 I'm very happy to be here today and happy also that we have a generous amount of time. History is something that I have great interest in and I also regard myself to be an educator but I never studied education. A lot of the questions that you have and a lot of the ways that you have are looking at education and the product that it produces in the students I was never trained that way. So therefore when you ask a lot of these questions I don't probably understand them like you understand them but I think by give and take and by your asking questions and explaining what you want to be if I don't understand then we can probably arrive at something that is useful for you. For me the study of history is so important that it doesn't really need much justification and no doubt that's because of the fact that in my own life it was the study of history that changed everything. When I went to the University of Missouri at 16 years of age I really wanted to know the truth and that was actually what motivated me through all my undergraduate career. What is the truth? What is reality? Why are we here? Career didn't mean anything to me. I never in for a moment in education I wouldn't say that starkly but like what are you going to do with this that did not happen and I went to college in 1964 that was you know when the 1960s were beginning to heat up and of course then I was in the whole reality and turmoil of the 1960s and a lot of us including myself it's like really all we care about is like what are we doing here? Why are we living here? And we were questioning the views of our parents and all sorts of paradigms. I was never a hippie I like to always explain that because I didn't like the hippies but I was very politicized and I was very concerned with philosophy and understanding. When I began at the University of Missouri I had to take a rural history class rural civilization and the professor was a very good professor he was the head of the department and that was professor Nowart and when he talked about the history of the past and the church and how Christianity had been changed and things like that this really affected me profoundly like this is what I want to know and so then I decided to study history and history became my first major then I took English literature later as a second major again to try to discover reality because I saw that philosophy I saw that history cannot really be meaningful if you don't have a philosophy of history you have to have a conception of what you believe to be true or otherwise you know you will drown in all these facts and so then where do you find the truth so I looked at psychology and I looked at philosophy and then to me literature became the most inviting of all those subjects because of the way the literary criticism is done you know which involves things like studying the history it is behind the literature the sociology that's reflected in it and then people like Shakespeare and Milton they go into the psychological dimensions of human beings and things like that so but for me history was really an important study and one of the most important things and I hope this responds to the questions that were just raised but you know when you look at history and when we look at everything we have to look at paradigms and cognitive frames that what are the conceptions that we bring with us and we have to be really critical about that and I think that as educators the most important thing to focus on are the paradigms and the cognitive frames so today I probably will just give you a little history lesson in which we look at the effect of paradigms and cognitive frames and you know we can also see perhaps how the secularist view imposes its own extremely anemic and empty cognitive frames on reality and distorts the whole view of history and we we have a responsibility as Muslims you know to set our own cognitive frames and you know in other words like how how do we view reality and what are the prisms through which we see reality and you know when we look at history at that you'll see that history is extremely rich and history is extremely untapped and we have a major responsibility to study history to research history to write history today in the time we have we probably will only be able to talk about some very few things but I hope even in talking about them you'll see how rich these these subjects are and how you present that to a child or to an elementary student or a middle school student or a high school student you know that's what you have to figure out as an educator regarding whatever it is that you teach or a university professor but this is extremely important and you know we have to emphasize the fact that facts never speak for themselves you know it's often said right but let the facts speak for themselves no facts never speak for themselves they can't do that facts must be interpreted facts have to be interpreted and the way that we interpret facts is through what we call paradigms and cognitive frames some people might use paradigm and cognitive frame as essentially the same thing I don't have an adequate philosophical training or epistemological training to be able to say really how they should be used but when I use it the paradigms are big cognitive frames and then you have cognitive frames tend to be often a lot smaller you know so for example you know if we take Darwinian evolutionary theory and the different views of history that come out of that the different views of the universe that come out of that that's a big paradigm in my use of the word and then you have a lot of cognitive frames like for example primitive religion primitive people when we look at that like what are primitive people what do you know about primitive people you know and and really most of what is believed about primitive people is nothing but a projection of the inadequacy of Darwinian theory it's not true it's not true and it's certainly not a closed case they said that so like primitive people you know that's a cognitive frame which is part of the paradigm which is the Darwinian paradigm as much as that paradigm has changed okay so you know cognitive frames are the way we understand this is what enables us to understand paradigms are the big pictures and we put the cognitive frames in them and you know this is really important you know for example are men superior to women does Islam teach them that's not the way Islam actually talks about people Islam talks about responsibility that's that that's our that's our cognitive frame and we have a narrative so the fact is that men are burdened with greater responsibility than women that's what it says that men have authority or they translate it in different ways but really it's because men have certain responsibilities in the law that women don't have why because women have children because women are mothers potentially and because in that they have to be sheltered there's certain things they cannot usually do so the men have to do that doesn't mean that the men are superior to the women why do women not have to pray general prayers it's because they're not responsible to do that and this is actually a mercy for them that's the way we look at it in the sharia because it's like you have been removed from the responsibility why do women will be you know a woman can transmit a hadith and the hadith is completely safe but why do you need to women witnesses and important law in certain matters especially monetary matters because of responsibility why because it's not a question is bishi truthful or anything like that but it's like when you go to a court of law there's all sorts of things that happen you know so let's say for example that that you witnessed that so-and-so loaned me ten thousand dollars and not one thousand like i say and then you're going to go to the court of law and say that no it was ten thousand and if i'm a powerful person i may be able to put tremendous pressure on to intimidate you so therefore you have to win that makes it easier that makes it easier that's what a lot of our people have said but this is important about responsibilities so again we have to get the cognitive brain right that why are you saying superior to we're not talking about hierarchy of being that we're talking about responsibilities and if you have more responsibilities and you fulfill your responsibilities then in the garden you will have a great reward and your degree may be higher than so-and-so and if you don't fulfill your responsibility you'll be lower so that tells us more about superiority it does never in this world it's like did you keep your responsibility most of us probably here i don't know many of you and i don't know your backgrounds but a lot of us come from really privileged backgrounds right i've never been hungry in my life you know i was allowed to study anything i wanted i could go to any school i wanted to um you know i had good health uh hallelujah i had wonderful parents and grandparents and great grandparents great grandparents who told me about america back in the 1860s and 70s and how they went west on the cover widens and how they were afraid of the rivers because it's so difficult to go across the river and wagon they weren't afraid of that native americans or anything like that but like the rivers that was a great fear oh here's another river you've got to take the the wagon across the river when they all drown you may lose everything you know so this means people like she comes to use it he comes from a very blessed background look at his father look at his father okay so what does that mean it means that that she comes to use it has immense responsibility and he fulfills it he strives to fulfill it and you also probably like that as well you know you were able to go to the university you were able to study you probably made good grades your parents probably took good care of you so that means you have huge responsibility and you have to fulfill that and if you do you'll be superior you're going to high degree you know some of the questions we had on saturday about abuse and about insanity and things like that and you know one brother oscar asked the question about people that grow up you know where all they know is drugs and prostitution and crime and things like that and you know i'm trying to answer that question you know it's like you know those people a person like that god does not hold them responsible for what he holds you for responsible for because you're able you know you were not blighted by that test people like that if they can come out of the test then they will be giants you know diamonds are made from what coal you take the coal you know she's only good for burning and you put it in the heat under immense pressure for years and it may turn into a diamond you know so uh we have to get paradigms and cognitive frames right now you've got to always look