Imam Omar Suleiman is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research and a professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - House of Macadamias: https://houseofmacadamias.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Omar's Instagram: https://instagram.com/imamomarsuleiman Omar's Twitter: https://twitter.com/omarsuleiman504 Omar's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imamomarsuleiman Yaqeen Institute's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@yaqeeninstituteofficial Yaqeen Institute's Website: https://yaqeeninstitute.org PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:39) - God (16:25) - Loss (25:14) - Life after death (26:53) - Why God allows suffering (40:18) - Seeking the truth (47:58) - Islamophobia (1:12:55) - Muslim ban (1:20:24) - Meaning of prayer (1:34:01) - Mecca (1:39:12) - Malcolm X (1:42:23) - Muhammad Ali (1:47:09) - Khabib Nurmagomedov (1:53:19) - Prophets (1:59:31) - Quran (2:05:17) - Ramadan (2:12:21) - Future of Islam (2:15:30) - Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis (2:23:37) - War and religion (2:33:29) - Israel and Palestine (2:59:13) - Hope for the future (3:03:56) - Prayer
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman. He's a Muslim scholar, civil rights leader, founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and he's a professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University. He's one of the most influential Muslims in the world and is a fearless, kind-hearted human being who I'm now proud to call a friend.
As a side note, allow me to say a few words about Israel and Palestine. While this conversation with Omar Suleiman was mostly exploring the history and beauty of Islam and the Muslim community, we did delve briefly into the topic of Israel and Palestine. This topic is an extremely challenging one and an extremely important one.
It has deep roots and implications in US politics, in global geopolitics, in military and religious conflicts, wars, and atrocities. and basic struggle of all human beings to survive, to protect their loved ones, and to flourish as individuals and as communities. I did not want to cover this topic in a solely scholarly fashion.
Much like with the war in Ukraine, it is not simply a story of history, politics, religion, and national identity. It is also a deeply human story. To cover this topic in the way that my gut and my heart says to do it, I have to talk to everyone, to leaders and people on all sides, Muslim and Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian, from refugees to soldiers, from scholars to extremists.
I'm not sure if that's possible or wise, but like Forrest Gump said, I'm not a smart man. And maybe you know how the rest of that goes. I just like to follow my heart to whatever place it leads. I ask the Muslim and the Jewish communities for your patience and support as I explore this topic. I will make many mistakes and I'll be listening to all voices so I can learn and do better.
I've become distinctly aware that my approach of talking to people from all walks of life with empathy and compassion, but with backbone, can create enemies on all sides. I don't quite yet understand why this is, but I'm learning to accept it as the reality of the world. Hopefully, in the end, whatever happens, whatever silly thing I do has a chance of adding a bit of love to the world.
Thanks for going along with me on this journey. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got NetSuite for business management, House of Macadamias for satiating delicious snack, and ExpressVPN for privacy and security.
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Chapter 2: How does the conversation address the Israel and Palestine conflict?
Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
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And I have to be honest, there's a bunch of aspects of that that I don't understand as deeply as I should. I think a lot of that you can catch up by reading books, but there's just no replacement for experience. Like I said, you should work with the best people, but you should also use the best tools for the job.
You could do that if you go to netsuite.com to access their one-of-a-kind financing program. This show is also brought to you by a sponsor that brings a smile to my face every time I think about them. Because they're delicious. Not the sponsor, but the thing they make. It's House of Macadamias. They ship delicious, high-quality, and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door.
They have bars, whole nuts, whole nuts mixed with a bunch of different stuff that makes it all super delicious. I mean... I try not to consume all the snacks that I get from them, that I purchase from them, because I'm trying to actually have like a snack thing for guests when they come over if they're sort of hungry or they need a little bit more energy for the longer conversations.
I'm trying to get the Hassan McDame nuts snacks there because They're small portions, super delicious, very healthy, and there's a lot of variety and there's no way you can go wrong with any of the options. And so I like to be a professional adult, responsible kind of human being that... cares about the joy and the well-being of the guests that come over.
