297. Talking to Muslims About Christ | Jonathan Pageau & Mohammad Hijab

[0] So our first special guest is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

[1] He is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

[2] From 1993 to 1998, he served as an assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard.

[3] He spent 15 years writing maps of meaning the architecture of belief.

[4] Dr. Peterson has penned the popular global bestsellers beyond order 12 more rules for life and 12 rules for life, an antidote to chaos.

[5] In 2016, before the publication of 12 rules, several of Dr. Peterson's online lectures, videos and interviews went viral, launching him into unprecedented international prominence as a public intellectual and educator.

[6] With his colleagues, Dr. Peterson has pronounced has produced two online programs to help people understand themselves better and to improve the psychological and practical functioning.

[7] He's currently working on an online university dubbed Peterson Academy.

[8] Please welcome Dr. Peterson.

[9] We also have with us Jonathan Peugeot.

[10] He is an artist and he studies Christian symbolism and he also studies postmodernism, right?

[11] God forbid for some, right?

[12] So we also have with us our beloved Muhammad Hijab.

[13] He is an author, comparative religionist and philosopher of religion.

[14] He's the co -founder of our Institute, Sapins Institute, and is a researcher and instructor for the organization.

[15] He has a BA in politics and a master's degree in history, and he also acquired a second master's degree in Islamic Studies from the school over here into an African Studies, and he completed a third master's degree in applied theology from the University of Oxford.

[16] And now he's studying his PhD on the philosophy of religion, specifically on the contingency argument for God's existence.

[17] In addition, hijab has undergone formal training in Islamic studies with a focus on the Quran, prophetic traditions and legal reasoning.

[18] Hijab has completed Islamic seminary courses and has been given formal permission to relay Islamic knowledge on selected Islamic fields.

[19] Muhammad Hijab is one of the very few Muslim public figures who deal comparatively with political, philosophical, and theological issues such as, and has amassed a following.

[20] with many subscribers on YouTube in English and Arabic.

[21] So please welcome Mohamed Hijab and, of course, Jonathan Pejot.

[22] So because I'm 100 % disagreeable and not polite at all, I want to just, I want to get the elephant out of the room.

[23] I do like to do that.

[24] And there's been a recent video that you put up, a message to the Muslims.

[25] And before I say this, I do want to speak about the important topics, the theological topics and all these kind of postmodernism.

[26] That will come, but I just wanted to mention this first.

[27] Because for me, it's just get the elephant out of the room and then we can move on.

[28] Sometimes it's just replaced by a slightly smaller elephant.

[29] Well, smaller elephant is better than nothing.

[30] I was going to say is that it didn't land well with a lot of the Muslim community.

[31] And I think the reason why is that it was seen as condescending, it was seen as kind of patronizing.

[32] What was your intention of this video exactly?

[33] to start a dialogue stupidly and badly because that's how you have to start you know we talked already about the idea of tolerance and I'm actually not here to be tolerant you know because tolerance sort of presumes that I know what I'm doing and you guys don't but I'll put up with you anyways and see I don't actually think I know what I'm doing exactly and so I think while you might have something to teach me. And so it's not so much tolerance as I would say, hopefully something approximating an expression of reasonable humility, which is, well, first of all, we occupy the same space.

[34] And as far as I'm concerned, it'd be better if we got along.

[35] And we've all had our own revelations, you know, personally and, let's say, socially.

[36] And we don't know how to integrate those revelations.

[37] And that's rough.

[38] that's hard.

[39] And so I'm here to listen and the message was preposterous in some sense although not much more so than the message I made to Christians, which I wouldn't say was exactly flattering.

[40] And, you know, I thought it would probably ruffle some feathers but I thought it might also initiate a dialogue or at least further it.

[41] And that has happened, you know, I mean, certainly there were many people who were irritated at me and thought that I was being condescending and I wasn't trying to be because I do have a lot of people who are paying attention to my lectures around the world on the Islamic side which is quite surprising to me especially with regard to the attention that's been given to the biblical lectures and I don't take any of that for granted and I wasn't trying to either capitalize on it or interfere with it.

[42] I was trying to do the next stupid thing that might move things forward a bit.

[43] And that's actually, it's actually worked, I would say.

[44] Well, first of all, I am here.

[45] And I know that's not a direct consequence of that message, but at least it didn't break it.

[46] And there have been many other Muslim groups who've reached out to me in a serious way, at least in part because of that.

[47] And so I think we have to understand that we're going to stumble into each other a fair bit if we actually try to talk because of all the elephants and the snakes that are lurking.

[48] under the carpet, and I think it's a very good thing to get them out and open.

[49] I'm a very agreeable person, as it turns out.

[50] Yes, I know.

[51] It's to my detriment.

[52] I wouldn't have guessed, to be honest, that you're very agreeable.

[53] Yes, it's one of my major character flaws, but I don't like conflict at all.

[54] But the reason I would say I'm prone to engage in it is because sometimes what's under the carpet needs to be revealed, because it's going to cause a lot of trouble if it just sits there and bruise or broods and multiplies.

[55] And so it is one of the advantages of disagreeable people having them around because they will haul things up for inspection that everyone else might be loath to confront.

[56] The downside is, well, you might do that too often, you know, and that's a hard thing to get right.

[57] So I'm not here in a spirit of tolerance.

[58] I'm here in a spirit of ignorance.

[59] And I'm hoping, see, The other thing I've been thinking through and guys can tell me what you think about this is it seems that in the situation we're in now, sort of globally speaking, that it would be useful for people of religious faith to note that there are other people of religious faith with whom they have much in common, one of them being religious faith, and that they are also confronting as people of religious faith, a world that is attempting to, let's say, shake itself free of that.

[60] And so it isn't exactly obvious to me that it's a great time for people of religious faith to concentrate on their differences, given that there are perhaps more important elephants to address, let's say, or fish to fry.

[61] And so I've been trying to, I'm very ignorant about the Islamic tradition, and I'm trying to rectify that.

[62] It's very difficult to step outside your own culture and to really understand someone else's and so and I'm under no illusions I hope about the degree of understanding that I've managed but I have tried to understand what we might share in common and that's crucial and so certainly one of the ideas that we all share in common on the religious front let's say is that there is an ultimate unity that should be placed above all else and so that's part of the great monotheistic tradition and I'm going to speak mostly as a psychologist rather than as, say, an advocate of the Christian tradition because it isn't obvious to me that I...

[63] Let me kind of push back a little bit on that point because you're an individual like, obviously in your newest book, you're talking very categorically about precision.

[64] And I would say you're an individual that is very precise.

[65] They're categorized, like, if I would say anything, I would say that you're individual that's scrupulously meticulous in exactitude and, I don't know, meticulousness or whatever, yeah?

[66] so you speak and you think about what you're going to say before you say it.

[67] That's what you're known for.

[68] In fact, if someone says something which is kind of off the market deal, but you pull them up for it, right?

[69] You're usually because I don't understand it then.

[70] Yeah, for example, like the Cathy Newman interview, like the assumptions and the questioning that she had when she was questioning, you said, you pulled her up on it.

[71] And that's why it became so popular, the discussion was so popular.

[72] And your clinical psychologist.

[73] So what I was going to say is this.

[74] For example, if I were to make a video, right, I say this message to the, you know, to white Canadians or something, yeah.

[75] Yeah.

[76] And I said, you know.

[77] It's hard to talk to them.

[78] I say, look, you know, sensitively, why don't you reach out to some Russians, you know?

[79] Oh, you know, heaven forbid, you know, reach out to black Africans or First Nation people, you know, whatever it may be.

[80] How do you think the community of white Canadians, let's say, for the sake of argument, will react to that kind of message?

[81] Well, if it was you?

[82] Yeah.

[83] Well, you're pretty disagreeable, so you'd probably get bit back a lot.

[84] Yeah, but exactly.

[85] I don't, I don't, it's hard to say until you do it, you know.

[86] I mean, I have reached out to other communities, let's say.

[87] I did an interview with a friend of mine who's a Native American carver who lives on the West Coast.

[88] And, no, I'm not very happy with the narrative that's being promoted in Canada, which is that the European settlement of Canada is best viewed as genocidal colonial.

[89] And having said that, my friend, this car.

[90] was in a residential school in Canada, and the residential schools were put forward by the government in an attempt, and other institutions, in an attempt to separate the indigenous children from their families and then socialize them rapidly according to European norms.

[91] And there was some positive motivation for that, and sometimes that helped and work.

[92] But one of the things that did happen was that some schools were, let's say, invaded by people of a pronounced pedophilic and sadistic bent.

[93] And my friend ended up in one of those schools, and his life was so dreadful that you can't even hear about it without serious emotional damage.

[94] And so I went forward with that discussion, and it was very contentious, but it went very well.

[95] And it told a story that was true and needed to be told.

[96] And so, you know, you step into foreign territory at your peril, that's for sure but you know and it was relatively difficult for me to arrange for this to be a possibility yeah of course and and but my my thought again because I'm trying to look for what we have to offer each other rather than what divides us I thought it was worthwhile but let me push back again once again on this point so for example it's not always what you say sometimes it can be what you don't say so for instance I think you've been become somewhat of an emblem of Western civilization, right, in terms of you're an intellectual.

[97] You have.

[98] And I also push back on the point that this is a foreign culture, because I think that Islam, I know you've mentioned this in a lecture as well, that Islam has now become part like, you know, Western culture.

[99] Yeah, well, that's the open question.

[100] As we noted in the introductory remarks, it's like, well, is Islam part of the West?

[101] We're kind of having the same discussion about Russia in some real sense.

[102] And that's really going well at the moment.

[103] Yeah, so there's that part.

[104] But what I would say is that, you know, if there is a bloody history of Western colonialism, and that's almost undeniable.

[105] Like, for example, look at Algeria, for instance.

[106] Algeria, when it was annexed by France, there's no dispute in that.

[107] There's no dispute in what happened there.

[108] So I'm giving you one example of many, the Spanish colonialism of Latin America, for example.

[109] There are things that happened.

[110] And I'm not saying that's not things that happened on only just on the Western Front.

[111] There are things that happen on the Muslim front as well, of course.

[112] This is true.