for the paradigm look for the cognitive frame you've got to flesh it out and in the way we speak the language that we use this is really really important so we will give you some examples of that because it's not a valid view of the world and uh secularists are extremely intolerant and the secularists impose their worldview on us many times it's like wherever you get the academic establishment if you don't cater to evolution you know you have a hard time because that's the golden cap and it's a ridiculous idea it has no metaphysical merit whatsoever chance cannot account for anything random does not exist in the metaphysical world in the real world god creates as he goes to create a species among the most incredible things that he creates and species are demarcated one species never leads to a number of species we have no indication of that in history whatsoever you know but uh pervert butterfield he said that and he wanted to defend historians like himself who wanted to be honest but who were not committed to secular uh points of view and we are certainly not committed to a secular point of view and he said the blindness of the blind the blindest of the bluff the blindest of the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions the blindest of the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions presuppositions being popular to frames and paradigms and other things like values and blithely imagine happily imagine and no big deal blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess it that's really important and and this is one of the most important things that we have to say is you know to flesh out what are the presumptions in our books what are the cognitive frames what are the paradox and then is that valid is it not but to assume that well i don't have any you know i'm just objective like you said those are the blindness of the blind people who as you said the blindest of the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions and we cannot make any progress in education or science or history or anything else until we are able to examine presuppositions and cognitive frames you know if you look at the greatness of someone like uh albert einstein one of the greatnesses of iceman is that he is able to examine the presuppositions of the newtonian world you know and if you look at things like quantum mechanics that in quantum mechanics it's like you see that the newtonian paradigm the newtonian physics is based on a paradigm that the structure of reality is based on the wave and the what you call the particle the particle on the wave that's the great dualism of newtonian physics and for hundreds of years westerners believe that everything in reality could be studied and could be predicted on the basis of understanding points and waves then you give to quantum mechanics and einstein also is one of the people you know who's pushing in that direction and all of a sudden the point in the wave cannot be distinguished in you know so the ability to accept things like that the ability to examine cognitive frames this is really really important the greatness of malcom x and hajmadi uh shahbaz royal falcon shahbaz he said shahbaz is from shahbaz royal falcon you know feta noble youth you know shahbaz one of the greatest things about malcom is he's always able to re-examine the way he thinks his cognitive frame and if he sees it doesn't work he will change it that takes genius that's why malcom x is a genius malcom x was a brilliant and it's courageous too because he will scrap the cognitive frame if he finds that it doesn't work for people and he will look for one that is greater so um the blindness of the blind or people cannot do that most human beings cannot do that most human beings and even most thinkers most academicians are not capable of examining their paradigms in cognitive frames we can't do that and and we will see when we look at some of these examples that they're afraid to do that we'll look for example at the the thamud script you believe that thamud thamud did exist without any question they exist and they have a script called thamud which we look at but how did you date it and how do you date it and so they will say well we'll date that around 500 600 bc why because if they date it another 600 years back they will blow up everything that they believe to be true about the ancient at least so i can't go there i've got to protect the hypothesis one of the fallacies of thought you know fallacies are really important to study you know i think that's one of the logic is important but one of the most important things in logic that i believe we should be teaching people from the beginning are fallacies fallacies you know for example you don't speak of individuals as you speak of groups don't speak of an individual as you speak of a group you know we talk about the will of the nation okay and we might talk about the will of like the white middle class in america in in tea party america right okay so that's a valid statement we can make generalizations about tea partyers or say oh about the will of the nation sometimes like world war two but you cannot assume that every individual that is in that nation has that will field see that's a fallacy and it's a very common fallacy it's a very common fallacy so fallacies are very worth saving the hypothesis is a very important hypothesis a fallacy because it's like if i accept this paradigm that you're talking about if i accept for example we date them would expect at 2000 bc i would say today is 7000 bc you know then all the hypotheses about the ancient middle east are turned upside down everything has to be rethought everything has to be written to be written and academicians don't like that they don't and so academicians will defend their hypotheses to the death you know we can prove that muslims came to the americas at least 200 years before columbus i can prove it to you that the king the mandinka king of molly sent 2,400 boats across the atlantic filled with mandinka warriors and apara warriors 1312 why would he do a thing like that because he knows how to cross the atlantic anyway and we can talk about why he knew that there's lots of reasons why he did it but this gold hole did bend our hills you know that you go to america you get gold and the king of molly was based on gold it controlled the gold markets of the world that's why he even gives up his throne to lead the journey and then we know that they were there because we have terracottas which a lot of you have seen of mandinkas in ancient america that are so perfectly done that we can identify their tribe and their profession it's amazing and from when do we date them about 1300 1300 of the common era so these are among the warriors who came over but like do you think that's easy to prove it's easy to prove to a lot of african americans because they didn't buy into the cognitive frame and this is empowering for them but for a lot of whites especially tea party whites no sir because like you're going to blow in in 1492 full of the sail to ocean blue absolute nonsense okay so uh they would defend the hypothesis they were defended in fact the terracottas of mandinkas who came to the americas in the 14th century uh a german an austrian i think he's austrian discovered it from uh but now is his name and uh he discovered the the basement of the national museum of mexicans because like the mexicans didn't really want to be descendants of black ancestors even though the mandinkas are noble people but see even there it's like and i'll say even negative americans it's like what you're gonna make us africans we didn't know that we're not worth anything we didn't make so there's all sorts of minefields that are there and hypotheses that people are going to defend that's why when we talk right about things like this and talk about things like this you have to be really careful about how you do it uh simply because uh you are threatening you're empowering certain people i think everything we talk about today i would doubt that anyone here would have any problem with it because it is something that confirms our world view but other people know that's not true they will walk every inch of the way because you're leading them down a path where their cognition doesn't work anymore you're altering their cognitive frames you're threatening the way they interpret reality and many people won't let you do that so uh motherfield said that and then arnold twinby is one of the great historians of our time arnold twinby he regarded the secularist who is blind of his own suppositions and twinby writes a lot about that twinby detested you know like if you want to if you don't believe in god you don't believe in religion you know you're free to do whatever you want but don't impose your world view on me and twinby regarded the secularist who is blind to his own suppositions to be like a prisoner who pronounces himself free because he is unconscious of his chains the secularist who is blind to his own suppositions is like a prisoner who pronounces himself free because he is unconscious of his chains um then i wanted to look at um a beautiful statement from al-amiri al-amiri uh whereas the muslim thinker who died at the end of the 10th century it's about 100 years before imam al-ghazali and sheikh al-qadr jilani he was from central asia and he he's very intelligent he writes really interesting things but he says this is really nice knowledge is the starting point of action and i think this is really useful for us knowledge is the starting point of action action is the perfection of knowledge they both go together knowledge is the starting point of action action is the perfection of knowledge superior types of knowledge are only desirable for the sake of the useful types for the sake of useful types of action you know so and i think i think that you'll see that uh you know history history is really critical material because history has so much to do with what you believe to be true what you believe to be false um how you understand the quran how you fail to understand the quran quran is historically a mural really and truly but you have to know a lot about history to know that really and truly in a little knowledge is a dangerous thing the quran requires great knowledge it requires profound knowledge especially because the quran never addresses the bible for example what is the bible the bible is a very special and minor part of the legacy of the children of history the quran addresses the whole reality of the children of israel and it tells them about the things that they differed about and most of what is preserved are the things that they differed about mistakenly and so the quran will tell us for example if jesus was not crucified but it was made so to appear and what was the first thing that the christians disagreed about who knows what is the first thing the christians