 And also for us to take a moment to realize what's emerging right now, what's coming into existence in the MCC space, because this is very new for the Masajid space, and when Allah SWT wants something to happen, He brings asbab, He brings causes together. So we've had a number of people over the years come to MCC and we've started a series of these panels and a few months ago when I saw the first flyer of Dr. Ariana doing a lecture on addiction, I was excited. I said, Alhamdulillah, now we have another person because we had other people who were working on this. Dr. Ahmed was an addiction specialist from Stanford and he's done a few panels. So MCC is really now a pioneer. If we as a community and the board and the board of trustees allow this to emerge and not nip it in the bud, because there's a lot of things that are coming together that could really like a lot could happen out of this and MCC can be a pioneer in this discussion and establishing a model for how does the Masajid act as that, how does the Masjid act as that space, how do we bring together the like-minded people to address this issue of addiction in our community. I want to begin by just mentioning a few things that we have to remember in our dean as Muslims, as the way we walk in life and the way we look at things, we cannot address complex issues with simple solutions. I want to say that again. We cannot address complex issues with simple solutions. And I'll give you an example. Years ago when I was studying, not years ago, now it's been decades ago, when I was studying in West Africa in Mauritania, a friend of mine from the UK, he mentioned an improper application of the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and it's a Hadith that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, a man came to him and complained about poverty. He was poor. He was looking for a handout. So what did the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam do? He could have easily pointed somebody to give him money, but he asked and he said, do you have anything at home? Because he was basically saying, I have nothing. He says, no, do you have something? He said, I have a clay pot. He said, bring the clay pot. He brought the clay pot. He auctioned it at the masjid. Who will give me something for this? One dirham? No, two dirham. He's teaching him, you do have some resources. He auctioned it off and he said, who has an axe head? Somebody said, I have it. He said, I purchased it now with this two dirham. So he's showing them how you can take your resources and now transfer it into an axe head. Now get me a piece of wood. The Prophet Muhammad himself affixed the axe head to the piece of wood, gave it to the man, said now go into the mountains and chop wood. Now that's a very, very profound deep hadith. We can use it as a model of how to create self-sufficiency in people, work ethic, recognizing the resources that you have. Unfortunately, when people see that, and this is where the UK story comes in, my friend from the UK said that sometimes when people come to the masjid and ask for financial assistance, they'll say go chop some firewood. Now is that what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did? He didn't. He didn't oversimplify this complex issue. He walked the person through a few steps. Later on when the man came back and he said, how are you doing? He said, oh I'm financially stable. Like he was doing very, very, very well. So in the same way when we look at addiction, we cannot draw certain things from our tradition and then address it in that simple way, like the people who said, oh just go chop some firewood. So if somebody comes to you, a friend, a family member, a community member, says I'm dealing with addiction, we cannot oversimplify the response and say, oh it's haram, just stop it. Or if you were really practicing your Islam, it would be able to stop it. Just make toba, just have a spiritual experience. Tasawwuf is enough, or ihsan is enough, you know, spiritual, just focus on that. That's an oversimplification of how our deen actually is. And you know, for many of us we may have this book at home called, tib bin nabawi, just a show of hands. Who has the prophetic medicine as a book at home? Prophetic medicine, tib nabawi. How much of that book is actually literal lessons from the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam? Very little. It's a few hadith. The rest of it is what the Muslims gathered when they were exposed to Greek medicine, when they were exposed to Indian medicine, in India, when they were exposed to the medicine of the Persians. And they said, you know what, I think this is congruent with our faith. Let's take this in. Umar radiallahu anhu actually sent two people, when he was the Khalifa, to the Byzantines, he said, learn everything about medicine from the Byzantines, the Romans, the Rumi. And when they came back, he said, now place everything you've learned on the scales of the Quran and the Sunnah. We keep what is congruent and we leave what is not. So he wasn't saying, oh, the Quran and Sunnah is enough for us for medicine. He was saying, no, look at what's available, what our other humans in their human experience have collected. And then we'll put it on our scales. So this is what we're doing. That's what tib nabawi was doing. It was saying we have some indications that the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam would say, use honey in this situation. You know, when you balance your foods, if you're going to eat