[113] No doubt about it, right?

[114] I'm not going to stand here and, you know, defend the Muahidun who came and were very intolerant to Jews and Christians and kick them out of their homes and so on like that, who existed in Spain as well, in fact.

[115] So the point is I feel like, I don't know, as a psychologist, I think my question would be to you.

[116] Don't you think, is it of any benefit to be concessionary in this regard?

[117] Like to start off a discussion by saying, like, we know that these are things that could cause resentment because, for example, I know a lot of Algerian people, and this is very clear in their historical memory.

[118] Yes.

[119] And the accusation will be that the West have colonial amnesia here.

[120] They are not taking into account what they've done.

[121] I'll be honest with you.

[122] They don't even know how, well, okay.

[123] Did you see what I'm saying?

[124] Yeah, well, absolutely.

[125] I mean, look, here's how I would address that psychologically.

[126] In many of the mythological stories that I've read, there is the motif of the evil uncle.

[127] And so, for example, in the ancient Egyptian cosmology, there were four deities, four central deities, although a host of associated deities.

[128] And one of them was Osiris, who was the deity of the state.

[129] That might be a good way of thinking about it.

[130] And he had an evil brother, Seth, who was always conspiring in the background to overthrow the state and to establish his own rule, say, based on power.

[131] And the Egyptians, this is thousands of years ago, had figured out by that point because their society was quite large that there is something in the social structure itself that posed a threat to the structure, and that was the tendency for the structure and its leaders to become willfully blind and for conspiratorial powers or patterns that would use resentment and the desire for power to overthrow that.

[132] They thought of Osiris is willfully blind and Seth as an eternal danger, and that's true.

[133] And then, but there's another element to the evil uncle, too, which is that in some real sense, and it's a very difficult thing to sort through morally, all of us walk on blood -soaked ground, because human history is in some regards a nightmarish catastrophe.

[134] And some of that's just because life was so difficult, but it's also because people did in unbelievably cruel and malicious and deceptive, committed, unbelievably cruel and atrocious and deceptive acts.

[135] And so we're all stuck with this problem that here we are in relative peace and harmony so far, although we seem to be doing everything we can to try to disrupt that at the moment.

[136] And part of the price that's been paid for that is an endless litany of historical catastrophe.

[137] And then we all have to face up to what does that mean for us in terms of our individual responsibility?

[138] and how do we construe ourselves in our society in light of that fact?

[139] And we could go back and forth continually about whose historical atrocities were worse.

[140] And that's a rough contest because, you know, the devil is definitely in the details there.

[141] And then it also brings up the other problem, which is, well, when the Spaniards went to Central America, a lot of the bloodshed they produced, the death they produced was actually a consequence of the introduction of disease because that took out about 95 % of the native population in the Western Hemisphere.

[142] And then the conquistadors were, well, maybe they weren't the finest representatives of the highest flowering of Western civilization.

[143] We don't know to what degree they were the sort of thugs that couldn't get along at home and went out adventuring.

[144] And even if I, say, attempted to take full responsibility for that, I'm not sure what it would mean because I suspect I have a lot more in common, with you people in the modern world than I do with Spanish conquistadors from 300 years ago.

[145] Now, I'm not saying I bear no responsibility for the bloodshed of the past, but I would say we all bear that responsibility, and that's something, I would say, that's something like the conception of original sin.

[146] Yeah, and that's the point of difference.

[147] To be honest, I would disagree with that point.

[148] Like, as a Muslim, there is a verse in the Quran says, well, I tell you to where zero to muizra, that one soul should not bear the responsibility of someone else's actions.

[149] Yeah, well, that's the other ethical complication.

[150] It's like, can you call me out in relationship to the atrocity of the past?

[151] Of course not, not.

[152] But it's complicated, right?

[153] But because at the same time you do say, and I don't mean you personally, but, you know, we can say things like, well, the West is not bearing sufficient responsibility for its colonial past.

[154] And so at some level, that kind of devolves down to the individual.

[155] So let me kind of rephrase it then.

[156] I think that's more of a left -wing criticism.

[157] It's like, you know, there's reparations and affirmative action programs.

[158] I'm not advocating any of that.

[159] And not do I even believe in any of that, to be honest with you.

[160] Nor me. Yeah.

[161] So what I was putting as an alternative to that is this.

[162] There is this kind of, I would call this, maybe an Orientalist, a new Orientalist narrative, which states that Islam is incapable of X, Y, Z. Call it tolerance, call it whatever it is.

[163] And look at what's happened in Islamic history.

[164] You've got all of these deaths and you've got all of these kinds of things that are happening, comparative to what we have in the West.

[165] And what we're saying is that let's look at what you have in the West, because liberalism was an ideology that was started in the 17th century.

[166] Like, I mean, really it was crystallized, you know, with John Locke and all these kind of things then.

[167] And after liberalism was established, in fact, the constitution and the documents of the founding fathers and stuff like that were based on the liberal, secular principles.

[168] Even after that, you had Napoleonic wars.

[169] Even after that, you had colonialism continuing.

[170] You had slavery continuing until 1867, whatever was, you know, the American Civil War ended.

[171] So what we're saying is that this picture of history that, you know, the West is best, this idea, because our ideology can fix all problems, it's not reasonable when you look at the historical records.

[172] I mean, one of one scholar called Navid Sheikh actually done a piece, it's called Body Count, and he was counting the amount of people that died in each civilization, and he put the Western civilization is the highest.

[173] And because you have things like World War I and World War I and World War II, and World War II were nationalistic conquests.

[174] They were not religiously inspired.

[175] I mean, you can argue to what extent were World War I and World War II religiously inspired, but certainly Islam was not a main feature of the 30 million people that died in World War I, or however many million people died in World War II.

[176] So the point is that we're saying is that, obviously you've got concepts in the West, like manifest destiny, which I think every single president of the United States of America believed in, Westwood expansion, these kind of things.

[177] The point is that the proposition that the ideology of the West can fix our problems, this is what we have an issue with, because what we're saying is that if we look at the historical record, There is no evidence of that.

[178] In fact, what has shown us is that there's more bloodshed.

[179] Individualism has caused more death.

[180] Like, with all due respect, I know that you do cherish individuals.

[181] I'm not saying everything is bad about it.

[182] But when you have a society the plea of a communitarian ethic is bereft of a communitarian ethic, then you can have these issues.

[183] And so these are conversations.

[184] And I think you are moving towards communitarianism.

[185] Your newest book, you were talking about institutions and these kind of things and the respectful tradition and these kind of things.

[186] I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but these are the kinds of conversations I think we need to have.

[187] But on that point, I think I don't want this to be interrogative.

[188] I just want to interject one thing because I think it's important.

[189] I think Jordan, you're very kind.

[190] And I understand, I also watched the message to Muslims, and I thought there were some problems with it, definitely.

[191] But when you said there's an elephant in the room that I wanted to address, my mind immediately went to videos as I've seen a view.

[192] with some of your friends in the street and suggesting violence and suggesting aggressive actions against other communities which in the West is something that they say in Canada people don't do that and that even though there might be civil conflicts we have a state, we have police, we have an apparatus which is not completely perfect but which is functions to install the rules.

[193] So when I see someone in the street We're surrounded by men wearing masks who are talking about if these other groups come out, you know, they're going to see us and we're going to be there and I'm looking for Jews and we're talking about blood.

[194] There's these very strange behaviors that I think that if we're going to...

[195] Do you remember that when I said that exact statement?

[196] I just remember you talking to police about...

[197] About Jewish people?

[198] Yeah.

[199] I'd like to get an exact quote.

[200] Okay, so I don't remember.

[201] I'll recall...

[202] Well, the one that I definitely saw that you spoke for quite a while.

[203] was relating to some issues with Hindu.

[204] So what happened recently?

[205] I don't want to go.

[206] Yeah.

[207] Well, I think the reason why it's important, I just the reason why it's important is that is that I have met, I'm a Christian, very much a Christian.

[208] I have many problems with modern, Western culture.

[209] Right.

[210] And but we are in the West.

[211] Okay.

[212] Right.

[213] And you are in the West.

[214] Yeah.

[215] And I am a Western.

[216] Right.

[217] And you live in the West.

[218] And so.

[219] And I'm British.

[220] Yes.

[221] Just like you are Canadian.

[222] Yes.

[223] Yes.

[224] And so, to me, the elephant in the room is part, that's part of the elephant in the room.

[225] But there are many people who told Jordan not to come here because of those videos.

[226] Okay, well, there's a lot of people that told me not to have this conversation of Jordan because of some of his videos.

[227] And that's why me and Jordan...

[228] Lots of people don't want to have difficult conversations.

[229] But what I'm saying with Jordan is that what makes him gallant and brave is that despite of those voices that are the voices of disunity, because he's been cancelled more times than I have, yeah?

[230] despite the fact that he's been cancelled in Cambridge University or whatever I don't care about all these institutions with all your respect I know this man is a person of influence and in my estimation I see him as one of the most if not the most influential Western public voice right so for that reason I speak to him and for that reason I don't apologise to anyone for doing so and I think in a way he sees the same thing in me maybe not to the same level but the fact that I'm half his age he knows what's going to come in a 30 years time So he's playing the cards right.

[231] And I think at the end of the day, my voice, my emotions, what I'm saying in the streets of London or Lester or whatever else, is how a lot of Muslim people feel.

[232] But don't forget, yes, I'm disagreeable.

[233] And my temperament is not the temperament of the average Muslim.

[234] So you've got to differentiate between me as an individual, me, Mohammed Hajab as an individual, and Islam.

[235] Do you see, if you say Muhammad Hajab, you are a hypocrite, you are a bad guy, you are violent.

[236] So you know what?

[237] That's something I have to look into.

[238] do you know what I mean if that's your advice to be that's something after I would also say there's no moral advantage in being a pushover either yes I agree and so these things are very hard to calibrate correctly and so well and if we come at this in a spirit of mutual ignorance and with some degree of maybe this is where tolerance is more of an issue we're going to have to tolerate each other's rough edges and imperfections in order to talk even if we think that there's something useful to be gleaned And, you know, my sense is that what we're called upon to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that's not so much to damn the chaff as it is to gather the wheat.