disagreed about this is really important because you know after the fight now the broken china then the victor sweeps out the garbage or puts it under the carpet so you don't know what really happened but the first great debate in christianity was about crucifixion was jesus the christ or not because it is the christ it is the messiah you can't crucify it that's the definition of messiah the messiah is a victor t s alea refers to christ is the tiger christ the tiger jesus said i did not he said john baptizes the water i baptize with fire the sword knows i'm a messiah messiah is a man of war and satan when he tempts jesus in the bible and he puts him up on the parapads of the temple he says cast thyself down throw yourself out of the wind jump because the angels will pick you up it's not not true you might bury that the messiah because it is written that you will not you messiah messiah satan shaitan does who he is that you will not stumble on a stone but the angels will pick you up because that's the messiah you're going to crucify him never you will not he will be delivered and in traditional belief of the rabbis and the children of israel the messiah cannot be harmed the messiah cannot be touched that's why paul believed that christ was crucified he says that the crucifixion is an escandal it's a scandal the greek word scandal means a stumbling block because who can accept that no one can accept it like like this is proof that jesus was not the christ if you killed him that's why the jews say we killed the messiah the son of mary you know in other words like he was not the messiah you know because we killed him and our killing him shows that he couldn't deliver himself but you know saint gerome says the blood of christ the people these was crucified we could say the blood of crucified had not dried in the earth the soil of jurism but that there were those who said it is not him it is one who looks like him and in greek they use the word tokein tokein which means the same as shubhya exactly the same they say shubhya and these were called docelics d-o-c-e-t-i-c docelics and many early christians were docelics and the proan comes to say that they were right and you were wrong sorry you missed the vote the docelics were right you killed them all you got rid of them you know you you close that chapter of history and you know as if it never was but this was your first issue like is that jesus because like it's like they can't crucify him he is the messiah and people said and it's not him it looks like him but look at the lower body and even in the in the gospels as they are transmitted to us today the church gospels they say that christ when he is carrying the cross stumbings to the ground and then another man has to come and pick up the cross and carry it for him as a mercy to him and this is not jesus christ because the messiah is strong and the prophets and the messengers are strong you know you take the strongest wrestler in arabia and the prophet who is not the restness of someone throws him to the ground and he said no no you have to give me another chance that you did something that does it again does it again and he said i should have you know that this is you know like this is not normal this is not beautiful the prophet is very strong because the prophets and the messengers were the most perfect of all human beings they were the most intelligent and they were also physically strong and jesus was like that too so who is this man who's stumbling is he this is an ordinary human being and they say he looks like jesus in the upper body but he looks different in the lower body these things are really important and if you look up at dosetting in the internet i think you might be discouraged if you want to look at a good article on dosetism then you could look at the encyclopedia of religion and ethics and i think you can look at the article of dosetism and he will show you that for example the christians know today maybe they've heard some of us talk you know the christians always are trying to cover their weak spots but you know they so they will present dosetism to you as if this is just a gnostic idea that some early christians had no dosetism was never identified with any sect not the gnostics or anybody else although all the gnostics of christianity were deceptic except for maybe one you know but it was not a sectarian view it was an early christian view dosetism and you know all of the apocrypha all of the books that are not canonical books of the bible you know they're not accepted by that you all of the apocrypha they give what we call the acts of the apostles the acts of the deciso of christ they're all deceptive except for one for example the acts of john john is sitting on mount olives the mount of olives and he's looking at calvary where the crucifixion took place and he is depressed he's crying as i believe it says and then it says jesus comes to him on the mountain and he says john i'm jesus this is this is i and that's someone else that they crucified very very interesting so i mean the portland is really amazing really amazing we can we can talk about many aspects of that but the first is sort of the bakaras addressed to them who is sort of the bakara addressed to you for one of the main sorry let's say the Jews right as also the christians of any israel see that's also very important to know that christianity is totally a very israel phenomenon it will declare itself not to be but the reality these are also paradigms about the difference we have to get them right which religion is older christianity or Judaism who would know what what do you say okay when it's older christianity or Judaism we've been told to do yeah christianity they're both about the same age because you don't refer to the children israel before jesus usually as jews we sometimes do and sometimes you can do that it's very rare the jew and jews as they emerge in history they emerge after the mission of jesus christ and they grow out of the development of the tawun of the mishnah and the gamara and these are written in the first century the third century the fourth and the fifth in the sixth centuries and one of the main goals of Judaism rabbinic Judaism as it develops after christianity is to get the judae christian out of the church because the great threat to the jews was not the trinitarian christian it is the judae christian the jew who believes in moses and follows the law of moses but also believes in jesus the son of mary as the messiah and probably a lot of the jews some of the jews of medina were the judae christians abdullahi bin salam for example may well have been a judae christian okay and these are like jews but they believe that jesus is the messiah and they still want to live with the jews because you know they eat their food and they pray their prayer and you know they circumcise their boys their children and and stuff like that and so it's like you have to get them out and this is why when the talmud is attacking christians it's always attacking jewish christians judae christians not attacking the roman christians because they don't care about those these are trinitarians no jews are going to be tempted to follow that like this is crazy you believe that god isn't the triune god like no jews are going to believe that but you believe that moses was a prophet you follow the law of moses and then you say the son of mary was a messiah but that we don't accept you know um in any case uh useful knowledge useful knowledge enables us to be better and to do with this food uh we have an ethics of thought study and research that's the point that i want to make there and this is actually based on the writings of sheikh uh hasin haddana we're seeing him who is one of our contemporary scholars that we and he refers to this also useful knowledge is knowledge that enables us to be better and to do what is good and of course as muslims we see useful knowledge and useful knowledge is vast and history is useful knowledge it's a very important knowledge and we have an ethics of thought we have to think right we have an ethics of study and we have an ethics of research seeking the truth we don't want to distort things we don't want to cover things up there are people who do that who who weed out the weeds of history so that things um we must seek out true and beneficial knowledge and one of the things that sheikh the ad-rahman haddana uh hasin haddana he says is um ethics in islam are not restricted to the realm of action alone but encompass all aspects of human behavior inward and outward thus we have an ethics of thought study and research just as we have an ethics of day to day social interaction part of our ethics of thought and this should be emphasized in the present information age is to seek out beneficial knowledge avoiding what is worthless and detrimental and separating the weed from the chat and these are my those are actually my words the last one today knowledge of the past pre-history and history belongs to superior knowledge and it gets useful action it does it gives you your identity it's very important very important if you believe that muslims didn't do anything in history and you think it always was fight with each other and betray the trust and like you know um just you know one problem after another then how do you feel about yourself how do you feel about your religion you know when you know that muslims did things like we developed paper we made it accessible to people we developed the numerical system so that we could facilitate um uh calculation we are the ones who are the major influence that leads to the rise of colleges in the west and the phd and academic freedom and the professorial chair and that humanism in the west also comes from us then you have a different view of yourself right and if you also are an american and you know that muslims were here before the europeans you don't think that affects you you know uh when cortez conquers mexico city town of chitlán what did he find there you know what he found right what did he find so i found it had many mosques muches metkites etiocales and pagan temples etiocales and beautiful houses and pisaru says the same thing about where he goes and even in new mexico the spanishes believed that the apaches had among the muslims and were doing what they had and that they prayed like muslims in their camps okay and today we say like look what crazy people they thought they were muslims in america can you believe that they thought they were muslims in america before we got here no you have to take that seriously they're definitely were muslims here before the europeans and but we will prove them we will prove it and almost certainly they had some kind of influence on the native americans not to say all native americans were muslims no but probably there was a compatibility between those of them who were muslims