date, which is dry and hot, eat cucumbers with it, which is cold and wet. Have this balancing of the diet. So then the Muslims just went and they ran with it, so to speak. So this is what when we see examples in the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam's life of him addressing addiction, we have to say, these are indications. He's showing us, go in this direction, have this response, but then fill it in. Take it and run with it. There was a young man who came to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in the Masjid context. And he complained. He said the thing that was most beloved to him was zina, illegal intercourse. He loved it. He said, I love it more than anything in the world. When he said that, now he's coming to the Prophet, not to boast about it, but to say, I have an issue, can you help me with it? The Sahaba that were around him, the companions that were around him, they said, Matt, like quiet, quiet, don't talk about this. So what are they doing? That was basically the board of the committee. We're saying, no, no, no, no, no, not in the Masjid space, not around the Prophet. No, no, no, come on. This is not the place for it. Keep it, keep it, keep it silent, stigmatize it, silence it, keep it in the shadows. We don't need to know about it. What did the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam do? He walked him through a process. He said, do you, would you like this for your mother? No. He said, and people are like that. In other words, that person is somebody's mother that you're interacting in that way with. Would you like this for your sister? No, of course not. And people are like that as well. They don't want this for their sisters. And he went through all of his female relatives, you know, step by step. We could say this is almost a type of talk therapy or CBT or that he was walking him through, indicating like, don't, he didn't just say, it's haram, don't do it. Stop it cold turkey, which you know, and you know, there are, there are people who can stop cold turkey. But he didn't tell him that he walked him through a process. Then he made dua for him, the spiritual side. Sometimes people might say, oh, just make dua and it'll stop. That's not the way the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam treated this man's sex addiction. He said, he walked him through a cognitive process thinking about it. And then he made dua. So he had both the cognitive side and the spiritual side, which we need that in our approach to recovery. So now if we look at that hadith and other hadith or say the famous Sahaba, Abdullah and Noaiman, who was addicted to alcohol, he was addicted to alcohol and he was a Sahabi. And he was punished for it because there is an Islamic punishment for alcohol use. But after he was punished, some of the Sahaba started calling him names. And the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam stopped him. He said, he loves Allah and his messenger. He loves Allah and his messenger. You don't know who this person is. And Dr. Rayana mentioned a few times about the spirituality of addiction and the spirituality, the level of people who have addiction. And the mountains that they are and that they could even be bigger mountains and we can't, you know, make a person just the sum of their actions, which is why the move is away from referring to addict, because you're not an addict. You are a human being with thoughts and love and fears and hopes and emotions and struggles, one of them happens to be addiction. So you are not an addict. So how did the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam respond to him? And how did he, how was he incorporated in the community? So I know these stories, but you know, for me, and now I'll just a little bit of how my path to learning about addiction, because as Dr. Rayana mentioned that we have to have compassion. We have to approach this with compassion and with understanding. And part of that understanding come, or part of that compassion comes through understanding. I've had friends and family who have struggled with addiction, both narcotics as well as alcohol. On my mother's side of the family, they had, you know, I've had an uncle who passed away due to complications of alcoholism. So when Dr. Rayana was mentioning about the end result being death, and this was the uncle who was closest to me on my mother's side. My father's from Jordan. My mother's from Mississippi. And we spent a lot of time with him. And so to watch him go through this process of alcoholism and not get treatment and eventually pass away of complications related to that, it was very, very overwhelming for me. And Subhanallah, I mean, I got the news that he had passed away right as I was going into a final for a course of one of my master's programs, and I should not have read the test at that time, but I had to, I just, I read it, and then I just had to push through it and then process the grief afterwards. But it is, it's very, I'm still grieving. And so I know the effect of what it could do to a human being. There might be, this might be relevant or not, but there's a song called Tennessee Whiskey. And there's a lyric in there. It's about a man who fell in love, the love of a woman helped him get over his alcohol addiction. And it goes on like this, but you rescued me from drowning in the bottle. And it goes on. It's a very famous song, you know, it resonates with a lot of people. And I think it's because of the deep meaning that it captures. And every