[239] And it seems to be in the biblical stories in the Old Testament, there's an immense emphasis, strange emphasis, in some real sense.

[240] It's one of the things that makes the text so remarkable on the moral stranger and foreigner.

[241] And so when the society is unstable and shaking in a variety of ways, it's often the moral foreigner who comes in with something wise to say.

[242] And I think that's definitely true of those biblical narratives, and it's very interesting that they point them out.

[243] But I think it's also true practically.

[244] It's like it's not as if any of us, like we want to have faith in our faith, and we need that because it keeps us together individually and it unites us socially.

[245] But then if we insist that my, if I insist that my faith, which is more like my pride in my own belief is 100 % correct, then I've confused myself with my faith.

[246] I've confused myself with Christianity, or perhaps you've confused yourself with Islam.

[247] That's a big mistake.

[248] So let me ask you both a question then.

[249] We can talk about, by the way, one clarification we've called a question.

[250] I've never asked for violence.

[251] And that's an accusation I think that you need to look back at because I've never said, let's go and do violence.

[252] I said that if such and such group come out again, which were a group of armed people, then we'll be there to defend the community.

[253] I've never said in my whole life and I'll challenge anybody to find anything that's opposite from what I've just said.

[254] Now, that's one thing.

[255] Second thing I'll say is this, is that, and if it was a violence issue, if I did say that, what's happening with the Metropolitan Police?

[256] Why am I not behind bars?

[257] Why have there was not been a single investigation?

[258] It's 210 ,000 people who have watched the video, unless the police have put their fingers in their ears or that they are, if you want to accuse the police of, you know, negligence or incompetence, that's a different story.

[259] Let's go to the second point, because you're saying now about this basically dogmatism.

[260] Let's just call it for what it is.

[261] Like, you know.

[262] What's pride in dogmatism, right?

[263] And that's something we all have to watch because it's a hard line to walk.

[264] Because you want to be an advocate for your faith, but what in the world do you know?

[265] Right?

[266] You're ignorant beyond comprehension.

[267] Let me ask a question.

[268] And both of you, this is a question to both of you.

[269] Is there an ultimate purpose of life?

[270] Yeah, sure.

[271] What is it?

[272] What we're doing here.

[273] Which is what?

[274] Hopefully trying to make peace.

[275] Is that enough?

[276] We'll see.

[277] Yeah.

[278] Because if...

[279] It's better than the alternative.

[280] What's the alternative?

[281] Hell.

[282] Okay.

[283] Which we're toying with.

[284] I don't mean us.

[285] Well, us too.

[286] That's for sure.

[287] But, you know, things are shaky at the moment on many fronts.

[288] And we have this opportunity in front of us.

[289] us to have a very abundant world, right, where everyone has enough and maybe more than enough.

[290] And we're shaky about that.

[291] We're not sure that that's acceptable.

[292] And we're not sure everybody should have it.

[293] We're not sure everybody deserves it.

[294] And even ourselves.

[295] And we're retreating into our corners in some real sense.

[296] And we're not addressing the elephants under the carpet.

[297] And you can't do that.

[298] Like the things we're discussing contentiously, now.

[299] You know, they make for rough conversations, but they make for a lot rougher streets if you don't talk them out.

[300] And you have to do that in spirit of ignorance.

[301] You know, like I was hoping to come here today and, well, and listen, I talk a lot.

[302] There's my flaw, you know.

[303] But I don't know how to feel the right way forward.

[304] I think part of it is, well, first of all, to find commonalities, we believe in the fundamental necessity of a united book across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths.

[305] That's not nothing.

[306] That's a strange thing to insist upon, and yet we all seem to agree.

[307] We believe in a higher and purposeful unity, the necessity of that, and then also in the necessity of putting that above all else.

[308] And we also agree that we're not very good at that.

[309] But that's the hardest one to get, is that even if you do claim in some sense to worship the highest in this monotheistic sense that doesn't mean you're very good at it and that's a hard pill to swallow especially when you're trying to also be a courageous knight of your faith let's say it's hard to be properly humble in the face of the divine but that might be in some sense the proper command I mean the fact that Islam means submission is a reflection of that in some sense right?

[310] Just remember who's God here and who isn't.

[311] And so and that's a very hard thing to keep in mind.

[312] So when I listen to you, you disagreeable character, I'm trying to separate out the wheat from the chaff, you know?

[313] Because there's no doubt I have many things to learn as I learned to some degree when I put out that message.

[314] Honestly, I appreciate this part of like, you know, I learn from your humility, honestly, the way that you come across.

[315] And once again, I do appreciate both of you coming here, you know, and I appreciate disagreeability as all.

[316] What you've said there is good.

[317] I deserve the accountability, just like he does.

[318] I don't want to be a person who can't dish it out, who dishes it out but can't get it himself.

[319] I deserve it.

[320] What I wanted to say is this to both of you.

[321] I want to do a thought experiment, yeah?

[322] So imagine you're going to sleep.

[323] I don't know where you guys are staying now, what hotel you're going to stay.

[324] You're watching my videos, you know, me with the masks and stuff like that before you go to sleep, subscribe on the channel, whatever you do, yeah?

[325] And now you're, after you've, you know, put the dislike and done your negative comments, which I deleted already and put it in the trash.

[326] which is what you do is always tweets and, you know, we can talk about that layer.

[327] But after that's all happened, then you've gone to sleep.

[328] You both go to sleep now, right?

[329] You wake up and you find yourselves on a ship, on a ship, yeah?

[330] And people are eating food.

[331] People are drinking, people are this and that, so it's happening.

[332] Now, what would be the first questions that you would ask to people around you?

[333] Would you ask things like, how did I get here, where are we going?

[334] Are these...

[335] Those seem like the first two good...

[336] Those are good questions to ask in general.

[337] Where are we?

[338] How did we get here?

[339] And this is where are we going?

[340] Beautiful.

[341] That's what I wanted to actually get to, because this is what Hyderga, you know, Maen Heidegger, he's a controversial figure in his old, right?

[342] But he described us as the thrownness of life.

[343] Yeah.

[344] Because we're chucked into life.

[345] We're thrown into life, right?

[346] So the facts now that we're in this world, these questions that we would be asking if we were on a ship and were just chucked on a ship are the same very questions, like you said, you know, that we would be asking if we're in this world.

[347] Where did we come from?

[348] Where are we going?

[349] I think if we can't get these two questions right, nihilism will persist.

[350] You're a nihilistic expert.

[351] You've spoken a lot about nihilistic.

[352] I think if we can't get those...

[353] He's a counter -nialistic expert.

[354] I'm not a nihilist.

[355] If you want, ask what I think my purpose, the purpose is, is to be united with God.

[356] That would be my answer.

[357] Yeah, beautiful.

[358] Okay, so from the Islamic perspective, it's this, right?

[359] First of all, ask these three questions.

[360] Where do I come from?

[361] Where am I going?

[362] What am I doing here?

[363] what is the purpose of life?

[364] What is it?

[365] And the answer is, we came from a creator, okay?

[366] So we can approach this in whatever argument you're like.

[367] I'm doing a PhD in contingency argument.

[368] You can do anything you want.

[369] You can do it, for example, through the fact that the universe is regular and stable and uniform and possesses life.

[370] What's the best explanation for that?

[371] Is it knowledge or not knowledge?

[372] So we say it's knowledge, right?

[373] Or if we say it's a creative capacity of some sort.

[374] We came from this creative capacity.

[375] We came from this knowledge force, right?

[376] So that's the first thing we say.

[377] we came from this force, this higher power.

[378] Where are we going?

[379] We're going back to the higher power, right?

[380] And we're going back to the higher power with our deeds, which we have to be responsible for, which is exactly the hallmark of what you stand for.

[381] And that's, I believe, genuinely, that's why you're asking why are so many people listening to you?

[382] Because we reject original sin.

[383] What would you respect?

[384] Original sin says that one man, yeah, gave us a sin, the other man took it away.

[385] Basically, I mean, we're fallen creatures, and then Jesus, you've got a bit of, believe in a Solar Fide, you believe in whatever you know about.

[386] I'm Orthodox, so I don't believe that.

[387] Oh, fair enough, okay, fine.

[388] I don't believe in original sin the way you described it.

[389] Oh, fine, but that's fine.

[390] Fine, no, no, no issue.

[391] Eastern Orthodox, yeah?

[392] Yeah.

[393] Okay, fine.

[394] But the issue is that this...

[395] I didn't say, I believed in it either.

[396] I just said that the concept of original sin is an expression of this problem that we're describing, which is that we're all burdened with something approximating while the throwness and this ambivalent relationship we have with, with the atrocity of history.

[397] And that's worse, hey, because if you study the atrocity of history with any degree of seriousness, you have to take account of the fact that people like you did it.

[398] And you might think, well, I wouldn't do it.

[399] It's like, yeah.

[400] I get you.

[401] I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[402] For sure.

[403] I mean, you know, you were talking about the kind of, you were talking about the suffering.

[404] And obviously one of the major sufferings is the Holocaust.

[405] I was reading the book, Meaningful Life, Victor Franco, I'm sure you're aware of it, where he then produced logo.

[406] therapy and all these kind of things.

[407] And it goes back to what Nietzsche said.

[408] You know, if you have a why, almost any how is possible, you know?

[409] Bearable.

[410] Yeah, if you have a why, almost any how is possible.

[411] So it goes back to, everything goes back to purpose.

[412] Logotherapy.

[413] Yeah, just, if you have a purpose, then everything is possible.

[414] That's why I think that you can do the best as a human species, yeah, in the human condition.

[415] If your purpose is transcendental.

[416] It's higher than the physical, the material.

[417] And for us, the purpose is mentioned in chapter 51, verse 19 of the Quran, which is, we have not created human beings and jin except for that they may worship me. What is worship?

[418] It's the epitome, the higher point of submission, is the epitome of love as well.

[419] Jonathan has an interesting take on that too that has to do with celebration, which I think is psychologically appropriate.

[420] I don't want to put you on the spot, but it's something I've been struggling to understand more.

[421] I've attended some orthodox ceremonies, with Jonathan and also on my own.