and those of them were not and these are very important things to study so knowledge of the past prehistory and history belongs to superior knowledge and begins useful action it has a special relation to islam because it enables us to discover the truth of the divine message it gives us identity it gives us self confidence it gives us self respect certainty of faith it increases sound faith and emotional attachment to the religion and to the lands and the peoples and the languages that we hold dear and that are essential to our religion and i think that you'll see that these things we talk about today they all fall under that heading now i'd like to sort of begin as much at the beginning as we can even though to do that we should even talk about things like the origins of the universe and big bang theory and evolution evolutionary theories i thought we'd want to do that today in arpita that's very good and even here would be appropriate to do but let's just look at human history and first of all we look at things like the old stone age the new stone age what is the stone age do you know the stone age we have old stone age paleolithic and we have new stone age neolithic that's prehistory um what are we talking about we talk about stone age people pre civilization and we would what are we talking about we talk about civilization cities and cities that's all you're talking about cities okay so the stone age is an age that is before cities did abraham live in a city you know when he went when he made his migration he probably lived in a tent um was ibrahim was abraham primitive the prophet muhammad thought he said i've lived in houses of play and he's no doubt and often he would be intense as well um was he primitive um you know why is it that the building of cities is so important for us in the definition of humanity a lot of traditional thought in the world greek and indica and others believes that cities are actually the manifestation of the decay of humanity okay the cities produced the worst and the worst situations so um you know this is very important first of all um arabia and we would probably we would talk about arabia a little bit today as much as we find it appropriate and we have time but the arabian peninsula is a neolithic treasure chest it's never been studied really only barely been studied the neolithic period is usually dated in arabia something like a 7 000 bc to about 3000 bc and things that are before that you know and today we often believe that history goes back a long time um how we believe that why we believe that are things that also need to be studied carefully i've never done that but i just basically just accept what they say but the paleolithic they usually put back to like a hundred thousand bc up into about 7 000 bc and what's the difference between the old stone age and the new stone age that in the new stone age people become much more artistic they begin to design things more they put more uh art in their influence and their axes and their arrows and things like that so there's a there's a difference between the old stone age where they often make things but they don't decorate them very much they'll make axes and bows and they make different types of cleavers you know but they just use them they don't really they don't decorate them very much so that shows of course that they were primitive right backward people why why does it do that you think the prophet muhammad sallam wouldn't waste his time to decorate his axe when there's so many other things to do like pray or fast many people want to do it then fine but um and so this is very important to say what were people like in the paleolithic and arnold toinby is among the people who believes that the most superior of all human beings were those of the paleolithic and he believes that when you look at the neolithic you see a very distinctive spiritual decline so that's very important that's very important and you know we won't go into that great depth you know but that's very important but neolithic arabia which is arabia you know seven thousand bc six thousand bc is rich full of treasures full of interesting things us some people say you can't walk the distance of a football field in arabia without stumbling over an ancient tomb for arrowhead or other remnants of the new new stone age all this needs to be studied all needs to be studied very carefully and interestingly in ancient arabia in neolithic arabia there were at least four races of people that were there there were semites the Arabs are usually regarded as semites they were mostly in central arabia at least we see their remnants in central arabia and there were then sumerians who are the sumerians the sumerians who are there but where what did they do in history we're going to talk about them a little bit more today the sumerians these are the people that begin Babylonian or Iraqi civilization and we don't know what you want them we don't know where their language came from but they were in arabia they were there there were also Egyptians Egyptians who will lay the foundations of Egyptian civilization and there were also nubian type people black people african looking people you know they were they were there too they're the four groups very very interesting things and then all this begins to change at the end of the neolithic and one of the reasons why it begins to change is that the earth begins to dry up and the ice pack of the ice age is melting and this begins to change the whole configuration of human history but see this is another thing if you think about ancient civilization ancient people were worth talking about who do you think about the ancient mesopotamians the sumerians the Babylonians you think about the ancient Egyptians and you think maybe about the ancient chinese of the yellow river valley these three represent three major ancient civilizations in googleville cities and again it's like this is why it's so important to get the paradigm right that in fact are they ancient that's a relative statement right but like with regard to the paleolithic and the neolithic they're modern and what they are doing and this is really important we have to keep our eyes on the bulk is that before that people don't live in Egypt they don't live in the Nile valley they don't live in the Iraqi Mesopotamian river valley and they don't live in the yellow river valley of China if you go in the neolithic and you look at Egypt you won't find hardly any human beings there you will find some hunters who come in and go out some fishers who come in and go out and you find the androfolks who are not human beings apparently they're not human beings they're not related to us in DNA and they probably couldn't talk they were very strong people and they're usually killed off by human beings in history probably because they can't talk you know so they can't organize like you can if you could talk you can organize you're very dangerous but if they can just live together and work together almost like animals then they're very susceptible so they say that the neanderthals probably be produced by coming together in certain grounds where they find spouses whether they married or not we don't know whether they were well colored or not we don't know but they have these customs but they those are the best lands and human beings will take them away they can't go back there anymore and they can't find spouses so they say that's maybe one way that they die off they're also killed a lot by human beings but in ancient Egypt but in the neolithic and there's nobody there why why what was the Nile Valley life you know is it because of seasonal flood yeah what would happen when the Nile would flood it would flood you know with immense floods that would flood the land 100 miles to the east and maybe 50 miles or so to the west and the floods are powerful floods and then also if the flood is gone and the Nile appears can you get to the river there's papyrus everywhere papyrus will cut you to bits and they're hippopotamuses that are very dangerous they're crocodiles that are very dangerous they're disease there's disease there's serpents snakes so the Nile is virtually impossible to live in nobody wants to live there Iraq was like that too the tibers in your phrase they are even more dangerous when they flood and the yellow river of turnips like that too very dangerous river valleys are dangerous by system so why do people choose to live there because they had no choice they had no choice because the beautiful grasslands that they lived in in central Asia in india in Rajasthan in the Sahara desert in Arabia they have now dried up the animals have often died there is no water and so you've got to leave before that you could live off the land you could have a tent you could live in a shelter you could hunt you could gather food and you could live very well but then when the world changes you can't do that anymore so therefore you have some people from these desert areas who will go south or north they will go looking for lands where you still have water where you still have grass where you still have forest so then a lot of people go into what will become black Africa some people will go up into Europe Europe was empty land you know because it was covered with ice now it's it's being opened up the ice is melting and and then there's some people that do the impossible which is to go to live in the Nile valley or the Tigris Euphrates Valley of Iraq or the Yellow River Valley and also we could talk about the Indus Ganges Valley of India these are all post-Nedolithic and again as Toynbee points out that look for the prophet he doesn't actually say it that way Toynbee uses words like creative minority you know which we could talk about but we could say look for the prophet because what Toynbee is saying that look to make the transition of leaving the assumed pastoral life of the vast grasslands of the Sahara and Central Asia and Central India and Arabia and to go into these river valleys there has to be massive social change and there has to be a fundamental restructure of society organization of society and Toynbee believes this requires very special people and Toynbee wouldn't be bothered if he said prophet because we would say that's the word we were prophet but he said that had to be there and he calls them creative minorities that are just minorities and that when people's following by what is the word that he uses but it's a word that means like affability like they're they're very pleasant they're very nice you want to follow them they don't make you follow them you want to follow them he's so beautiful so he wins you by charm that that's probably the world worth it climate users they dominate my charm and look we can show you a new way to do it we will be just to you and that's why also you know the beginning of civilization which is the beginning of these cities