qatar, Press TV out of Iran, even though they realize those are fascist medias that they hate, the conspiracy theories and the demonization of Jews and the anti-Western, anti-American mantras that come out of there, they've internalized. And I listen to sermons at the mosque of doctors, and lawyers, and engineers here in America and they spew the same nonsense. And I confront them and I say, "What's your evidence? I was in Somalia." And yet Ilhan Omar says that the biggest act of terror in 2017 ... she tweeted out right as she was running for Congress, she said, "Americans committed more acts of terror than the tribal Somali gangs" that she said in the country that she came from, which is not only offensive, but I was there. I was a doctor off the coast in Mogadishu in 1992 on the USS El Paso. And, to hear that is not only offensive. I remember going to the Islamic Society of North America convention once. And I saw it to table from the Somali Relief Fund saying that, "America was materializing the Horn of Africa through what we did in Somalia." And I went to them, I said, I was in my Navy uniform. And I said, "This is offensive, what the hell are you guys talking about?" That's not what we're doing there, we went to take food and we tried to save the folks there and liberate them." And we left within a few months, because was a completely failed operation. So this is the problem is that you have the far left, that hates America for a number of reasons. Now is working, in what I call the red-green axis. Those that want to demonize America domestically as racist, and globally as imperialist and colonialists, working synergistically with the propaganda arms of regimes in the Middle East that want to demonize America through the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and those media arms are then taking previously rational American Muslims and others, and telling them that we're the problem and it retards and arrests reform in which they don't deal with their own problems and thus marginalizing. And that's why we have to start doing more of this work and debate across universities, so that they begin to be held accountable, to really prove some of the things that they think are fact, which are simply fabrication.

Well, let's talk about that for a minute, because as somebody who spent 15 years in higher education, 10 years working in the Middle East, I'm listening to the narrative that you've presented, and I can see why it would be appealing, especially to a White American conservative population, predisposed by certain racist currents and certain media misrepresentations to be afraid of some things that you're speaking about in a authoritative way. And it would sound to them like, "Oh my God, the green tide is at the gates." And I can't help, but pause for a second and say, now hang on. There are more sources for history than Bernard Lewis, who is not taken seriously by any high level scholarship dealing with primary sources. It's fine to consider on its merits, but you can't let that stand in for Middle Eastern history without at least somebody raising their hand to say, yeah, but we don't take him seriously. That can't be the term of this debate. You're using the term fascism in a very glib and loose way. I'd like to know more what you mean specifically, because I think by replacing the word nationalism with fascism, we get into some interesting problematic territory. How do you respond to Muslims in America who may have been more deeply educated in some of these topics than the average American and who might say, "I hear some of the truth in what you're saying, and a whole lot of other stuff kind of mashed together." It starts to sound like an ideology of its own. How do you respond to that?

Well, I mean, I think you're going to need to be more specific. I'm not sure that's sort of a dismissal of one of the West's preeminent scholars on Islam is helpful. Unless you take something that he said, then we can talk about whether it was factual or not as far as Bernard Lewis. But he's not my own only source. If you look at the reality of what he talks about, my grandfather was a Sharia court judge in Damascus, and I can tell you ... that's on my mother's side. My father's side, Zuhdi Jasser was not only a newspaper man in Syria who started Al-Hayat in Aleppo, but he had a business that was nationalized. So fascism to me is not just a term. It is a known entity when soldiers come up and tear down your house, take you and put you in a prison, which is what happened to my grandfather and lost all of his belongings, because he did not swear allegiance to the Baʿath Party. So whatever you want to call it, the Ḥizb al-Baʿath, the Party of Baʿath in Syria, acted in a way that terrorized the population. And we saw Assad continue that, which his father, Hafez Assad did. They knew at which rate to kill people in the street, so fascism in Syria in the past seven years has been basically the killing of about a thousand, two thousand a week. The use of chemical weapons in order to crush a revolution. So when you talk about, nobody's talking about a green tide, no, I've never said to demonize Islam, I've never ... I've rejected ... To say that 1% of the population is trying to take over America through Sharia law is absurd. But what they are trying to do is weaken American forward muscular liberalism, which is, I believe that America has a moral obligation to advance ideas of liberty, be it towards helping the Uyghurs in China who are being systematically genocidally encamped and destroyed. Or helping the Muslims in Indonesia defeat some of the radical sects that are trying to take over some of the more secular history of Indonesia that's slowly being lost, because the Islamists are funding the major movements. So all I can can tell you is that, all I'm asking for is a fair playing field across the battlefields domestically and globally to where, whether it's Arab fascism or Islamist ideas are countered. So that civil society, when a government leaves right now without... When the far left in America ends up defending dictatorships, I tell them, well, yeah, if you don't help liberal movements on the ground, feminist movements and others, and you end up seeing Code Pink working with Tehran in Iran, what is ... Do they really believe that the Khomeinists help far left ideas? They're not pro ... They're homophobic, they're anti-feminist. So I never understood really the lefts endearment with dictatorships, because typically it doesn't endear itself to many of the ideas that they believe in. So yeah, and nobody's talking about a green tide, we're talking about basically the destruction of liberalism, classical liberalism across the Middle East that had oxygen for the first time, after 2011 with the revolutions. And we had an opportunity to have, what I thought should have been a new doctrine, I've called the doctrine of liberty, which is to help promote movements on the ground that could have replaced as a third pathway, not military dictatorships that we see, which is what I mean by fascism, and not political Islamic states like we saw. And the best time actually, I think the best sign I'd wanted to talk to you about, December 31st, 2014, we saw the defeat of the Islamist Ennahda Party in Tunisia. That was a democratic defeat. I, as much as I'm anti-Muslim Brotherhood, I thought that it was wrong for the coup of el-Sisi to go in and take over what happened after the Brotherhood created a theocracy in Egypt. That was not a way to defeat the Brotherhood. It made them victims again, and it made them actually get a lot more respect than they should have, because they were targeted by the fascist of the National Democratic Party in Egypt. So there is a third pathway, which is civil society liberal ideas.