[422] And he's very perspicacious when it comes to describing the role of both worship and ritual.

[423] And so there's an element, anyways, I'll let you continue with that.

[424] No, I agree.

[425] I agree that worship is also the manner in which we bind together.

[426] And so without something we celebrate together, then we don't.

[427] And so we have different levels of what we celebrate.

[428] You know, we can celebrate in our families, the things that bind us.

[429] But ultimately, that has to reach all the way up.

[430] into something which is beyond.

[431] I think that's actually very powerful, you know.

[432] And in fact, the very first lines of the Qur 'an is al -hambul -Lah, which is all praise and thanks belong to God, Lord of the Worlds.

[433] All praise and all thanks.

[434] And this is a kind of celebration.

[435] This is a kind of praise.

[436] You know, we agree that praising God at the highest level, celebrating God, I mean, the word hallelujah.

[437] Well, I would say in some sense, if we're doing that, well, there was some comments at the beginning about the importance of music.

[438] and you open this event with music and I've been beginning to open my events with music and part of the reason that that's very much worthwhile and has to do with this drumbeat that underlies everything is that music is a manifestation of something like the joyful spirit of harmonious play and it's not semantic, right?

[439] It grips you and it sets the tone.

[440] I've heard you say something before about this.

[441] You said that music was impervious to refutation.

[442] It's impervious to Russia.

[443] The meaning of music is impervious to rautishinal criticism.

[444] Yeah, I think that was a very powerful way of playing.

[445] It's something, man. It's something to know.

[446] And so with musical manner in which the Quran is presented, a major part of that is the music.

[447] And the music speaks, we know, the music speaks of layers of patterned harmony.

[448] And you talked about the individualism of the West.

[449] And I think that there's a flaw in that, particularized conception that needs to be addressed by something that's more approximating a communitarian ethos and I think you can understand that relationship to music because look to some degree the three of us can sit on stage and everyone in the audience we can be comfortable at the moment psychologically so we're not too anxious and we're kind of engaged because there's a certain degree of playful harmony that we've established.

[450] Especially with him now.

[451] Yeah, so it's so there's some...

[452] I've known my dark secrets about, you know, There's some fractiousness, right, but we're able to integrate that, and so that means we can remain calm.

[453] And so one of the things that indicates is that part of our ability to remain calm and focused is dependent on social integration.

[454] So you have to ask yourself, well, could you be sane if your marriage was insane?

[455] Could you be saying if your relationship with your children was too fractious?

[456] Could you be saying if you had no friends, if you didn't integrate yourself into the community and maybe the state and then maybe a higher vision.

[457] And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is, no, you can't be saying by yourself.

[458] It's not merely a matter of psychological integration.

[459] It's not merely a matter of the isolated individual.

[460] And, of course, we understand that in the West, although perhaps not as well as we should formally, because we'll punish criminals, for example, by putting them in solitary confinement.

[461] And that's another indication of the impossibility of, Maybe if you were an expert meditator and a religious man, you could tolerate the solitude, but you probably wouldn't be a criminal then.

[462] So my point is, is that I view this process of integration as a multi -layered process that involves the integration of the community all the way up to the highest place.

[463] And that highest place has to be a unity, as Jonathan pointed out, or we're divided.

[464] And so we might want to seek amongst us as much as we can for, a common unity at least start with that and that's what we're trying to do in this conversation yes but unity is different to uniformity so I say the difference being is that you know in the Islamic discussion or discourse it's like there is this there's a verse in the Quran in fact it's lecum dinokum mili aden you have your religion we have ours there is we can demarcate and still tolerate that's the point and I think appreciate even yeah even appreciate that would be good we can even love each other well go on I don't know if we can manage that I think we can I mean that's the thing Going back to the message to Muslims, I think this is where, can I ask the question, have you ever been to a Muslim country?

[465] Yes.

[466] Which ones have we been to?

[467] I've been to Morocco and I've been to Turkey and now have I been to any other Muslim countries?

[468] Not yet.

[469] Okay, okay.

[470] There's many on the itinerary.

[471] Go to a Muslim country with a Christian population.

[472] I'm originally from Egypt, yeah.

[473] We've had Compti Christians there for years.

[474] Yeah, we've had them for 1 ,400 years.

[475] I mean, they were there before the Muslims came, right?

[476] And the point is that if you go to Ghana, go to Nigeria, this bleak image of Muslims and Christians kind of fighting each other, I don't think that's what's really going on.

[477] I'm not saying that there's no grievance there when the Christian communities in Muslim majority lands.

[478] That would be a lie and that would be false and that can easily be refuted.

[479] Why I'm saying is that it's not as bad as you think.

[480] If you go to these countries, you will not find, I do not think you will find what's going on, for example, you're talking about Hindustva.

[481] In India with the Muslim minorities in a Hindu supposedly, you know, majority, which is a peaceful religious.

[482] and what's going on there, what's going on China with the Muslim minority there, or for example, may I add, like, sorry to say about what's happening in Palestine as well.

[483] Well, I don't want to paint any large -scale endeavor with the brush that's, let's say, dipped in the blood of its worst excesses.

[484] I don't think that's helpful, because then we're all irredeemable in some real sense.

[485] I think it's much wiser for us to see what we, see what we can jointly celebrate and see if we can manage that in something like a spirit of ignorance and hope.

[486] Because one of the things I learned a long time ago, it was very helpful for me as a clinician, was that if everything wasn't perfect around me all the time, it was probably at least in part because I was much less than I could conceivably be.

[487] And one of the things I learned from Carl Jung, who's a great thinker, was that what you need most will be found where you least want to look And yes.

[488] Well, and it's almost by definition, right?

[489] Because you can imagine that you're most likely to be most ignorant about what you're most afraid of and most contemptuous of.

[490] And so by definition, that's the last place you want to look.

[491] And if you're an advocate of a given religious faith, one of the last places you might want to look is in the wisdom of an alternative faith.

[492] I agree.

[493] But, you know, that's who are you to be such a committed advocate of a faith that's so complex that there's no way.

[494] that someone like you can understand it.

[495] And I mean that of your own faith.

[496] And so it's not so obvious that the stranger you think is the devil doesn't have something to say.

[497] I get you, but I once heard you quote Carl Young because obviously you mentioned him a lot in your books and I learned a lot from you about Carl Young that he stated that, you know, the West are technological giants but moral dwarfs.

[498] In comparison, yes.

[499] And that's the problem all over the world increasingly.

[500] We're technological giants, but moral midges.

[501] To some extent.

[502] But what I was going to say here is that going back to Carl Young here, because, for example, and going back to the issue of purpose, yeah, if we're speaking about purpose, I watched your discussion of Sam Harris, and you were speaking about your...

[503] The last one?

[504] No, there was one that you've done.

[505] I don't know, it wasn't that famous.

[506] You weren't speaking to him like this.

[507] But there was one point of it, which really was, like, it gave me an insight into your...

[508] I don't want to be a psychologist here, right?

[509] But maybe I dare say it gave me an insight into your psychological state because Sam Harris, he said to you, he said, your conception of pragmatism that truth is malleable or whatever, it's not one capital T truth like corresponding to.

[510] Well, there's no, I said more that I don't believe that the most fundamental truth is objective in the scientific sense and I don't think it can be.

[511] Not that objective truth isn't useful.

[512] So in that sense, your perspective, and you will know this as well, is more epistemologically pragmatist rather than correspondence theory, right?

[513] So correspondence theory says that one truth out there.

[514] I think correspondence theories have to be nested under pragmatic theories in some real sense.

[515] So you're saying the same thing as the American pragmatist said Charles Beatt and William Jenkins are.

[516] Yes, very much.

[517] So what I was going to say with that, he said, if you believe in this, it will be at your peril.

[518] And you know what you said?

[519] You responded, you retorted, you said, it has been in my peril.

[520] You said it has not, let me, let's focus on this because this is actually deep.

[521] You said it has been at my peril.

[522] Why would...

[523] Everything's at your peril, man. No, no, no, no, but think about this for a second, because I heard your voice and these words stuck in my mind, yeah?

[524] You said it has been at my peril.

[525] Now, let me submit something to you today.

[526] Could it be that it's at your peril?

[527] Because if you don't believe in truth with a capital T in the correspondence theory sense that there is a God and that's a true statement, just like two plus two equals four is a true statement.

[528] Just like the geocentric model, the heliocentric model is a true statement in that sense there is a god out there and he created the world he created you he's sustaining the universe he is maintaining the universe there is a true statement and that is in a correspondence serious sense if you don't have that level of certainty then you will end up being an existential angst and and you will end up being depressed because that's what the korean says the The Quran states, I'm a ira 'ridae for in aechea whoever swerves away from my remembrance will have a depressed life.

[529] So for us...

[530] I think that every...

[531] Well, I think almost by definition, when you veer from a path oriented towards the highest unity that you fall apart, it's by definition.

[532] Now, I don't know what that means specifically with regards to a correspondence theory because the correspondence theorists tend to be more oriented towards a materialist viewpoint.

[533] And that doesn't seem to me to work out very well when discussing something like God.

[534] Do I think that we strive towards a higher unity, that that unity is real and that it's necessary?

[535] No, but there's no contradiction in having correspondence theory in dualism or idealism.

[536] It doesn't have to be materialism.

[537] Because that would indicate the truth of imperishism.

[538] Well, I would say then my answer to that is that I try to act as if that's true.

[539] And I think I say I act as if it's true because I don't, I'm not in a position to make any final judgments in some real sense, but I am in a position to stake my life on certain faith -based propositions.

[540] That's what you can do.

[541] That doesn't mean you're right, but that's what you have at your disposal.

[542] And so I am trying to do that.

[543] to feel the proper way forward in this spirit of, let's say, playful unity, and to put that above all else, which is partly why I also said that I did it at my peril.

[544] The thing is what I would say is that if you take the proposition that truth is utility, yeah, and what is useful is that which is true, that's basically the American pragmatist stance.

[545] If you take that, if...

[546] Well, it's not exactly, not exactly.

[547] Well, there, see, I think...

[548] Because that's what Charles Pierce said almost by word.

[549] I know, I know, I know.