that were and again we will we have to talk about this a little bit further too because there may be worse cities before that but the cities of Egypt and of Iran and of China you know this is a major transition and it requires lots of things but first of all you have to protect people from the river you have to build up the land you have to do all sorts of things and you've got to have government you didn't have government before the Arabs never had government they didn't have rulers they didn't have kings and you know you have got to also you know provide for the people with agriculture you have to store the food you have to distribute the food there are all sorts of things so these are this is a major change in history but it's a response to the challenge of the deserts that are spreading in the world and so here you have the first cities that we know of again what's that progress you know it's change and it is monumental change and Torendi would say that when it begins this is a lot this intuition not historical proof but you know historians always try to figure it out and then you look for evidence but he would say that when this began it must it was a very noble society and it was a very just society and then oppression comes in the creative minority is replaced by the dominant minority an elite that wants power and privilege and they begin to oppress the people and then they also defy the people and some have wealth some don't have some have access to privilege some don't and so like when we look at ancient Egypt who do we think of favorites right and Torendi would say you must look for it because it couldn't have been that way it couldn't have been that way and there's evidence for that in Egyptian mythology and Egyptian history Torendi doesn't just make it up but he said that there was a period in Egypt which is we could say the prophetic period in which there is justice and there is harmony and then that is broken by the domination that will lead to the emergence of erotic Egyptian Egypt and then you have the oppression the dominance of the favorites that come in okay and you have something similar to that that may happen in other places as well but again it's like it's really important you know for us you know to look at this big picture and you know to be able to understand development civilization in the right way okay so what we don't want is an unimagined or poorly imagined pre-sidney class now there's don't assume that just because what human beings were were doing in the Sahara desert when it wasn't desert or what they were doing in Arabia when it wasn't desert don't assume that this was backward or uncivilized just because they didn't build cities just because they didn't have organization because you can't make that assumption and these are people who did not leave us much in the way of relics like the pharaohs leave all kinds of stuff but you know you cannot assume that the story of the pharaohs is any more true or is any more real or is even better than the people who don't leave evidence what kind of archaeological evidence would Abraham have left other than the carpet he built the carpet he rebuilds the carpet but you know his tents and his flocks and so forth what kind of remnants they don't need anything see and then to judge him on that basis like these were backward people you see that that's not thinking of this it's not thinking problem so in any case Arabia is the major formative area of near eastern civilization all near eastern civilization Egyptian Babylonian Syrian all of it comes out of Arabia and so therefore Arabia is really important you'll notice that when we study ancient history that we never talked about it you just talk about Egypt you talk about Mesopotamia and you might talk about something else a lot of other interesting things to talk about what about Gambia what about the Gambia river valley that's also ancient that's really ancient really and there you have rice cultivation there you have mango cultivation cashew cultivation and that but and like what was going on in Gambia that's very interesting nobody studies that mostly because like these are africans and give me a break it's like they had civilization where they're human just like you know they all have civilization of America you know those were after this your after 500 dc probably coming out of Gambia probably coming out of the Gambian river and we we have a lot of work to do this is really important but um Arabia is the formative area of all near eastern civilization that we know Sumerian Semitic Egyptian the civilized populations the city builders of the ancient near east all had their roots in Arabia including the Egyptians and the evidence of Arabian rock art indicates that there were probably these different all these ethnic groups there okay uh now um I just want to I try to put this together this morning and so it's not not carefully done but I want to have something that you could look at makes it a little bit easier for you to follow my hope but here we have to make another point and this is like the Arabic language uh what kind of a language is Arabic what family does it belong to submitted and we usually call it Semhamido Semitic Hamido Semitic and today a lot of people prefer to call it Afro-Asian it's like they say Indo-European you know say Yaphethite Yaphethite you know they say Indo-European and these are big families you know you have in Africa the Afro-Asian family is one of the biggest ones while the Semitic languages are spoken in Africa Ethiopic Tigray Tigrenia and then you have a Hamidic languages like Berber and Hausa and so forth and then you have also uh the language is in between which is Old Egyptian Old Egyptian is you can't say you can't put it in one camp for the other but it's closer to Semitic than it is to Semitic okay so that's the family that Arabic belongs to and uh what are other languages that belong to that family it was Hebrew Aramaic Syria lots of them some of the languages in the family are ancient some are middle some are new modern only one is modern not many um what is the most ancient of all the languages that we know that belong to the Hamido Semitic family what is the most ancient what would you say yeah Aramaic Aramaic you're just guessing this is all right it's all right it's all right what would you say how would you say Hebrew no the most ancient of them all is Arabic very important and uh a lot of you are right when Christians are not going to tell you that in fact they have things out websites out talking about how Hebrew is older than Arabic and Aramaic is old absolutely not Hebrew is middle Semitic Arabic is the most ancient form of Semitic no so this is something very important also um some linguists theorize that Afro-Asians the Afro-Asian proto-language that is the old old language from which Arabic and Hebrew all come was spoken during the fifth millennium dc like there was a language that all these people spoke together you know like 4000 dc at the end of the neolithic but they're russian scholars of Vladimir Oral and Olga Stolbova they wrote in 1995 they have a very important dictionary that america compared to Semitic Hamido Semitic they suggest that this proto-language should be dated around 10 000 or 9 000 dc and because arabicus was close to it then we can very easily argue that the way that the prophet sallallahu sallam spoke Arabic the way that the Arabic language is expressed in the Quran this is the way that the people the arabian speakers in arabia were speaking 10 000 dc that is 12 000 years ago 9 000 years ago and maybe even more than that and this is scientific this is scientific ancient Hamido Semitic languages are defined as preserving all or most of the characteristics of proto-Hamido Semitic so how do linguists work on things like this how how do they say that Arabic is ancient Hebrew is not you know how they do that how would they say for example that Sanskrit is an ancient language but english is not how would they do that any of you have any idea how they do that you so you take the whole family as much of the family as you can if you take Hamido Semitic you're going to take Hausa you will take uh tibetan here tigue and harry ethiopic berber all the berber dialects you will take old egyptian koptic you will take hebrew armenian napetian paul myron akkadian amorite canaanite hymniridic sedian tamudic all these languages what do they have in common well we by seeing what they have in common then we get an idea of what must have been at the ancient time because these common elements you know they must indicate to us what they had together in the past this is really important and it's this kind of linguistic study that enables us to say for example what does the word god mean in english we say god what does that word mean well for us as creator we don't know what it means just use the word but by comparative linguistics we say it means he who is supplicated he who is supplicated because it's very clear but we put together the proto language you see that um that uh that the root here is a root to supplicate to pray and god is the one who is supplicated very valuable like deals dear god so again in comparative linguistics you go back and you say oh like this comes from the same root that you get two from in tuesday and see you in german and deal and this is white so deals is the god of light isn't anew and god is alone though he who is worship all right he who is supplicated in prayer very valuable so linguists when they do this they will take all these languages together as many as they can and then they look for common elements and on that basis they try to reconstruct what the most ancient form of the language would be so ancient ancient sephiric and the very it had ten wean bay tun bay tan bay tin rojulun rojulan rojulun that's ten wean it had ira baabu al baabu al baabal al baabin makkatu makkatak the babalolians will say baabun baaban baabin so so ten wean is ancient iraab is ancient then you see that in the ancient languages they distinguish between and so iron and vine are distinct letters in hebrew they're all the same in hebrew all the vines become irons so they will say and then you see that they distinguish between and and you see that they also have and they have hamsen la al saab and you see that they have dual rojulani rojulani bay tani they can't they take for and has the dual you know it's amazing and it's very important in the story about believe because they're both guilty not have them and not if they're both and they're they both ain't from it and as i have they both came down right the dual it helps our album here in this case you know okay so you have the dual you also have you know the continental structures like kattabah kattabah and from that we will just change a little bit in kitab maktuob kattib maktabah huh so that's also ancient and also you can have