time I hear it, I tear up because I think of my uncle who did drown in the bottle because he did not find the love. Whatever that would have been in spirituality, in a path, in treatment, in a woman, in family and friends that rescued him from drowning in the bottle. More recently, I had a student of mine through Tlava Foundation where we worked with the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. And to give you an idea of incarceration in America, the majority of people who are incarcerated are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, nonviolent drug offenses. And they're being treated for their addiction by prison, which is the criminalization of addiction or the criminalization of also as well of mental illness because they're overrepresented in the prison population. And so, you know, about 20 years ago or so, I started teaching Muslims who were in prison and then we founded an organization, Tlava Foundation, to teach Muslims in prison about our faith through a correspondence and a distance education program. And over time, we just focused just on the Islamic element. And this was a tipping point or a turning point for me. Brother Justin, Abdul Salam, and he's given me full permission to share his story. He said it could benefit other people. He was a person who, as Dr. Arianna was saying, you know, some of these people are deeply spiritual. He's one of the most deeply spiritual people I know. And he's getting up for Tajib every single night. And he's memorizing classical texts in Arabic. He's teaching, he's leading the prayer in the prison chapel. He's, for all intents and purposes, he is an Imam. He knows the Dean, he practices the Dean, he teaches the Dean, he converted to Islam in prison, taught him, you know, and then we enhanced that. Now he's translating texts and he's, you know, from Arabic into English. When he went home, because he spent 10 years of his incarceration working on his Islam, just the Islamic, the element of his Islam was his knowledge of the theology and practice and the soul as well, Tezquia, purification of the heart. But he didn't address his addiction. So when he went home, he got paroled to a place where there was drug paraphernalia all over the place. We actually tried to have him paroled to California, but because the way the parole system is, you have to go back to the county where you committed your crime, which goes against, you know, logic. So anyway, he goes back to the only place that he had there. There was drug paraphernalia all over the place. A renter had five dogs living in the house. You can just imagine the chaos. And as Dr. Arianna was mentioning, once a person goes back from a situation in prison, it wasn't a rehab center, but he did not have the access to the, there is narcotics and alcohol in prison, but he didn't have as easy access so he was able to stay away from it. Plus there's a tight knit Muslim community that will check you at every, you know, at every point. So he had that support system. He goes home. He doesn't have that. He starts his downward spiral. The coping mechanism that he falls back on is his addiction. And later I asked him, I said, why didn't you reach out to us at the time? He said, because I was afraid of letting you down. And I said, never have that, you know, feeling. We're here for you at any point in your life. Needless to say, he kept spiraling down. He mixed two drugs. It was a bad mixture, caused a psychotic break. And at that point he actually wanted to take his own life. So he doused himself with gasoline with lighter fluid, but could not get himself to light the match. So he concocted an idea to commit a crime, and they called it suicide by cop, where the cops would then shoot him and the spark from the bullet would set the lighter fluid on fire, and that's how he would die. So he did commit a crime in the process of the crime. And mind you, he's in a psychotic break now due to the drugs that comes out of his addiction that was untreated by the prison and then put him back into society with no support system. So he goes, he commits the crime. Eventually when they catch him, they stack everything up and then he's now facing 37 years in prison, which is stemming from his addiction. So what it caused for us, me as an individual and as an organization at Tayba is saying, okay, we're offering the Islamic education, but now we also have to recognize this other element of their life as part of their Islamic education. So when he reached back out to us and said, could you send me the books, because I've lost all my Islamic education books, I said, no problem, Abdullah, we're going to send you the books, but at the same time, just as you feel that studying that Islamic knowledge is part of your individual obligation, your Fard Al Ain, I want you to go on a deep inward journey to find out what happened and why, introspection. And so with my encouragement, he did, he went on that. He started looking into a lot of unaddressed issues. Unfortunately, the prison doesn't give him enough resources, so he stayed on a waiting list for six months to see a professional. Once he got to see a professional, it was somebody with an undergraduate degree in psychology, not even clinical training or addictions specialty. So then I started asking other therapists, you know, for their advice, and there's issues with offering therapy to a currently incarcerated individual across state boundaries, the person in prison, all of this. So I said, okay, let's do some maybe psychoeducation. So