[550] Yeah.

[551] The pragmatists are more like engineers, which is, well, you can't build a perfect bridge because what do you know?

[552] You can't build anything perfect, but you can build a bridge.

[553] That's a bridge insofar as it will stand up and allow you to walk across it for 400 years.

[554] And then the notion there is, well, it's not perfect.

[555] It doesn't correspond precisely to the ultimate nature of reality, let's say, but it's good enough to move you from point A to point B. and so...

[556] Yes, but going back to Viktor Frankl and the idea of meaning, what I'm saying is, I know you're a psychoanalyst, this, from the Quranic paradigm, this will not be enough.

[557] Meaning, based on your current paradigm, according to the Islamic diagnosis, you will be depressed.

[558] Why?

[559] Because your purpose is not strong enough.

[560] Do you see the point?

[561] Yes, well, that's probably true.

[562] I know that sounds a bit intrusive, so I do apologize for that.

[563] No, I don't think it is intrusive because I think it's even.

[564] deviate from that orientation towards unity, then I know this from a psychological perspective.

[565] If you deviate from orientation toward the highest unity, which you might think about as the highest goal, two things happen.

[566] One is you experience less positive emotion, so joy and enthusiasm and engagement, because positive emotion is experienced in relation to a goal, not as a consequence of achieving it.

[567] So if you're pursuing the highest goal, then you're celebrating most intently.

[568] And then if the goal you're pursuing isn't unified, then it's multiplicitous.

[569] And then you're confused and anxious and unstable and depressed.

[570] So I would say that's true by definition.

[571] What I was reading recently, I've read all your books.

[572] And I even read some of your peer -reviewed work.

[573] Because when I was going to speak to you, then I said, you know what, I'm going to do my homework.

[574] So I read everything.

[575] One of the things that you said one time in the maps of meaning, He started off the book by saying, when you were a young lad, I don't know how young you were, you said that you found the doctrines of Christianity incomprehensible and absurd, yeah?

[576] And you also said that you found, you had some kind of issue with Christianity because of the Genesis narrative and how incongruent it was with scientific narratives.

[577] You went to a pastor, you said, or church cleric or something, and then you left the church.

[578] Now, I've got a question, do you still have the same position?

[579] or have you changed your position?

[580] Well, I've changed my position a lot.

[581] I was only 13 then, you know, and I was caught up in the battle, you know, in so far it was manifested in me when I was 13.

[582] I was caught in the battle between enlightenment, rationality, and traditional narrative belief.

[583] I had no idea how to reconcile those two things.

[584] Do you feel like you can do that now?

[585] I'm doing my best to reconcile.

[586] Yes, and I think, well, I certainly can do it a lot more than I did when I was 13.

[587] Let me give you an example, right?

[588] This point, when you were 13, I think you were thinking straight.

[589] I'll be, sorry to be very straight.

[590] It's hard to believe that someone is disagreeable with you as you would manage that.

[591] Because someone with an IQ of 180, whatever you have, yeah, someone of your intelligence.

[592] When you were 13, you probably had an IQ of, I don't know, 120 or something, yeah.

[593] So you were operating like my friend over here, Ali Dawes, on his level, at the age of 13.

[594] But what I was going to say was that, you know, the reason why I think you was, because look at the Trinity, for example.

[595] Look at the schisms.

[596] Now this goes to your specialism.

[597] The idea of three all -powerful entities that Jesus is all -powerful, that the Father is all -powerful, the Son is all -powerful, and the Holy Spirit is all -powerful, but there's not three all -powerful, there's one all -powerful.

[598] You have one ultimately willing being, which is a person, which is Jesus, another person, which is ultimately willing, which is the son.

[599] The Quran states about this.

[600] ma'ttachah allah from a -wal -in -wal -in -lawed.

[601] I then let's have all o 'u 'elah in chapter 23, verse 91.

[602] It says that, Allah has not taken any son, and he did not have any creator with him.

[603] Had that been the case, they would have stripped one another for what they would have competed and tried to outstrip one another for power.

[604] Meaning this idea of three all -powerful persons is unintelligible to say the least.

[605] The idea that Jesus Christ exhibits two natures for, I know that there are schisms and there's differences of opinion among Christians.

[606] But the fact that you have this human nature, where Jesus is walking and he sees the tree and he can't eat from the tree, he doesn't know that the tree is in season or not, although he doesn't know when the hour is or whatever it may be.

[607] The Quran says it very clearly.

[608] He and his mom used to eat food.

[609] This proposition that they are limited and unlimited at the same time is an contradiction.

[610] It's an affront to logic.

[611] This will cause you.

[612] cognitive dissonance because if you want to be a rational actor and you want to be that's the thing yeah yeah i don't want to be a rational actor what you do when you do your scientific experiments that's true so why'd you why do you separate the two things because rationality should be subordinated to something above it and i'm trying to subordinate myself to that and so my my reaction to what you're saying um is that it's an in this isn't an insult i'm telling what my reaction is.

[613] It's not even a criticism.

[614] Of course.

[615] I find the discussion, that discussion, as soon as it started, I found that less interesting than what we were doing before.

[616] It was harder for me to focus on.

[617] And I think the reason for that is that it transforms to some, and I'm not saying this isn't necessary at sometimes, but it transforms the transcendent into something like an intellectual and propositional discussion.

[618] And so in some sense we're debating perhaps not the fine points of theology, because they're more like the blunt points of theology.

[619] But there's something about that that, there's something about that that isn't what I want to do with you.

[620] Yes.

[621] You know, and it isn't that it's not necessary.

[622] So let me flip it around to some degree.

[623] So one of the things I'm very curious about is, obviously, the figure of Christ is contentious.

[624] And so the Jews don't know what to make of Christ in some fundamental sense, because he seems like the last he seems like, a continuation of the prophetic tradition in some real sense, plus he was Jewish, so that makes things complicated.

[625] And then, of course, the Christians put the figure of Christ as central in some real sense, but that begs the question of the relationship between Christ and God.

[626] And then in the Muslim community, Christ is also a central figure.

[627] And so I'm curious about that, and we could say we have doctrinal differences about what constitutes that centrality.

[628] it's like fair enough.

[629] And I would also not say that I understand what that centrality means.

[630] So one of the ways I would understand that, let's say, is that in the Western tradition, and I don't know to what degree this is true in the Muslim tradition, one of the attributes of what Christ is psychologically is the logos.

[631] And so if we're engaged in dialogue, which is dual logos, then we're embodying the spirit of something like mutual enlightenment, and that's then the presence of that spirit in the genuine confines of temporal reality, right?

[632] It's something like the infinite descending to the finite to illuminate us, and to the degree that we can have a dialogue in good faith, which is also a religious notion, then we can engage in that process of dialogos and that transforms and redeems us.

[633] And then what I say, well, do I believe that?

[634] I say, well, it isn't just that I believe it as a proposition.

[635] It's that I can tell when it's happening.

[636] And so can you, I think?

[637] It's like, you're going to see that this conversation will ebb and flow, you know?

[638] And some of the time it's going to grip you, you think we're at the heart of the matter and sometimes your attention's going to wander.

[639] Your attention's going to wander when we're off the path.

[640] And so I would say that...

[641] Yes.

[642] To the degree that you and I are communicating, this is a religious way of thinking about it, is that we're doing our best to embody the spirit of the logos.

[643] And if that's working, then we're making progress.

[644] And I know that in the Western tradition, that's part of what has been conceptualized as the fundamental attribute of the figure of Christ.

[645] And I know that Christ is central in the Muslim tradition.

[646] And so one of the things I would want to know is not how we differ doctrinally, because I don't even think I'm qualified to debate you on that case.

[647] We've got the guy here.

[648] Well, Jonathan might have some things to say.

[649] But what I would like to know instead is, why do you believe that the figure of Christ is central in some sense, or maybe I've got that wrong, although I don't think so.

[650] Why do you think the figure of Christ is central both to the Muslim faith and the Christian faith?

[651] And what do you think that says about what we share in common?

[652] Because I really don't understand that.

[653] It's a mystery to me. So Jesus Christ, secular historians will look at him and differ on his existence.

[654] or not.

[655] The majority, to be fair, do believe he existed, right?

[656] The even secular stories, atheists, or agnost and whatever it may be, right?

[657] It's the simplest explanation.

[658] Yeah, it's the simplest, of course, yeah?

[659] So I believe that, first of all, Jesus Christ existed, which in the modern age is worth noting, right?

[660] Muslims actually Muslims are the only other major world religion who believe in Jesus Christ, as the Messiah, as the prophet.

[661] Right, right, and this is a strange thing, so we should definitely be trying to sort that out.

[662] All right, so this is the first point of commonality.

[663] We believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in his miracles, that he cured the blind with God's permission, that he raised the dead with God's permission.

[664] We believe that he even, you know, he created some things within the Gospel of Thomas Namish in the Bible, like, you know, but for example, the clay bird and so on, that he blew into it and it became an actual bird, that he cured the leper with God's permission.

[665] We believe that he was one of the mightiest human beings that have ever lived on the earth.

[666] And we believe that his mother was the best woman who ever lived on the earth.

[667] The Quran actually explicitly says that.

[668] Well, that seems like a good starting point.

[669] Right.

[670] And so that is the first thing we believe.

[671] When we look at the Quranic verses relating to Jesus Christ, we don't look at those metaphorically.

[672] No orthodox Muslim normatively looks at those in an esiological way.

[673] It's not echaeology for us.

[674] It's history.

[675] So we believe that this is actually historical.

[676] That's the first thing.

[677] And the reason why I mention that to you is because I listen to all of your biblical series.

[678] I think a lot of Muslims have.

[679] Yes.

[680] A lot of people like it.

[681] because obviously Yeah, strangely enough And no, and it's not very strange if you know the Quran because the Quran actually tells us to go to the people of the book and to listen to them and to, you know, and you'll find an exegesis is like, for example, Tafidabin Kethear, like one of the staple exegesis of the Quran they use biblical verses all the time.

[682] Let's go to the people of the book, let's see what information they have.

[683] Tabari mentions what you call Israeliette, which is basically passages from the Bible, passages from the Torah and so on like that, from the biblical tradition and from the Torah.