Yeah, so House of Macadamia doesn't just make me happy. They provide the possibility, the infinite possibility of joyous snackage for the guests that come over. I think last time C. Grimes was over, somebody that I've gotten to know more over the past few months. She's a brilliant, brilliant artist, but just a fascinating human being.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of discussing the topic of God?
A VPN is obviously really important. Or maybe if it's not obvious to you, if you don't use a VPN, I think you should really be using a VPN for many activities that you do. It protects your privacy. There's a bunch of features that allows you to do, like if you watch Netflix and you want to get access to a geographically restricted content, it allows you to do that.
But it's just a good tool to have. In your toolbox, if you're on the internet. And my favorite VPN by far, the one I always recommend is ExpressVPN. I've used it for many, many years. Makes me super happy. It works on any operating system. It's super fast. Click a button, pick a location. It just works. It does one thing.
It does it extremely well, which is what I love from software and from, I don't know, from anybody. I love meeting people that just are extremely competent and passionate about one thing. And they do that thing better than anybody I've ever seen. And that sort of fills me with joy, just admiring their excellence. And even more than that, just admiring their joy at the thing they're doing.
Their lifelong passion manifested in this one very specific activity. I don't know. It's beautiful to see. And so ExpressVPN in some way represents that for me. Go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Omar Suleiman. As-salamu alaykum, Omar.
We've been trying to do this a long time. The world tried to prevent it through the funny ways that the world does, but here we are. I'm a huge fan of yours. It's a huge honor to talk to you. I appreciate it. Thank you for making the sacrifice and coming down, or coming up, I guess, to Dallas. I appreciate it. It's a short flight, but a long journey. Let's start with the biggest question.
Who is God, according to Islam?
God is the most compassionate, the most merciful, the creator of the heavens and the earth. He is one God. He begets not, nor is he begotten. He is unique. He is omnipotent. He is beyond the limitations of man. He is beyond the constructs of our imagination. But he is ever accessible through sincere supplication.
When you call upon Him alone, one God, He is closer to you than your jugular vein, the Qur'an tells us. He's known by many names and attributes, but His essence is one. He's one God. No human likeness, no human imperfection can be attributed to Him. No partners, no image of Him can be constructed.
And that is God. So God represents, he is a feeling of closeness that is accessible to every human being?
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Chapter 4: What insights does Omar Suleiman share about personal struggles with faith?
You know, Islam requires a complete submission to Him. And one of the things that happens is that if we project some of our bad experiences with authority onto our relationship with God, then we immediately perceive him in a certain way that might not allow us to gain a closeness to him because maybe we didn't have the best relationship with our parents growing up.
Maybe we didn't have the best relationship with authority figures in our lives. And so this idea of an ultimate authority to whom you submit yourself can be very difficult. You know, Malcolm X, who was one of the most prominent converts to Islam in American history, talked about the difficulty of prostration for the very first time.
Putting your head on the ground, putting your face on the ground and praying to God is a very humbling thing. Submitting all of your affairs to him is very humbling. And ultimately you have to relinquish control. And you can't relinquish control without trust. So you have to learn to trust God. To trust God, you have to know him. And to know him is to love him.
And so for me personally, growing up, going through certain difficulties, Having a sick parent who struggled in her life with cancer and with strokes, dealing with racism in South Louisiana growing up, it was important for me to learn about God through my difficulties, for example, rather than let those difficulties turn me away from Him.
Many times, people put a barrier between them and God because they can't make sense of the things that are happening in their own lives. And so they project anger towards God and at the same time deny their own belief in him and do away with this natural disposition that every one of us has to believe in him. So there are intellectual barriers, certainly. There are experiential barriers.
But I think that one of the beautiful things about Islam is clarity. There's an explanation for his existence, there's an explanation for our existence, there's an explanation for the existence of difficulties and trial, an explanation for the existence of desires and distractions, and it all comes together so beautifully and coherently in Islam.