Dr. Jasser, as a rabbi one of the things that you said that struck a very big chord in me was when you, I don't speak Arabic and I definitely don't read Arabic, but you mentioned how a lot of people misunderstand many of the words, many of the translations of the Quran. And I believe that you mentioned about a specific word, whether it is translated as a friend or a witness. Can you talk more about the literalism that often is found when people read or misread the Quran? Because that's a topic that we find also a lot in the Torah. And often we find in the Torah, people that are not very familiar with Hebrew, that they will read certain passages in one way or another, and there is political and other ramifications to it. So what you mentioned struck a very strong chord in me, because I think that is something that should be taught also to non-Muslim, because often non-Muslim shaded view and understanding of Islam is what they see and hear by the majority. And maybe, that is completely wrong. So, I would love for you to speak more about, maybe there are sources where people can read a proper translation of the Quran or a different translation of the Quran, that is not literal.

Yes. Thank you. My father Mohamed Kais Jasser has a translation called the Interpretation of the Quran, The Holy Quran and that had a huge impact on me. There are a number of translations, Layla, oh my gosh, her last name is escaping me right now. And, there's a lot of different translations there. And I think, I always tell folks to get six, seven translations and then figure out their own based on what they feel. I mean, there's a lot of different terms, for example, there's a passage there that says cut the hands of those who steal. So in Saudi Arabia, that means literally dismemberment and the removal of an arm from somebody that steals, when in fact the Arabic word itself is to sever them from society. So you could take that interpretation, and that means put them in prison if they steal or to sever them from, to remove them from society. It doesn't mean necessarily to literally cut their arm. Hijab, there's debates in my own family, and most Islamic families about whether you need to cover your hair. The word hijab actually does not mean hair cover, it means a basically concealment or a covering of the breasts on other things. So, it is an interpretation of what the intent of the term is, versus actually the cloth itself. So it can be a concealment from immorality, from corruption and other things. So, these terms are very important. For antique scripture was revealed to a population that had a deep entrenched Arabic poetry, and one of the things that my father taught me, again, I'm not an expert in that Arabic poetry, but my father was, my grandfather was, and we had lots of conversations that I remember as a teen and else where with them, in which they were telling me the example of the poetry, in which it refers to some of these terms. For example, I remember them talking about Israel and saying, "It's interesting that the only state that's discussed in the Quran is Israel, so how could we be against the State of Israel, when actually the only state that's legitimized in Islamic scripture is Israel." It's discussed that the Nation of Israel was given to the Jewish people. Now, the borders and stuff aren't discussed there, but the bottom line is, at least, you can't reject the state like most Islamists do." And, we need to have these debates. And I think this is where the vibrant conversation, most of the things, by the way, that are radicalized in Islam that are thought to be scripture are actually from hadith. Hamas itself, it's charter that says, "Cut the..." I'm sorry, "Kill a Jew behind every stone," that's not from the Quran, that's supposedly a saying of the prophet that many of us believe was actually fabricated and the prophet never said. And actually, one of the bigger reform, you'll see even Islamists, I call them neo-Islamists, like the AKP in Turkey is doing a huge project trying to modernize hadith, because they realize that they can't even control their own movements in political Islam, unless they begin to marginalize much of the hadith. I mean, if you look, Sahih al-Bukhari is one of the largest six, seven volume sets of hadith. And Bukhari himself is of Pakistani, Indo-Pakistani origin. So the authentic scripture that's considered hadith, you could say up to 70, 80% of those six volumes. I mean, there are hadith in which the Salafist believe the prophet said, "Do not pray behind a woman because her brain is half the size of a man." That is literally a hadith. And to think that the Prophet Muhammad said that, I just find that offensive. It's just fabricated for tribal control. And one of the things my father taught me, and he talks about this in his book is there is a passage that was one of the last passages revealed on the Quran that says, "Today, I have completed your religion." And there was a reason, one of the whole reasons we believe Islamic scripture came to be was because Christianity had lost some of the authenticity of its scripture and created a trinity and thus created a original sin concept and deified Jesus and other things. So, it came as a course correction. And once that course correction was done back to the original monotheism of Judaism, back to Islam. It said, "Now, I've completed your religion." The interpretation is, well, then you can't 70 years to 400 years later, create all this hadith as scripture and say that is Islam. When he's completed your religion before that, number one. Number two, I then get called a Quranist. I'm not a Quranist. I believe in a lot of the oral tradition of Islam and it's hadith. And I tell you that because we wouldn't know how to pray if you didn't believe in some of the hadith, we wouldn't know a lot of the details of fasting. So I'm not a absolutist, like some of the movements that are core honest, that think that the hadith is evil, which are radical movements that, not radical, but it's sort of extreme movements, if you will. That I don't... Most of my Islamic legalisms are Hanafi in the way I was raised. But like I told you, in the first six, seventh centuries of Islam, there were 4,000 schools of thought, now there's four in Sunni Islam. There's four in Shia and four in Sunni. So, we're down to eight. That's not diversity. That's complete oppression. Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali, are the basically four schools of thought and there's hardly any difference between them. It's sort of dancing on the head of a pin to look at some of the differences.