[684] So it's not really, it's not abnormal for Muslim people to be interested in Christian explanations.

[685] That's been going on for 1 ,300 years, yeah?

[686] That's the first thing.

[687] The second thing is that, why, because symbolism is important and you've mentioned, for example, Egyptian symbolism.

[688] You mentioned, for example, orisis and, I don't know, ISIS and all this, not that ISIS, I know he only thinks I'm going, a Google, but, you know, the Egyptian god ISIS, I have to make that very clear.

[689] And so on, yeah?

[690] So my question would be, therefore, before we talk about symbolism, because a symbol can be something, you can have a symbol and an expression of something which exists at the same time.

[691] For example, you can have something which is not metaphoric, because you can't have a metaphor and non -metaphoric, but you can't have a symbol and something which doesn't exist.

[692] For example, I say that you are a symbol for Western, I don't know, whatever it is, intellectualism, yeah?

[693] Possibly, I mean, this debate is Jordan Piers and a symbol for Western.

[694] Debate it.

[695] And he exists.

[696] now here's the point like you know you know that there are central doctrines to Christianity like the crucifixion the ascension the resurrection and all the above right these are doctrines how do we look at these doctrines because the reason why I'm asking you I think you are qualified or at least you have some because you did mention in your lectures that you were taking the approach of the Alexandrian school which is like origin of Alexander and his Jewish teacher Philo and these kinds of people who take what you call the spiritualizing text they spiritualize the text they were known the Alexandrian school was known for spiritualizing the text and they were aberrational in that sense and that's one of the reasons why they were seen as heretics by I think all the churches I think just origin but the origin said some things which are heretical but he has massive influence on church fathers that are respected but to your point let's say the notion that facts have meaning that is something that as Christians we should believe yes right is that God created the world with the meaningful structure, so the world lays itself out in a way that when we see it, we can see the meaning.

[697] Exactly, and this is something which all types of Christians will agree with, Catholics agree with it, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants.

[698] All of them will say, you must believe in these doctrines as happening.

[699] You cannot believe in them as symbol.

[700] You cannot believe.

[701] So the reason why this actually is...

[702] So when I hear something like that, then the question that arises for me is, what do you mean happening?

[703] And so let me just unpack that a little bit.

[704] So I did a lecture last night at the Apollo on the story of Canaan Abel.

[705] And one of the things that I proposed was that not only did that story happen, but it's always happening.

[706] It always happened.

[707] It's happening right now, and it's always going to happen into the future.

[708] And so I would say to some degree, the mere reduction of these profound stories to a historical reality is an underestimate of their truth because they're a strange kind of truth because they're the truth that always happened and is happening now and always will happen.

[709] So this came to an Abel's story, for example.

[710] You have a story of the eternal battle between something like the spirit of joyful and appropriate sacrifice, which characterizes Abel, and the spirit of resentful resentment against the structure of existence as a consequence of thrownness and the shaking of the fist at God.

[711] And that's always happening because for all of us, you know, we look at our lives and we think, well, should we be happy to be alive?

[712] Should we be grateful to be alive?

[713] And the answer to that is often, but not always.

[714] And if you put someone in the position of Job and he's being tortured to death by fate and tragedy and catastrophe and malevolence, he might well come to a point where he's motivated to take the resentful path and shake his fist at God.

[715] And we have those spirits inside of us warring constantly.

[716] And so then when I look at a story like Canaan Abel, I think, well, the question did that happen begs the question, what do you mean by happen?

[717] Because when you are dealing with fundamental realities and you pose a question, you have to understand that the reality of the confidence, concepts of your question when you're digging that deep are just as questionable as what you're questioning.

[718] You know, so people say to me, what do you believe in God?

[719] And I think, okay, there's a couple of mysteries in that question.

[720] What do you mean do?

[721] What do you mean you?

[722] What do you mean believe?

[723] And what do you mean God?

[724] And you say as the questioner, well, we already know what all those things mean except belief in God.

[725] And I think, no, if we're going to get down to the fundamental brass tax, we don't really know what any of those things mean.

[726] And so for me, belief, for example, is often reflected not so much in proposition as it is in action.

[727] If I want to know what you believe, I could ask you.

[728] And hopefully you have some idea about what you believe, but I'd rather see what you do.

[729] Can I push back a little bit with this?

[730] because, like, for example, when I was reading your book, your newest book, actually, this time, yeah, 12 more rules.

[731] They're very good books, by the way.

[732] I mean, I recommend them, honestly.

[733] Buy them if you haven't already bought them.

[734] I would specifically recommend the 12 rules for life, because 12 more rules, I have some criticisms of it.

[735] But it's good, it's a good book.

[736] But one thing you did say about it, you're really hard to believe that you're disagreeable.

[737] Really, yeah?

[738] So one thing you mentioned.

[739] in the book, you were talking about some psychological theory which I don't forget.

[740] I forget what it is, right?

[741] You mentioned something.

[742] You said there's, you know, the problem with this such and such theory is that it doesn't have any evidence.

[743] Full stop.

[744] Categorical.

[745] All this, what you're doing now, you didn't mention that.

[746] You didn't say, well, it depends on what you mean by this.

[747] It depends on what you mean by this.

[748] It depends on what you mean.

[749] You become postmodern all of a sudden.

[750] It's like you've become now.

[751] Yeah, well, that's a definite.

[752] Oh, yeah, that's a definite.

[753] Look, I think that's partly why the postmodern critique in some sense was inevitable is because we started to dig down into something like, say, the meaning of stories because that's really where the postmodernists got their impetus, because the postmodern literary theorists, sorry to drag this up, but it's relevant, they hit a mystery which was, well, if you read a given text story, or even a paragraph, and you get 100 people to offer their opinion on it, in some way you get 100 different opinions.

[754] And you can tell that if you assign students to write an essay, let's say.

[755] And so then a problem emerges is if, well, if there's 100 different opinions, and some of them even appear to oppose one another, how do you know what the true significance is of the text?

[756] And then worse, how do you even know that there is a true significance?

[757] And then you think, okay, well, that's a major problem.

[758] And then here's a worse problem.

[759] Imagine you have an assemblage of texts, like the biblical corpus, let's say, which is really a library, and it's in some sense canonical, right?

[760] Well, if you can decide on the fixed meaning of even a given paragraph, how in the world can you make the statement that this selection of text, which are much more complicated than just paragraphs, is somehow canonical.

[761] Now, the answer to that is, this is the answer.

[762] We don't know.

[763] Now, the problem with the postmodernists wasn't that they figured out that this was a mystery, because not only is this the mystery of textual interpretation, which is a major mystery, how do we understand the text, but it's also the mystery of perception because at the same time, people who are investigating perception, Jonathan has been talking about this with John Vervaki, a cognitive scientist, At the same time, scientists on the perceptual front in AI labs and neuroscientists were discovering that it's so complicated to look at the world, which is to interpret the world, let's say that it isn't obvious that it's even possible, which is partly why we don't have autonomous robots.

[764] They can't see the world.

[765] Now, it's easy for us because we just look at it, but that's not so easy.

[766] And so what's the point of all this?

[767] Well, the point of all this is that if you delve into questions deeply enough, you do run into the problem of perception and the multitude and multiplicity of perception.

[768] And that's a real problem.

[769] And so when I do something like I interrogate a question, well, the postmodern problem does emerge.

[770] Now, I've been trying to work out solutions to that, and Jonathan and I and John Vervaki have been discussing this a lot.

[771] The postmodernists were correct, I think, in their diagnosis of the problem.

[772] They leapt right to the idea that the way we solved the problem of perception is by exercising power.

[773] They just took a Marxist story and said, well, there's the solution.

[774] But you say they're here, who you're talking about in particular?

[775] Mostly the French intellectual types like Derrida and Foucault and...

[776] Yeah, I would disagree with this, by the way.

[777] I don't think Derrida or Foucault took a Marxist position at all.

[778] Well, Jonathan, you want to have that for a bit?

[779] But that's not my fight.

[780] It's a worthless victory for me. Are you sure you want to talk about that?

[781] No, no, no. I don't think, like, I don't care to...

[782] Okay, well, we can either delve into that or not.

[783] Let me just say something, Jordan, about what you were saying.

[784] That is, I think that when there's this question of do you believe in God, I think one of the problems that Jordan, no, the difficulty that Jordan faced was faced with a modern Protestantism, which was very propositional.

[785] And it was like just, I believe, and it's just a bunch of things that you believe in in terms of thinking.

[786] And I do think that what Jordan is trying to grasp at and trying to understand is actually probably closer to something that most traditional Muslims would believe, which is that if you say that you submit to God, but you don't submit to God, then that word is empty.

[787] That I agree with.

[788] Yes.

[789] Yeah, the question is, why is it empty?

[790] If you said the words, why is it still empty?

[791] And so I think that what he's grasping at is to find a more encompassing, it's like, stop asking me if I believe in God, watch me. Yeah, okay.

[792] No, but I get what you're saying.

[793] But what I'm saying is this, is that the attitude that you have towards scientific investigation is that which is more congruent with a correspondence stereotype, right?

[794] So you simply ask the question that, by the way, the Quran asks.

[795] And one of the central questions, the Quran asks us to ask Christians and Jews is, bring your evidence if you're truthful.

[796] This is the central question that Muslims are asked to ask.

[797] The same question that you, as a scientist, ask, we have to ask as well, right?

[798] And I'm using what I'm asking a lot here.

[799] What I'm saying is, this is where the cognitive dissonance may come in.

[800] It does come in.

[801] That is part of what's torn the West apart on, say, on the basis of the Enlightenment versus the religious tradition.

[802] To the degree that that's a conflict.

[803] Just to add to this point is, for example, going back to origin of Alexandria, yeah.

[804] Origin of Alexandria, because he has this hermeneutical dilemma.

[805] He has a hominutical dilemma, right?

[806] He doesn't know what to do with what verse.

[807] Is he going to spiritualize it, metaphorize it, or is he not going to do that?

[808] He was asked by an apologist called Celsius.

[809] He said, what do you say of the crucifixion?

[810] And he responds to an effect to say that not everything was true what happened in the crucifixion.