I reached out to a Muslim mental health professional who has a lot of experience in addiction, and she said, ask him about childhood trauma and abuse. And it was a conversation I never had. And as soon as I asked that question, the floodgates opened. And so then I said, have you ever addressed that? He said, never. Nobody's ever asked me. I said, all the addiction treatments that you have done in prison, has anybody ever touched on that? No. So one of the books that was recommended to me, actually by my mother, was Gabor Mate's book In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, and I sent that to him, and he said that was the best book on addiction that he's ever had. And Gabor Mate, if you're not familiar with him, he's got a lot of things online. He runs, I believe it's a methadone clinic in Vancouver. And in that book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, there's also some Muslims who share their stories. So then I also, at that time, I met Dr. Amir, and I started asking him to correspond with Justin. And that helped me learn more about addiction and understanding it and having more of that compassion. And then he suggested Kraft. He's the Kraft program, the smart recovery program. I actually got certified in it to facilitate a group for friends and family. So that helped me learn more about addiction. Since I had not gone through that experience myself, but I could understand what, you know, I could understand more of what another person is, and also to help out families who have gone through that. And then, you know, I could speak a lot more, but this is the book, Getting Your Love When Sober Without Nagging. It's called Gilos. It's part of the Kraft recovery. And if you have a friend or family, you know, this is a good book to read. Another book that I read to understand the 12 Steps was Russell Brand's book, which is called Recovery. Cover is off of it. But he was, Russell Brand is a comedian from the UK, deeply addicted to heroin, which is one of the most difficult drugs to get over. And he was also extremely addicted. He had an extreme sex addiction as well. And he said the 12 Steps actually got him out of those two addictions. And now if you see his podcast and you see what he's talking about, you can see, going back to what Dr. Arianna was saying, that deep spirituality that's actually there that was hidden. And I'm just going to run through some of this, because this is just kind of like my history of understanding it. We were talking in a group, an MSA group, and it actually, a person stood up and he, he shared in front of almost 200 people some of the struggles that he's going with. And then responding to him in a way that I've learned through some of these programs, also motivational interviewing, which is part of that, bringing out that internal motivation and intrinsic desire to change. Using some of that, it started this whole conversation where it was very, you could hear a pin drop in the room. And I talk about it in some of the writing. I'm kind of going very quickly. But Ostad, Obedullah Evans, opened up about his father being a heroin addict and how he had distanced himself from his father. And then he mentioned that one time to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Sheikh Hamza said, well, you know, in another realm might have been a saint. And he said, what are you, he never thought about that. He said, well, because those people who are seeking, they're not satisfied with this dunya that's right in front of them. They want something ethereal, something beyond this dunya, but they're going about it the wrong way through substance. And so he mentioned, this book, Blessed Are the Attics, The Spiritual Side of Alcoholism, Addiction and Recovery, which I bought right there in the hallway on Amazon. And then, and I'm just rushing through this because of time, another brother who facilitates an intensive therapeutic community within one of the prisons where we work with Ahmad Adisa, and has been facilitating 12 steps groups for many, many years, I started talking to him about it. And because of his also deep study and practice of Tosov, Tezquia, Ehsan, you know, whatever name we're going to call it, Ehsan by any other name is still Ehsan. I said, could you do, you know, and he was talking about a lot of the 12 steps from the spiritual aspect. I said, could you do a 12 steps explanation of the 12 steps with your understanding of our tradition of spirituality as Muslims? And so he went on the road to do that. As he was looking for some references in the chapel library in the prison, he came across this one, Recovery, the 12 Steps as a Spiritual Practice, wrote by Rami Shapiro. It's a Jewish name as well. I'm not Jewish, although sometimes when I wear a kufi and you know, people will tell me shalom. I guess it's, anyway, I'm not going to go off into that. But anyway, so these are just some of my experience. It culminated in about three years of Abdul Salam, just in the one I told you his story, and Ahmed Adisa, who runs 12 Steps for Intensive Therapeutic Community, he's one of the facilitators in the prison, they both wrote this book together. And we published it through Taba, Overcoming Addiction and Islamic Approach to Recovery. And I encourage you all to read it. Whether or not you're dealing with addiction or if you have family, or as Dr. Ariana was mentioning in there, you know, it could have been addiction, it could have been substance, it could have been a personality, it could have been a