I have to say I personally, and I think there are Islamic jurisprudence scholars who wouldn't agree with that characterization. I would agree that it's a substantive area for inquiry and debate. I think we have to be careful with some of these sweeping generalizations that collapse distinctions, that are meaningful distinctions to serious scholarship and practice. And so, let's just be cautious.

So I mean, there's Sufism absolutely, there's Mysticism, there's... Well, I mean, the reason I'm saying them as a, what appears to you to be a sweeping generalization is why have there been no free thinking products coming out of the Middle East, coming out of Pakistan? There's no critical ... The reason there's not one invention of free market inventions coming out of these societies is because they've been completely fossilized and paralyzed in their critical thinking, so I don't see that.... I see that as a statement of love for the Muslim populations that have been paralyzed in their critical thinking.

Dr. Jasser, as a last question, where do we go from here? And, where are the spiritual leaders that had help move the needle? Because I think that it cannot be done without the help of spiritual leaders, because the Muslim population worldwide is, it's religious at the core. Even secular Muslims are connected to their traditions, just like in Israel so many of the so-called secular Israelis, they're still very much connected to Jewish traditions. So, where are the religious leaders that can help in this direction?

That's a great question. They're there, as Adrian pointed out. And sometimes brevity makes things seem like generalization. There are a lot of scholars, whether you look at An-Na'im at Emory University ... An-Na'im has a whole series of books on reform in Islam. And he talks about, I mean, he's informed a lot of what I've learned. If you look at Abdullahi An-Na'im's work. And out of Turkey now working with Cato Institute, a liberty-based organization is ... Oh my gosh, his name escapes me, but he's ... It'll come back to me later. But, he writes for the New York Times frequently and he's talked about liberty. Obviously, the fact that he came to Cato here in the U.S. and had to leave Turkey as, speaks to the climate under Erdoğan there. Muhammad al-'Ashmawi in Egypt had a book on extremism and terrorism in Islam. He was in prison under Nasser for 15 years. The translation of his work, I think is one of the most important books of the 20th century, in which he was translated. Actually, if you look, the premise of Muhammad al-'Ashmawi's work in Egypt was that you have to separate mosque and state. And he became an anti-Islamist, when he noticed in which ... He was a judge and he was a family court judge in Cairo. And he said in Islam, according to the Islamists, Salafis, a Muslim man can marry a Christian or Jewish woman, but a Muslim woman cannot marry a Christian or Jewish man. I disagree with that, so do many scholars. But so, he found himself, all of a sudden there was a Muslim woman that was married to a Muslim man. The man converted to Christianity. So the court, all of a sudden wanted to nullify her marriage and it came to his court and he said, "You know what?" He asked them, "Do you love each other?" And they said, "Yes." And they said, "Well, why are you here?" They said, "Well, we have to nullify our marriage according to your law." And he said, "Well..." He took off his robe and he said, "I will not participate in this court, this does not make any sense." And, they took him straight to prison. He was in prison for 15 years and he wrote a book that I think is just amazing. So there are many, many, those are three stories. There's a lot of other physicians, and attorneys and others that have written books. The problem is they don't have a bandwidth. They don't have the ... They're not getting on Al Jazeera, because it doesn't sing the tune of the Islamists. The Turkish media run by AKP, the Islamists of that party don't want to hear it. And the other parties also don't want to hear it either, because I can tell you, and again, to Adrian's other point earlier, the right sometimes in the West does endear itself to some far right groups in the Middle East, be it the monarchs, or the el-Sisis, Mubaraks of the world and others. And that bothers me, because what happens is then you don't hear the voices of reform and they just want to, sometimes the cheers for a moderate monarch makes us not pay attention to the fact that the first people to go into prison in Saudi Arabia were not the Islamists, it was actually the reformists, who were moderates that wanted to question the authority of the king, and the judges and things like that. So, that's why we have to do this work here. We have to hold both parties accountable in the US and in the West to begin to work with folks that share our values across the world. Not just the ones that are not going to take us to war and sort of just deal with a national secure narrative, instead of a liberty universal declaration of human rights narrative.