[811] The point is that when you open the can of worms of hoministical spiritualization or exegedical or, you know, metaphorization, yeah?

[812] When you you open that can of worms, what is left of Christianity is basically mythological.

[813] Now, then I will say, what makes this myth better than any other myth?

[814] Why are we investigating the myth of Christianity and not, for example, the myth of Hercules and Zeus?

[815] Why is the figure of father and son and the Holy Spirit more important to me than the Mithraic, would you call it Trinity?

[816] Yeah, well, that's a postmodern question.

[817] And you could take that even farther and say, well, why this story rather than that story, at any level of story.

[818] And that is a central question.

[819] So how would you answer?

[820] Because why did you, for example, you've done a biblical lecture, right?

[821] So why have you done a biblical lecture, not a lecture on Zeus and this and all these other?

[822] Well, I have done lectures on other religious structures, particularly on ancient Egyptian cosmology and on Mesopotamian cosmology.

[823] And I'm going to do a lecture on the Tao Te Ching.

[824] Sorry, do you consider the biblical narrative as having any level of superiority over the other mythological laws?

[825] Well, okay, okay.

[826] So let me try to address this cyclone.

[827] Oh, even he's interested in, obviously.

[828] Well, yeah, because I'm a Christian.

[829] So I've been trying to understand.

[830] So I'll tell you one thing that clinical psychologists have learned over the last 100 years despite their doctrinal differences.

[831] So there's many schools of clinical psychology ranging from behaviorism, which is very practical and strategic, and has to do with microchanges in action to psychoanalytic theory, say, on the Jungian side, which is more interested in dreams and large -scale transformations of the imagination, spans a huge range of philosophies and practical approaches.

[832] But there is one commonality, and it's emerged, I would say, empirically.

[833] The behaviorists first discovered, the behaviorist discovered that if someone was afraid of something and avoiding it, and the combination of those two things are important, because there's lots of things you should be afraid of, that you should avoid, like playing in traffic, because you'll just die if you go run out in the street.

[834] But imagine that you're moving towards a necessary goal, and you're pretty committed to it, and something comes up that you're afraid of, and it stops you, and now you start to avoid.

[835] Okay, and then maybe that gives you an anxiety disorder.

[836] It makes you depressed.

[837] Then the question is, what are you avoiding, and why, and what should you do about it?

[838] And what the behaviorist started to do was to expose people to small doses of what they were afraid of and get them to relax.

[839] And the idea was, well, if you could learn to relax in the face of what you were afraid of, then the fear would go away.

[840] And maybe you had learned in some way to associate that with anxiety earlier.

[841] Now, it turned out that that worked.

[842] But it also turned out that it worked even if you didn't relax.

[843] And so there wasn't a learning to be calm.

[844] And then the psychoanalyst said, now that's not going to work, behaviorist, because you'll expose someone to this little fear, and because the true fear is much deeper, the fear will just reemerge somewhere else.

[845] They called that symptom substitution.

[846] And that didn't happen either, because what happened, weirdly enough, was that if you got someone to confront something they were afraid of voluntarily, then they got less afraid, that was the first theory, less afraid of a whole bunch of things.

[847] So a little courage generated more, and that's a more accurate way of thinking about it.

[848] Turns out people didn't get less afraid.

[849] They got braver.

[850] And so their personality started to expand.

[851] So what you see often, one category of people who often develop anxiety disorders are dependent women.

[852] And so those are women who've gone from sort of superordinate man to superordinate man who've never established a sufficient individual identity.

[853] And maybe that comes back to haunt them later in life.

[854] And they develop an anxiety disorder.

[855] And maybe they're afraid to get into an elevator.

[856] so you can teach them to confront the elevator and to get in it and to take it and then they'll go home and have a fight with their husband and it's because they're braver and often the husband and the rest of the family will resist this woman's attempt to become more courageous because they know what's going to happen if it's successful but that is what you see is you see generalization of bravery and every psychological school knows this okay so now you asked me a theological question so I'm going to address that So I've been trying to understand from a psychological perspective, for example, why people have been gazing on the figure of the crucifix for 2 ,000 years.

[857] Now, not everyone, and doctrinal differences apart, it's still many people for 2 ,000 years, and that begs a question.

[858] Obviously, there's something about that image that's gripping.

[859] Okay, so now you might think, why?

[860] Well, why do people go to horror movies?

[861] Because that's pretty strange.

[862] Why in the world would you go be disgusted and terrified?

[863] Because that's sort of the essence of horror.

[864] And the answer is, because there are terrifying and disgusting things about life.

[865] And maybe you should go confront them now and then voluntarily.

[866] So you get a little taste.

[867] So you can build a little courage and a little faith.

[868] And so at minimum, one of the things that the crucifixion story, the passion story represents, is something like, the sum of all possible tragedy.

[869] And so Jung pointed out that the passion narrative was an archetypal tragedy.

[870] And this is what he meant by that.

[871] Imagine that you took a bunch of stories that were tragic.

[872] And so you could identify them all as tragic stories.

[873] And a tragic story is something like, something terrible happens to someone who doesn't deserve it.

[874] That's a tragedy.

[875] So then imagine you have 10 stories about maybe someone got betrayed by his best friend and someone fall prey to a tyranny, and someone died young, and someone innocent was punished by a court, and you'd think, oh, that's tragic.

[876] And then you took all those tragedies, and you took the core of the tragedy, and you made it into one story.

[877] And that's, in some sense, what the passion story is.

[878] It's the sum of all possible tragedies, insofar as that could be construed by the revelatory imagination.

[879] And then you might say, well, why gaze upon that?

[880] well the reason for that there's a story in exodus it's in numbers actually where the Israelites are lost in the desert like we all are and people are losing faith because they're in the desert and you know and not and not voluntarily in some true sense and so they're losing faith they're getting all fractious they're fighting they're starting to worship false idols they're falling apart and god gets irritated at that and so he sent a bunch of poisonous snakes in to bite them.

[881] And you think, well, why would God do that?

[882] It's like, well, have you been alive?

[883] You know perfectly well that if you're confused and lost and then you get bitter and disunited, that all you do is make things worse and that more snakes come up to bite you.

[884] That's like, that's life.

[885] And so the Israelites come to Moses and they say, you seem to be in quite nicely with God.

[886] Do you want to ask him to call off the snakes?

[887] Like, we're sorry.

[888] Get him to call off the snakes.

[889] So Moses has a chat with God, let's say, and God says, he doesn't call off the snakes.

[890] And so that's the thing about God is very often he doesn't call off the snakes, you know.

[891] And he says instead to Moses that you have to make a staff, you have to cast a staff out of bronze.

[892] And on the staff you have to place the serpent.

[893] And then all the Israelites have to go and look at the serpent.

[894] And if they look at the serpent, then they'll no longer be poisoned by the snakes.

[895] And then there's a section in the Gospels where Christ says something approximating that unless his figure be lifted up like the serpent in the desert, no one can be redeemed unless his figure is lifted up like the serpent in the desert.

[896] There's a very strange thing to have happened, right?

[897] Because it's a reference to this very strange story that's ancient in a very strange context many thousands of years later.

[898] But can imagine this.

[899] It's like it's a bad thing to be confronted with snakes.

[900] And there's a real reason that the symbol for medical transformation is a stake on a staff, right?

[901] And not just associated with the Judeo -Christian tradition.

[902] It's a much older idea than that.

[903] And so, well, there's snakes, and that's bad, and you should look at them.

[904] But then there's something like the sum total of all possible snakes, and that would be all the terrible things that could happen to you in life.

[905] And then you could think, well, maybe you need a story, that encompasses that territory of terrible things that you can then look on and that's, at least in part, what the passion story represents.

[906] Now, you can debate about whether or not it's a full account of the comprehensive tragedy of life.

[907] But like I said, I'm thinking about it psychologically.

[908] Now, there's more to it because around that story, There's also a cloud of mythology, of associated imagery.

[909] And one of those developed dreams is something like the harrowing of hell.

[910] So not only does Christ die terribly despite not only being innocent, but being good and being betrayed and being subject to tyranny and having to die before the eyes of his mother, all of that, but that's not enough that hell itself has to be confronted I would say well is that true of your life it's like well terrible things are going to happen to you and you better be prepared and then you might think well that's too much and if it's not too much it's at least enough and I would say yeah that'd be good to believe but I don't think it's true because you're actually going to have to do something like confront the reality at least of historical atrocity and human hell because that's part of your character too and in order to fully reveal what you could be then you have to contend with all of that and you have to do it voluntarily and so part of the reason I'm interested in that the Christian story let's say is because that part of the story is where the rubber hits the road in some sense it's like well that's your responsibility is to confront the catastrophe and hellish aspect of life, forthrightly.

[911] And then the question is, is that transformative?

[912] And one answer is, what did nature say?

[913] You know, you can tell the character of a man's spirit by determining how much truth he can tolerate.

[914] It's a very interesting way of thinking about it.

[915] This is a crushing weight, this notion, but life is going to throw its catastrophes at you, sometimes even if you're innocent.

[916] And if you're not prepared, you know, in faith, well, you're going to fold.

[917] And then it's going to be much worse.

[918] And how much do you have to face?

[919] And the answer might be every bit of it.

[920] Do you know, on this point, thank you for that.

[921] I think that you've really expressed that in a very powerful way.

[922] And the last comment that you made, really, was reminded me of a prophetic saying of the Prophet Muhammad.

[923] He said, I jaban to amry the mumin, wondrous is the effect.

[924] affair of the believer.

[925] Wonderous is the affair of the believer.

[926] Wanderous is the affair of the believer.

[927] All of his affair is good.

[928] And this is not afforded to anybody except for the true believer.

[929] If a subatheu sarah, shakar.

[930] If good happens to him, he is thankful.

[931] And if assabathu dara, and if negative things happen to him, he's patient and he's thankful.

[932] Right, that's a hard thing to pull off.

[933] The powerful thing is, and this is what Nietzsche was a great advocate for, ironically, he's a father of postmodernism in a sense, but he was talking about human suffering as a positive thing for the resilience or building of resilience in a human being.

[934] And this goes back to the point of purpose.