certain infixes they say iktattabah or we say infaaalah it's like put a new in there and then you have different forms of verse like kattabah kattabah kattabah to kattabah okay so the amazing thing is is that when you put all these elements together that were there in ancient semitic arabics got every single one every single one except one particular thing which may or may not have been in the original language and that's a type of s which thamudin has but which arabic doesn't have which is a type of s s it's like when if you know spanish a lot of spanish when they say los they say los los los it's a type of s which is it's like between an s and a sheen so ancient semitic probably had that arabic doesn't have it as seen and sheen also ancient semitic would distinguish between seen sheen and that and between dal and that arabic doesn't have it so arabic that is ancient ancient and look how rich it is you know the the jews of spain and portugal knew arabic very well because arabic was was cultivated brilliantly muslim spain and portugal and the great jewish writers and translators like ibn tibbun they always say there's no comparison between egypt and arabic you know and we have only so many of her form egypt lost most of the her forms arabic has how many we can arabic is infinite it has an infinite ability to produce meaning from words the trilateral root all of that okay so arabic then is an ancient language and these languages like hebrew aramaic syria ethiopic ethiopic is very rich and hebrew is not because hebrew most of it was lost after the balanin captivity but those are on middle syphilis that means that they only preserve two-thirds or less of you know the the characteristics of the original language how did arabic in an arabic is one of the last to be written a cadian is one of the first semitic languages to be written and it is ancient you know but it it is nothing like arabic it was written like three thousand three hundred dc but it is not as old as arabic so how was it that arabic which is not written for a long time how is it that it was able to preserve this purity and this richness so what is the answer that better way during the desert so that they kept your language yeah so maybe here we might do something here like this here we do it didn't happen now we messed up everything so this is arabia right okay this is arabia arabia is huge it's almost as big as india you know it could be but we call it a peninsula you could call it a subcontinent if you wanted to and um you know that it has lots of deserts in it it's very difficult to rain um where is the main what is the major river of arabia that's the Nile or the tigress you've raised it for arabia because egypt has a desert that's much more difficult than arabia you know but arabia where is its big river it doesn't have one right it has a little tiny river in terine and not in terine but outside of terine and that's the river where the prophet who showed ad the garden on that side of the river and then he went to a valley where he showed him the fire those that valley is there i've been there and he said if you believe in me you will have this garden and if you disbelieve you will go to this fire and they disbelieved you know and then all the remains and they have this sorcery you're just a sorcery that's an illusion okay but then the little river is there and the people go they still bathe in a bit like a stream there's no river in arabia um where are the natural ports none no natural port san francisco is a natural port new york city is a natural port boston is a natural port manila and the philipines is a natural port arabia has no natural ports you have some in the yemen but that's way in the south and so that enables arabia to go to africa and to go to india and to get goods but you know you you can't you can't come into arabia and if you look at the red sea you know which is right here um what kind of a sea is that it's a shallow or deep the red sea is a shallow or deep it's extremely deep extremely deep because it's created by a fault that separated arabia from africa so it's faulted it's really deep profound and the coasts there which are rocky coasts often and sandy sometimes but what do they have in them you know okay so the marjan is there the lupu is in the persian Gulf right here this is lupu this is a plural country this is coral a whole Arabian coast is big coral reefs huge coral reefs so even if you have a place like jinda which was a port it's not really a port today you have the islamic port of jinda you know like you have a christian port in new york right and the islamic port of jinda was done out you know there was no port like that if you come to jinda jinda is like the this place where you come to go to mecca but you know you have to go to adjo which is about maybe 20 miles or so to the north of jinda and then you you can't bring your ship in you bring in little boats that are filled with goods and then you wait for a person to come out from adjo and he says are you okay you can come in you're not going to conquer us you're not hostile and then at sunset he will lead you through the coral and it has to be sunset because even he can't see it clearly until that time and you know if you touch the coral you say that's all there is to it coral or rib you know you know the star of the titanic and you know how the iceberg ripped the titanic open icebergs are nothing compared to coral scissor just like that so you can either bring you in you unload all of your goods and you take them by donkey or mule or camel to jinda and you sell them that's the way it was for hundreds of years maybe even more than that yet more in the north is the same way there you go from there to yet to medina so there's no natural port and all this not as the romans and the greeks and the egyptians wanted to conquer arabia because they believed it was phoenix arabia it is happy arabia the land is spices and myrrh and the gods all of them believed arabia was holy all the ancient people in the east believed arabia was holy land the egyptians without all we'll talk about that they all believed it was holy but they can't conquer it because they can't get their ships they if they get their ships in the red sea the ships have got to stay out to sea if they approach the coast they will sink they'll be sucked by the coral so this is gods this is a sign this history a sign of god and creation he rated peninsula is okay and then the persian god right here this is where the portals are this is where the pearls come from why what is the persian god flag is it deep or shallow shallow extremely shallow dangerously shallow and very sandy and there you have pearls because it's hot hot water really hot red sea can be cold because it's so deep okay but that is hot and it produces pearls you have to dye it down to get them big pearls okay and then these are both people too but what kind of boats they use they use the dow the dow you know which which are boats that are really sea worthy they're amazing boats but you can push them on the sand and push them off the sand because they're no ports see so big Greek ships and roman ships they're finished they try to come ashore they will get hung up in the sand and there's nothing you could do you know so this this is amazing this is really amazing and then the arabia itself is a desert beautiful desert beautiful desert especially the hijas mountains of the hijas many of you've been there beautiful mountains very high very difficult this is all lava flow that's what we call it hijas it's all covered with lava flow rocks that will cut you obsidian humus that's what he does it is the barrier you cannot go there without a guide and you cannot go there if the tribes don't want you because they will attack you they know all the places to go they know all the pathways you don't and they will attack you so if you want to know and you have to have their permission the ancient jews and christians have that permission ancient jews and christians took records in arabia when they were being tormented and persecuted and killed by other people um but the hijas is very beautiful and then you have in the hijas you have mountains that get rained and you have forests in the mountains and you have lions and you have leopards and ostriches and you have all kinds of animals the orcs you know but those are in areas that catch the rain and keep it and you'd have to know where those are they're still there but you have to go on the mountains to know where they are and they belong to the tribes and they are tribal territory you you don't go there without permission the tribes all we keep this for ourselves so arabia is able to produce food and it is able to sustain large tribes powerful tribes but nobody can touch them and this is very important so this keeps arabia a single geographical unit what about culture what about culture Allah made the kaaba the house of God he made it a protector of the people because abraham around 2000 dc abraham rebuilds the kaaba he and ishmael and then he calls all the arab tribes to come to it to make coverage and god says the kaaba it's piano in that it is the protector of the people it takes care of the people because they don't have a king they don't have a governor meaning the sacred months how many were the sacred months um four where are they rata is the seventh month okay but the eleventh month the twelfth month the first month those are sacred months for pilgrimage and rata is in the middle of the year for umram okay and these are sacred months one third of the year you cannot fight you cannot kill you cannot shed blood did the Arabs respect that absolutely they did they don't anymore but in pre-islamic arabia they respected that for over 2000 years and this is what this is what we hear from the sahaba they say a man would meet the murderer of his father in the sacred month there he is he killed my father the murder of his brother and he would not touch him because you cannot fight in that month it was totally taboo and rama says that god would punish people who did it that's why they didn't fight the kaaba you don't touch the kaaba god will destroy you and abraha abraha learns that the hard way there we don't do anything this is the house of god god will destroy him and the sacred see so what do the sacred months do the sacred months enable these charts to have no government they have no ruler it enables them to make peace to live together to intermarry to trade and to go to manka to visit the sacred house okay this is one third of the year and then also what does that do they're coming together to make sure they're going to hajj and then what are they speaking pure so they have different ways of speaking they have different dialectical variations but they can all understand each other why because of abraha and arabia not had the kaaba then these arabian forms of speech which