Community and Faith Leaders’ Role in Countering Radicalization

Imam Talib Sharif – Masjid Muhammad, Washington, DC

Part-1: 55:00 - 59:00

So our topic today is the role of faith leaders addressing conflicts, roots of violent extremism and radicalization. I kind of like to look at what God has put in motion and I kind of want to go back and find what our role is. Qur`an gives us pictures, it takes us back. One of those pictures is, we have a picture before God began to bring about creation, obviously there is nothing. And then He says bringing about creation, it says that the creation was in a state of violent commotion, that`s one translation, one translation says disturbed smoke, the Bible, the Torah, the beginning picture is in all scriptures. And then God, didn`t want to stay that way and so he said to it “come you together, willingly or unwillingly”. And of course, in the Qur`an, the creation responds to God, and it says “we come willingly”. And so when an order had been established, each body was given its purpose, given its identity, its role, then and after that there was peace in the Heavens.

When there is a universal logic for human life and progress, God is given us a picture of what must be done and how we have to do it on earth. And of course, we say Muslims; one of the fundamental definitions of a Muslim is one who submits to the will of God, which is exactly what the creation did before us. God said “come willingly or unwillingly” but it came willingly, and submitted to God. That`s the nature before us and that is also the nature we came out. The nature that we came out has in us the same nature. We don`t have a nature really that disobey God, our nature really wants to obey God. Just like in the creation its said that it didn`t want to go against what God approves, so we came out of that. From that, now we come, we are the last, the scripture show that Adam, that`s the name we gave to the first one, was created on the sixth day. And all the scripture says, 6 days of duration and we find Adam on the 6^th day, but all of that comes before us and some scriptures identifies and tells us what happened and what was created on each day, and after it God said about the nature that it was “good”, it was excellent and it goes on for each day and turns what God crated and on the sixth day we find Adam and he said the same thing about Adam that he said about everything else he created and it was “good” and excellent. That`s the original nature and we know from Adam he had an identity but Adam`s identity being he was the first, the original identity that we were talking about, our common origin, his identity was not a racial identity it wasn`t an ethnic identity, national identity, none of that stuff was here. You see all that came later. So his identity was the first identity that God have gave to the first one, it has to be the most important identity and that`s human.