I think that for many of us, we want to be our own gods. And ultimately, we create and fashion gods in ways that allow us to still be the ultimate determiners of our own fates, of our own story. And that's very unfulfilling when you fail at your own plan. But when you realize that there is one who is all-knowing, that there is one who is all-wise,
you actually find peace in submitting yourself to him. And so submitting your will to him, submitting your desires, submitting your own fate to him becomes actually an experience of liberation because you trust the one that you're submitting to. You trust his knowledge over yours. You trust his wisdom over yours. And that gives you a lot of peace. And then you have direct access to him.
You pray to him, you call upon him, you supplicate. And everything in your life suddenly has meaning. You know, in our faith, Everything is about intention and there's an intentionality even behind the most seemingly most mundane actions. A morsel of food in the mouth of your spouse, your family is looked at as a great charity.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of Mecca in Islam?
And it gives the Muslims a unified direction of prayer. It's sort of at the center geographically of who we are. And when we pray towards it, It's not that that's the only place that you can supplicate turn towards, but it gives us a unified sense of direction. It gives us a unified sense of prayer. So Mecca is our qibla. It's our place of direction when we are alive and when we are dead.
Chapter 6: How does prayer unify Muslims worldwide?
So actually we pray facing towards it. When we die, we are also faced towards it in our graves. And it kind of gives us that unifying spirit. So this is the valley of Mecca. also in the Bible, spoken about the Valley of Becca, and where other biblical scholars would also mention Mount Paran.
And it is the place that Adam, in the Quran, Adam, peace be upon him, first had a place constructed there as a place of worship from the angels towards God. And then when Abraham settles Hagar and Ishmael in Mecca, they build this house of worship.
And that is where the gushing springs of Zemzum are mentioned, where God sends an angel to give a miracle to Hagar and Ishmael that they can sustain themselves from as they're not left in the desert. So Ishmael being the firstborn son of Abraham is given a place and there's a story and a history that's going to unfold from that place of Mecca.
And then Isaac is born, peace be upon him, 13 years later. And there's a story and a history that comes from that. But ultimately, Mecca is the center. Mecca is where we turn towards for prayer. Mecca is where we perform the pilgrimage, the Hajj pilgrimage.
Once in our lives, at least if we can, physically and financially, if we find ourselves capable, we at least perform the Hajj pilgrimage once in our lifetimes. but there are other pilgrimages throughout the year you can go. At any time of the day, any time of the year, you will find people that will be performing the pilgrimage, an iteration of the pilgrimage in Mecca.
And it's an incredible practice. It really is a place where you feel like you're no longer in this world. I mean, it's incredible. So we all go there donning what's known as the ihram garb. So the men will wear just these white garments, which are resembling, or they resemble the garments that we will be buried in.
And whether you're a king or a prince or a peasant in classical terms, whoever you are, whatever distinction you have, you're all the same. And the women will wear a simple garment as well. So you go there, you relinquish all of the pretensions and concerns and superficial barriers and distinctions. that exist in this life.
And we do what's called tawaf, circle around the Kaaba, symbolically putting God at the center of our lives. We do seven rounds between Safa and Marwa, the two mountains, where Hagar When she once ran between those two mountains with her baby Ishmael, looking for water, trusting God, was provided for.
We too go between the two mountains of Safa and Marwa to express that trust in God and to follow in that way. These are ultimately, these are the rituals that Abraham himself engaged in, in our tradition and the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, engaged in. And so we engage in the exact same rituals and there are divine wisdoms to them that we may not even be able to unpack and reflect upon.
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Chapter 7: What role did Malcolm X play in changing perceptions of Islam?
And it just, it looks like this perfect optical, you know, vision of just beauty when you see people in unison, standing, bowing, prostrating. And you don't know who the person next to you is. And that's where, you know, Malcolm X, you read about the history of Malcolm X. When he went to Hajj, that's where his entire worldview shifts. Not just his previous baggage, but...
the dream that he then had, the possibilities that he saw for people to be able to overcome some of the false distinctions that we have, race and class, and to see God as one and to come together and worship him alone and also seeing each other equal participants in that worship.