I want to add in closing, because some of my questions may have sounded to some listeners as combative. I want to clarify that I actually share some of Dr Jasser's commitments to liberal democratic participation, universal human rights, things of that in nature. I would like very much for those of us, regardless of political commitments vis-a-vis American politics, to find ways to have exactly these kind of substantive conversations, where we can try to clear away some of the politically charged and electrifying rhetoric and get down to substantive issues. I appreciate very much Dr. Jasser's willingness to respond to some questions that were in fact, quite a direct contradiction to what he was saying. Thank you very much for that.

Thank you. And by the way, the Turkish scholar was Mustafa Akyol, A-K-Y-O-L, that I was talking about. Thank you.

Dr. Jasser, in conclusion, there is so many things that I would love to continue discussing with you, and maybe for another time about similarities between Islam and Judaism, both historically theologically. And even today, I cry every time that a conflict between Islam and Judaism, because I don't think that it was meant to be that way. And, I don't know what is the path forward. Right now, I cannot see one, but maybe you do. Please tell me that you do.

I do. I have to tell you if you talk to, I think his name is Khaled Labwani, a physician that was part of the rebels in Syria, and now he's been targeted because he's so pro-Israel. And he said, "Listen, the only country, even more than Obama at the time, the only country that really, not only came to the help of Syrian refugees, but actually had a solution that was not pro-Assad, that was not pro-Islamist was Israel." And, I think as we struggled through ... That was one of the best things with the Abraham Accords is, the Palestinians took so much oxygen out of the conversation in the Middle East, that regardless of what you think about the intent and motives of the monarchs on why they came to the table, the difference with the Abraham Accords was that for the first time, not only was there real peace, but the clerics were starting to preach it from the pulpits in the Emirates, in Bahrain and maybe in Saudi Arabia. And I think that is going to shift things, because it might be still government driven. Bottom line is that the sermons they're giving about the need to recognize Israel are real and those we agree with.

And do you think that will continue?

Yeah. I don't think President Biden can put that back in the bottle. I just don't think he can. I think that they see economically, I can tell you I've talked to startups. Not only Israel is known as the startup nation, there are many businesses that are striving to do work with the Israeli economy. And that's something that regardless of whose in the White House, now the monarchs realize. And Egypt and others, their economies are going to tank unless they start to think into the next 10, 20 years, which involves... Just like China, I mean, these are still dictatorships and I hope to see the end of these oppressive dictatorships, so I'm not as pro Saudi as some of the folks in Washington are and pro Emiratis. But I will tell you that as you start to have freer markets, China's death now was the opening of their markets. And the government's still running, the Chinese Communist Party is still running the system there, but free markets are going to be the way in which the population will be able to change, hopefully. And at least in the Middle East, I think it'll happen quicker because the population is going to be far more able to create more civil society that it's not had so far.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe to Conversation with the Rabbi on your favorite podcast app. You can also find the latest episodes online at conversationwiththerabbi.com. For all of us here at PHX.fm, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and please join us for the next Conversation with the Rabbi.