are very ancient they wouldn't develop into languages okay because they're isolated but that's not what happened ja'ala allahu kaabat al-bayt al-haram piyaman minnaas see the kaabat them bring them all to manka so they all listen to quraish or they listen to jerum or whoever is here they have they understand each other and then will calab will head you will connect and the sacrificial victim what is the sacrificial victim the hadid what is it the camel that you're going to sacrifice the cow you're going to the steer of the boat you're going to sacrifice the sheep or the goat okay and you mark it you know you wound it in the right home and then you put sandals over it or garlands over it and why do you do that because then everybody knows that you're going to manka you cannot be touched so i want to go to manka not in arachid not in the sacred one so i want to go in okay then you take the hadid and no one will touch you because you've got the hadid and then when you come back you put on the qala'id the qala'id are the garlands and that they are garlands of ivka ivka is a beautiful plant in manka it's all most only in manka and it's the only plant in manka that you can pull out because they use it for garlands and they use it for medicine and they put it in their roofs because it smells beautiful and then you come home with ivka so everybody says coming from manka don't touch him so and this was really respected in pre-islamic arabia so this keeps the culture a united culture and it keeps it ready to receive the unloaded possid solar sun them these are signs of god this is amazing but then the rabid you've got to study this conflict you've got and see that's what our western historians it's like you know see up here you have right raider siri here you have egypt here you have misbethamia so it's like they put their back to arabia and they look at siri and they look at egypt they look at paludonia they never look south and it's like all these people are coming from the south you know what is the relation between that and the north they never look at that it's a blind spot and we have to say let's remove the blinkers and take a look you'll see it's very beautiful very beautiful it's really amazing and this also brings out another issue you know which is the fact that you know the arabians uh they were the most faithful of all the children of abraham they received the truth from abraham he rebuilt the carver with ishmael and they hold to the way of abraham for thousands of years more than any of the other children of abraham more than the children of isaac more than the children of jaco and this has also to do with the stability of their environment and some of our scholars uh you know write about that beautifully they have amazing things to say about that that's the truth you know the corruption of abrahamic religion which brings in the idols and the polytheism that's only generations before the prophet Muhammad sallallahu sallam it's only a few hundred years before the prophet Muhammad sallallahu sallam for thousands of years before that they held to the way of abraham and again arabia helped him to do that it's it's very very important um so um arabic is ancient right the great literary languages of hamido semitic are akkadian which was written in iraq 3300 pc whole egyptian which was written with hieroglyphics syria syria and aramaic are the same language ethiothic and arabic these are the literary languages the ones that produce poetry and books and things like that of all these only akkadian old egyptian arabic are ancient all the rest are middles semitic and of these the most ancient hands down is arabic very very important okay so um i want to go a little bit further and then we'll pause okay dill moon the largest ancient necropolis um where is dill moon who knows where is dill moon sorry um dill moon is in bahrain and dill moon is also in eastern arabia where you have the city of bahram today the oil city of bahram that was the city of that's the land of dill moon and that is an ancient land of the sumerians and in bahrain in dill moon and in bahram in eastern arabia you have the largest necropolis of the ancient world okay and um at first when they began to study what is a necropolis city right metropolis metropolis polis polis is city necro is what necrofilida are dead dead people so these are the cities of the den which are cemeteries necropolis is a big city of the den with lots of tombs and you know funeral coles and things like that the biggest necropolis of the ancient world is in bahrain and eastern arabia nothing like it in egypt nothing like it in bablonia um at first estimates were that there were about a 100 000 tumuli tumuli are like big tombs and these are all like beehives they are made of big stones that were brought from someplace else not from bahrain and they're made and big like beehives you have a door to go in and then you have burial chambers and some of them are a meter high some are 12 meters high like 40 feet high and they're big like today we say there's about 150 000 a lot of them were never used at least we don't know that they were ever used the general view is they date back to like 3000 bc 2000 bc 2500 bc time of the summaries no ancient cemeteries of comparable size are known to exist anywhere in the ancient and the near east and they had the elaborate funeral coles of second burials these were second burials in other words the people buried there they don't come from bahrain they don't come from bahrain where do you think they come from bablonia they come from mesothetite they're iranians but they're summaries okay and why do they do that why do they want to take their dead they bury their dead then they make pilgrimage to dilbun and they dig up well they don't have they dig them up they have to have funeral chambers in mesopotamia they take the bones or the body of the dead person and they take it for to dilbun for a second buried very very interesting again it's like 3000 bc 2000 bc this is before abraham before the prophet abraham a thousand years before the prophet abraham why do they do that because they believed in the flood they believed in the flood again very important everybody believed in the flood not just these people we know yoga mesh we know they believed in the flood but the fact is all ancient people believed in the flood all native americans to my knowledge believed in the flood they all believe there was a great world flood and that the native americans came here after and the chinese believed in the flood the indio europeans believed in the chad the indians believed in the flood they the unusual thing in the study of human beings is to find the people who didn't believe in the flood almost everybody did some people did at least they don't talk about it okay so they believed in the flood and they believed that the hero of the flood that's what our historians say was buried in dilbun and the hero of the flood is there great great great great their father but they refer to as ziyu sudra or utnapishtim or atrah khasis atrah khasis means extremely wise extremely prudent and khasis astra and atapa the son of aya that's what they call him and we would call him no we would call him no so they believed that he was buried there and they believed that dilbun was the anti-chamber the anti-chamber it was the rune before it was the anti-chamber of the spirit world and it was the gateway to immortality and it opened up to the abode at the pleasant the garden and they felt that if they could get their debt to dilbun and bury them there which is holy man but that would give them eternal life okay so they believed that burial in the populace of dilbun could give the give his children that is the children of utnapishtim immortality very interesting our Islamic belief is that Noah is not buried there we believe that Noah is buried where it's not a belief because it's not established by conclusive evidence it has weak reports but you know you can believe it if you want it's permissible but the standard Islamic belief is that Noah is buried where you know in matka in matka but he's buried in arabia that's the standard belief so that's actually what they believe they believe the same thing that Noah is buried down there why didn't they go to matka well how do they know where it is first of all they come from dilbun that's where their roots go back and secondly matka nobody knows where it is Abraham's one is going to rediscover it he's the one who the house is is not there anymore these are very important things very important stories and again who where did you read about that in your history book and why did you not read about that see these are things that we have to bring to light um so let's see where do we go from here um there are a lot of things to say and i have a note here that says that we have to pause for questions so um i want to continue with this but this could go up for days and so um let's pause for questions do you want to take a break first okay so let's take a break for a few minutes inshallah will we stop for a while and uh we will have some questions and maybe we have answers i don't know about that that's the hard part there's not such a thing as a stupid question a lot of stupid answers that's a stupid question yes um for um you just actually asked just a second ago why did you not read about that in your history book you were explaining about who has believed the satan you absolutely buried in mecca but mecca had theories discovered by ibrahim this synthesis that you're bringing this amazing synthesis of ancient uh arabian history is is there any books we can read about that um where does this history come from uh or is it more from all your readings is a synthesis that you you put together if there's any good materials for us to read on this um you know my so sorry i was just i was i was listening to you but it's like i lost stuff here uh you know what i don't know sometimes i make big mistakes but like i lost stuff here primitive i had something about primitive you don't see it okay so this is um anyway um you know to put history in a book is um very important and um that's always a later stage to develop and um the things that we're talking about are things that um have been bleeding for like maybe 15 years of reading and uh from articles and different books and histories and things like that um history especially when you do real history uh you can't follow the narrative the narrative is not adequate so you know you've got to study it on your own and there's amazing material there for everything but you know it requires that you do extensive reading and it requires looking at articles and and other things like that okay so um i don't know any book like for this i can give you articles for a time i can give you articles that you can read but um we have to write books like that and um may Allah enable