If we can just linger on it a little bit, I think you've mentioned that Malcolm X has been in part misunderstood. What are some aspects of him that are misunderstood?
I think reading his autobiography is... Extremely important for anyone that wants to understand him, right? So you read him his own words. Malcolm lived the tragedy of being a young disenfranchised black man in America who went through all of the difficulties that were posed in a 1950s America. towards him.
I mean, he went through the system and it was awful for him and he had to pull himself out of that and make himself into an incredible orator, an incredible leader that suddenly had a pretty empowering vision and a calm and nonetheless courageous, but a calm presence to him. And was able to bring together people, especially uplift black people in America, to believe in themselves.
Young men in America, in prisons in particular, will read the autobiography of Malcolm X and see hope for themselves. To come out of the darkness of, you know, being imprisoned not just by... the bars in front of them, but also by what they thought to be their own worth prior to that moment. And so Malcolm climbs out of that and he goes through multiple phases.
So Malcolm dies as an Orthodox Muslim who does not believe in the superiority of one race over the other. finds great tranquility in the practice of the Hajj, great clarity. And I think you read his letters from Mecca and he talks about his change, his transformation in particular. And it was a process. It's a process for him.
But he inspires the likes of Muhammad Ali to become the person that he becomes and inspires many other people till today to really see themselves and see the world differently in light of that understanding of monotheism.
So he was deeply a man of faith, and throughout his life, the nature of that faith has changed as he grew, as he interacted with, I would say, a cruel society that he was living in.
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Chapter 8: How does Omar Suleiman view the future of Islam and interfaith relations?
His coherence. I mean, he was incredibly eloquent. I mean, poetic. And just unwavering. Seemed unbreakable. So as relentless as he was in the ring, he was even more so outside of the ring. The man could not be broken. And everything was stacked up against him, but he perseveres.
And he does so then through Parkinson's and chooses to live a life of giving, a life of service, a life of using his platform to bring up issues of importance and to champion the rights of others. So he wasn't satisfied at any point in his life with simply being a boxing great, a boxing champion. He uses it for so much more.
And so he goes down as one of the most famous Americans period of the 20th century, one of the most transformative Americans period of the 20th century, not just American Muslims. And a lot of people that loved him when he died would not have loved him if they were around in the 1960s and the 1970s. You know, they said they loved him when he couldn't speak anymore.
You know, many of those who celebrated him at the time of his death would have been his greatest opponents. At the peak of his career. And when he was taking the stance that he was taking.
Yeah, he was fearless. And part of his faith was helping him take the fearless stance. But throughout all of it, given the strength, I think he's also a symbol of compassion. Through all the fun kind of... Yeah, the poetic nature of who he was and the fearless nature of who he was. There's always like a deep love for the sport and for humanity.
Absolutely. And that's the thing, right? It was so obvious that despite everything that had happened to him, He never loses himself, neither to the fame nor to the fear. He always stays himself. He's authentic. And I went to his funeral and it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen because... Everyone in Louisville, Kentucky had a story with Muhammad Ali, right?
The guy that he saves from committing suicide, the school kids, the hotel shuttle driver, the gas station worker. Everyone has a story of Muhammad Ali in Louisville, Kentucky. And when he passes away, everybody comes out. and stands in front of their homes and they take the casket and they drive around the streets of Louisville.
And he had this dream, I'm very close to some of his children, incredible people, by the way, just incredible human beings. And he had this dream that he shared with them that he was jogging around the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, and everyone had come out to wave to him. And so he's running around jogging and waving to everybody in the streets of Louisville, Kentucky.
Then he gets to the cemetery and he says he flies into the heavens. So his dream, and he had this dream years ago, I mean, if you look at his funeral, it's such a beautiful, you can't make it up. It's such a beautiful moment where it seems to come to reality because everybody in Louisville just comes out and just waves by to his casket.
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