behavior, it could have been a person. You know, it has a lot of crossover. And that's what Russell Brand as well talks about, that the 12 Steps has applications for everybody and understanding it, you know, to that. So I brought some of these books, they're available and I can talk more about that. But it's been a deeply transformative journey for me to understand more about addiction. I now approach it more with compassion. And when you have that, when you have that as a spirit inside of you, that you approach it as compassion, people will notice it right away, right away. It's just like kids, you know, if a kid walks up like a kid just walked up to the door and if you greet him with a smile, all of a sudden the kid now wants to interact with you. In the same way adults, any human being is very attuned at a very deep level to that acceptance. And so if you just, you don't even have to be an expert. If you just say, I'm here with you and I'm not, you know, stigmatized or judged or shun or anything, people will open up to you. And I've had people text me, students of mine, Shaykh, I can't go on like this forever. And then I have to go through it, so what are you talking about? You know, go through the suicide response that we should all be trained in to say, what are you talking about? But he was talking about his alcohol addiction, 3 a.m. at Texan. And so we should have those relationships where people can open up and in our massage it. And that's why I'm so excited about, you know, this opportunity to look, to go forward and say, can we use this as the message as a space? In the Bay Area we have about 80 massages and musallas. There's not one that holds the AA meeting. There is actually one. There's one. Does anybody know which message it is? What's that? Do they do that now? I don't know. They may. That might be recent. But before Lighthouse, does anybody know? It's the San Francisco Muslim Community Center led by Imam Abu Qadir, who is part of the community of Imam Murad Din Muhammad, Rahimullah. And they come out of the nation of Islam. And so they realize the importance of having this, you know, this treatment. And this is not something just in the inner cities. Wallah al-Azim. When I was doing religious counseling here on the weekends for, and Muneer knows this because they're coming to his office too. People are coming to the message all the time saying, I have this issue with myself, with my child, you know, it's here. It's here in our message. We just now have to just to recognize and say, okay, you know, oh, you're here for the Quran class. It's over there. Oh, you're here for addiction treatment. It's right over there. You're here for tarawih. It's right over there. Like, what's the difference? You're here for the food pantry. It's right over there. You have financial struggles. It's right over there. Oh, you have Zakat application. What's the difference? You know, it should be just like, Marhaban, welcome. You're here to get sober. 12 steps meeting in the back. That's what we, I had one young man who was a teenager, his mother brought him in. He told me that his introduction to marijuana was at the masjid. Another Muslim at the masjid introduced him how to vape with the marijuana cards that don't smell. You can't even smell them anymore. And I, I counseled him right here in that office over there. And then in this hallways during the boys groups that we used to have on Friday nights, one of the fathers came up to me in front of everybody. I mean, in fact, I was like, are you, you're, you're disclosing this about your addiction in the hallway. Somebody could over here, but he was just, he just wanted somebody to talk to and knew that we were doing this friends and family recovery group in the masjid here. And so he opened up about his addiction and was crying in the hallways right over here. So it's here in the masjid. The Muslims who will go to Doherty Valley, so many high schoolers at Doherty Valley are, are using, are using substances to cope with the stress of their parents wanting them to get 4.2 and 4.3 GPAs. Still don't understand how that happens, but there's so much stress. And so they, that's what they're coping with, they're going to. So it's here in our masjid. It's here. People are coming to tell me, he said, one young man said, I come to the masjid high sometimes. And his parents don't even know about it. So we have to do something. What does that look like? I don't know. But I hope, and I pray, and I'll look at the camera, to the board of directors, to the board of trustees, I hope, and I pray, and this is my solemn request, that this is not nipped in the bud, and that you don't take the position of the Sahaba who we understandable say ma, ma, like literally it means shut up. We don't want that. We want you to take the prophetic approach of the Prophet Muhammad SAW, which is to have that welcoming and the addressment and the treatment. How that looks, Allahu A'lam. But its place is in the masjid. And to the supporters of the masjid community all over the the US and the world. If you're giving your donations to a masjid, that board of directors and that board of trustees is beholden to you as a congregation and as a community. And if you are not seeing this being treated in the masjid, whether it's an auxiliary space connected close to the masjid or facilitated within the masjid, but if it's not masjid led and owned and facilitated, then you have a right to ask that board of directors and that board of trustees, where is my money going?