[935] Yeah, well, you know, so here's another thing that psychologists have learned.

[936] So imagine that you take a group of people and you subject them to a difficult and onerous and stressful task.

[937] But you've allowed, you've set up the experiment, so one group has that inflicted on them, let's say, and the other group decides to do it voluntarily, and then you measure as accurately as you can the pattern of physical and psychological response to those two conditions.

[938] What you find is that independent of the weight of the load, the attitude transforms the response.

[939] And so if you confront something difficult in the spirit of voluntary engagement, a whole different spirit takes hold of you.

[940] And you can measure that physically.

[941] That's exactly what I remember Viktor Frankl was saying.

[942] He was saying that those in the concentration camp who are most likely to survive are in fact those who made meaning out of...

[943] Well, Solzhenitsin said something, I think, that was even more profound on that front.

[944] He said, he left ambiguous the issue of whether or not you were more likely to survive if you were a believer, let's say.

[945] Although he was struck as an atheist by the composure that true religious believers had in the gulag.

[946] But what he did say, more importantly, I would say even, was that if you were a genuine believer, your soul was more likely to survive.

[947] And what he meant by that was many people in the gulag camps became corrupted.

[948] And you can think about them as a microcosmine.

[949] of the world.

[950] People were under tremendous stress, and one of the temptations was to become a trustee and participate in the system of oppression.

[951] And the camps in Russia could not possibly have sustained themselves if the prisoners weren't running them.

[952] And that's something to think about with regards to totalitarianism.

[953] And Sojanistan did note, and it was transformative to him, that there were people of genuine religious faith who were immobile in their commitment, to ethical action, even in the confines of the camp, even when faced with something like recant or die, and maybe not just you die, maybe your family die, or maybe you die in misery.

[954] And one of the things that transforms Solzhenits and then the world, because his book transformed the world in large part was his observation that this genuine striving to something like clarity of speech and a higher unity could withstand even the catastrophes of the Gulai camps.

[955] I want to ask you a question just before we end.

[956] I've only politely sat here just to indicate we need to wrap up.

[957] Okay, I just want to ask one last question because I'm interested in both of you in a sense, yeah?

[958] I said that, you know, from a Muslim perspective, the question that we're asked to ask is bring the evidence, yeah?

[959] If I were to bring reasonable evidence which would satisfy some kind of probabilistic reasoning that the Prophet Muhammad, we believe is the final prophet, right?

[960] That he was a true prophet, would you be willing to become a Muslim?

[961] I wouldn't I wouldn't dispute a priori the idea that Muhammad was a true prophet but I don't understand what that means.

[962] So obviously, so this is the way I'm going to look at this psychologically again.

[963] You know, it's people are granted revelations and it's obviously the case that's speak empirically that the revelation of Muhammad united a fractious society.

[964] And so it was a uniting revelation.

[965] Now, how to conceptualize, but it's not a universally uniting revelation, at least not yet or not now, because we're not all united.

[966] So why?

[967] Maybe we didn't understand the revelation problem.

[968] That's one possibility.

[969] Is the presupposition what you're saying, that unity is the ultimate objective?

[970] Well, not exactly, you know, because then you have the problem of uniformity that you pointed out, right?

[971] Even the idea of unity itself.

[972] I mean, is there not...

[973] Well, we talked about, okay.

[974] No, unity is a great, just to be clear, I believe that unity is a great objective.

[975] Yeah.

[976] But I don't think it's the old defining one.

[977] For example, if there is an injustice that is so great that this unity is more appropriate, then I can imagine situations where this unity is probably better than unity.

[978] Right.

[979] I'm sure you can as well, for example, like in Soviet Union.

[980] That would be a false unity in some sense, right?

[981] Exactly.

[982] So that's what we're doing about.

[983] Well, that's why you wanted to address the elephant under the cover of the...

[984] Right away.

[985] We can't have a false peace.

[986] Exactly.

[987] And we can't incorporate things we can't yet incorporate.

[988] Yes.

[989] The reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because I feel like it's my duty as a Muslim, especially in the mosque, right?

[990] To tell you that as Muslims, we believe that the previous dispensations as they were like Christianity and Judaism, they are part of our faith in a sense.

[991] Not in the sense of believing in the doctrines and all of that kind of thing.

[992] Like we obviously don't believe in the original sin or the resurrection, the crucifixion, all this kind of thing.

[993] We don't believe in any of that.

[994] or the Trinity, of course.

[995] But in the sense that we do believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in all of the Old Testament prophets, most of them, if not all of them, you know, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and so on.

[996] And we believe that each prophet was sent with two things, the message, which is to believe in worship in one God, and some kind of evidence to indicate their truthfulness.

[997] So with, for example, Moses and Jesus, we know what their miracles are, splitting the scene.

[998] And we believe that actually happened historically, right?

[999] We have no qualms with that.

[1000] We don't have this kind of material.

[1001] realistic viewpoint on the issue.

[1002] With Muhammad Salaam, we believe that his, because he was sent to all of humanity, he had to have an evidence base that would satisfy not just the eyes.

[1003] In other words, it wouldn't be just something that could be witnessed.

[1004] It would be something that can be interrogated and scrutinized for all times and places.

[1005] So it would be an auditory revelation.

[1006] In this case, it's the Quran.

[1007] The Quran means a recitation, yeah?

[1008] So the central message of the Quran is Tao Heit, or the idea of worshipping one God and believing in one God, as we've mentioned.

[1009] But there is an attempt in the Quran to challenge, for example, there's something called the falsification test or the inimitability test.

[1010] The Quran says, for example, that try and find a contradiction within the Quran, had it been from other than God, la wagedu fei achilaf and kath.

[1011] We have found in it many contradictions.

[1012] This inimitability challenge is to produce something as sophisticated as it, in terms of the linguistic composition as well as the structural component.

[1013] This is very interesting because now even Western academics like Angelica, Nureth and others, have said that this challenge has not been met.

[1014] It's a German orientalist.

[1015] She's recently said this.

[1016] So this is another thing.

[1017] Then you have a range of prophecies, for example.

[1018] Like if you look at Deuteronomy in 18, verse 21, it's mentioned in the Bible that one of the hallmarks of a true prophet, or a false prophet is that when they talk about the future, that it will be false.

[1019] Well, the Quran makes very specific, very specific prophecies about the future.

[1020] For example, in chapter 30, verse 2 to 4, it says, guliba to Rome, that the Romans had been defeated.

[1021] At that time, there was the Sassanid Empire and the Roman Empire, and they were in war with each other.

[1022] And that from three to nine years, that they would defeat the enemy, you see, it gave very specific timelines, it gave very specific, and this was a very risky type of prediction.

[1023] Because if you got it wrong, then it would endanger and undermine the entire prophethood of the Prophet of the Prophet Muhammad.

[1024] But it did happen.

[1025] And in fact, you'll find historical things which are not even in the Quran.

[1026] Romans defeated?

[1027] No, that Persians, sorry, that the Romans had been defeated by the Persians in a battle.

[1028] And so that's, it's mentioned, for example, the Chronicles of theophanes, which is a primary source material outside of the Quran and Sonnah.

[1029] You can find it now it's even translated into English.

[1030] He clearly mentions that eight years after this particular prediction took place, it did happen like that.

[1031] So we have a range of predictions, even that relate to the current day.

[1032] The Prophet said that the barefooted Arab, be there will be competing for the highest building.

[1033] That sexually transmitted diseases would be proliferated as a result of people having intercourse outside of marriage, and that this would be something that would be diseases that had never been there in the past.

[1034] The interest -based economy that we live in, is mentioned by the proper house.

[1035] I said in the future, interest will be everywhere.

[1036] If let meakulhu, if let me acolhu, he will not be able to evade his dust.

[1037] So this is another thing.

[1038] So for example, you've got a range of prophecies where Islam will spread country by country.

[1039] Where, you know, this is mentioned us, he's going to go, there's a had a Zouiy al -Ald.

[1040] That the earth has been expanded for me. Foraytumashariqa and maribha.

[1041] I saw it west points and east points.

[1042] and my nation will reach its points mazouyely from what was projected and ascending east and west.

[1043] If you look at the Islamic expansion, I mean, Barnaby Rogerson, who is a historian, he said that the similitude of the Muslims going eastward and westward and conquering the amount of countries that they conquered in that early period, which you can read in the book that I had given you, is like Eskimos taken over Russia and America.

[1044] That's what he said, Barnaby Rogerson.

[1045] On the point of prophecies, even people like Edward Gibbons, they agree that the prophecies of the Quran had been met.

[1046] So I have to ask.

[1047] So I don't understand the question exactly.

[1048] He wants to know if you'll convert to Islam.

[1049] No, I'm saying that.

[1050] I mean, that's the question.

[1051] Well, look, I would say to some degree, it's not up to me. No, no, but my question was, just to remind you, the question was, if I gave you evidence that would satisfy a certain level of probabilistic...

[1052] No. So you wouldn't?

[1053] No, because that isn't how I evaluate the situation.

[1054] How would you evaluate it?

[1055] This is the crux.

[1056] Well, I'm Muslim enough to have been invited to your mosque.

[1057] No, no, you always invite it, even if you were not always.

[1058] No, no, but I mean this specifically.

[1059] I mean this very specifically, you know.

[1060] I don't think in some sense, it's a very complicated problem.

[1061] Okay.

[1062] You know, when people meet me on the street, they'll say things like I met a couple of Orthodox Jews in New York and they said to me on the street that they called me rabbi which was a hell of a thing to hear you know and so and then I have Muslim people who are listening to my biblical lectures and they say yeah yes yes more than that more than that and you know they say well Peterson doesn't know it yet but he's really a Muslim and and that's very that's an honor you know just like it was an honor to be approached by these Orthodox Jews and that hasn't only happened once and I've had lots of correspondence with people and the same thing has happened with Orthodox Christians and to some degree the Catholics and less or so the Protestants and so I don't know exactly what to make of that we talked about this a little bit and let's talk about proof you know well for me the proof of faith is the attractiveness of its adherence and that's something to think about right well are you a shining example of the Muslim faith?

[1063] Well, how hard do you shine?