us to do that it's very important we have lots of things to do you know uh we have to write the history of america really we do we have to write the history of america we have to write the history of europe there were muslims in switzerland 150 years 115 years there were muslims in switzerland and the mountains of switzerland under the caliphate of qordoba and they made the pope pages you had three times and tarimby says that that's one of the most important events of the early middle ages they're there from about 900 to about uh 10 50 see and and you can find that out you can study that you can find books about that you can find articles about that but like this is something people don't ever talk about um you know the many things like that so again you know history gives you identity but history also reflects identity so i believe in islam and having been to the muslim world uh to spain and portugal which are parts of the muslim world even though unfortunately they're like museums you know and you have like the skeletons of the dinosaurs you don't have the dinosaurs anymore and morocco and indonesia and malaysia and china india you know so i know like this was a great civilization these were civilized people muslim people i remember in morocco uh taking my son you know uh this was when imam hamza i think it was the first rakhla in 1998 in phas and you know i went there to see him for like a day were you there yeah and um you know then uh you know i had some friends in phas that we want to see and uh you know we went to the house of abdel aziz at du'bar it was a great morocco saint his house you know which is the du'bar family and this is an old moroccan house and beautiful in a way that you cannot describe and you know i went to their bathroom and then i gave up i told my son you have to go to the bathroom and then you have to go i want you to see this bathroom the way that is an old traditional bathroom it's like so simple and so beautiful and so clean and it's like these were civilized people these were highly civilized people so it's like you know today when we look at the muslim world you know the muslim world for the last 200 years or 250 years has gone through the nose time and the fact that it didn't crash is a miracle but it's like everything that was there was destroyed and the worst thing that was destroyed was our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of our tradition and then you see muslims we have the greatest innovation in the muslim world today which is the nation state the nation state is an ugly innovation and i'm not speaking the language of the political muslims now we shall all be one right i understand no the nation state you know is an apparatus of controlling people you know that is totally contrary to our heritage and destroys our law which is a law that is decentralized and gives you freedom of justice you know look at syria that's a nation state they control everything education curriculum they spy on you they do whatever they want to do you know and um the nation state has destroyed muslims more than anything else in my opinion okay so today when you see muslims we are down and out we have no self respect a lot of us have self aid in fact it's one of the reasons why we're so unmerciful to each other and uh you know so like you just think oh these people produce your very civilization you know they can't even they can't even live together now so like you think well the past must be a disaster but it's not the past had a different kind of people in it the past had a different reality we have to regain the secrets that were there that made that civilization we have to do that and we can do that our schools should do that because here we have the you know uh you know the the two seas that come together you know the two bazaqs you have the bazaq between the two seas which is the convert you know like cd a twist you know like uh you know uh like myself she comes a user i'd say dr taxon you know many of us and then you have the muslim who is up the extraction of old families like most of you but it's like you um have the benefit of being here and having good education and also not being exposed to some of the crazy cultural ideas that dominate many muslim countries today things that like if you're born there you're not likely to get out of this and so like you you have you know it's like you're able to wake up and fight to understand things and then when these two come together they can produce amazing things they can produce amazing they benefit each other tremendously okay so um you know uh we have a few questions yeah one question here is what happened to analytical history slash dot e as a traditional asylum to science as embodied in the work of classical scholars like tawdry etc is important for you see um traditional analytical history is very valuable as a primary source of poverty is very valuable but most of these historians and most pre-modern historians they're not interested in the dynamics of historical change and also in the islamic world there was a certain insularity so that you know muslims in the past rarely have access to non-muslims and so therefore tawdry is going to tell you about persia he would talk quite a bit about it but mostly muslim persia even if he tells you about ancient persia it's not all that accurate okay and but the muslim historians basically going to tell you about what he knows and then he's going to be very honest usually he's going to report all sorts of conflicting information which is typical in history he's not going to sort it out and um he's not going to see the big pictures which are what we look for today ibn khaldun you know ibn khaldun is a philosopher of history and also it said that he is the author of modern economics he's the author of modern sociology so even if khaldun he begins to do that like let's put this stop let's like okay let's sit back and look at this like what makes a society strong what makes a society weak what is the role of economics what is the role of sociology what is what what does victory do to you what does defeat do to you those are unique questions that's why um toin b and others they say that has never appeared in human mind khaldun um and one great Scottish philosopher he says Aristotle and Plato are not his equal and all of us can't even be mentioned next to ibn khaldun ibn khaldun is amazing but out of ibn khaldun then you get the development of people like Viko who's a great Italian historian who wants to see how this history works and then because you have these big changes in European history moving from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the modern age then Europeans also it's like you want to know how does history change why do civilizations fall why do they rise and then also Europeans begin to bring in all this information that India China America so the kind of questions that we are interested in hiding you're not going to usually find that in the old books you've got to figure that out for yourself just like if we study Islamic law today we have to keep an eye on the dynamics of the law Islamic law in Spain and Portugal and Sicily abolished feudalism it liberated the serfs was that policy did they even intend to do them maybe not all they did is they came in to Spain and Portugal and Sicily and they applied prophetic law and one of the effects of it is that it destroyed the feudal system man apia of the noet and whoever revives unused land follow land owns it jew christian muslim whatever so like the peasants say hey wait a minute you mean if i go out and follow if i farm this land in the forest i won't be killed i won't be hanged the noble ontantic and i will own it mashallah so Sicily becomes green olives are planted everywhere in Spain they say you couldn't put down your foot without sticking on olive and the people become rich like they never were in history before our muslims did they know they were causing that i don't think they did they don't talk about it you know and this creates uh economic effects that go through all Europe it produces economic depression in england you know and in holland because everybody all the markets want to go south no markets want to go north these are and this is the modern history through the modern historian digs into the past and is looking for big meanings sometimes they find this amazing things see so um this is what you have to do you you cannot be lazy about this you should study all like the muslims of switzerland they are we do have information about them in some busian histories but almost everything we know about the muslims of switzerland comes out of european records european records so um you know there's a lot we have to do here there's a lot to discover yeah another question why do we start with the discussion of the beginning of human history with the study of the old and new stone age is this the time period and place for the first human being and this one to be well um this is the first thing that we know about human beings and um you know we have a lot of evidence that it was there and presumably this would be i mean the thing is is that you see people in this period were people who probably lived the way that adeptic people were believed to live that they lived naturally in the world um you know they made everything they needed they did not produce cities they did not produce wealth they were not interested in gold and silver and they were not interested in art and things like that they worshiped god they believed in god okay so uh to say it's a old stone age again it's like even the word like why do you have to use that word see like when we talk about primitive we talk about cognitive frames this is one of the ones i want to talk about the word primitive you know that is a cognitive frame right when you hear the word primitive primitive religion what do you think of the word primitive mean linguistically sorry no linguistically it doesn't in a semantically what does it mean first that's all it means primitive pretending to the first so why don't if you say primitive we understand prime you know or primary or principle but see this is again Darwinian notions of evolution things are really rudimentary backward stupid and then we say then the first people must have done that so they have to be primitive they're the first people they couldn't have done anything so we don't buy into that popular frame and that's why Tommy says the so-called primitive people of the paleolithic you said i don't believe they were that way of all i believe they were the most spiritual of all human beings full of the middle of waleen you know they're the many of the first generations and a few of the later ones we're the later ones see so so when we look at this from our standpoint and we look at it also from the standpoint of certain formed historians then we get a different view there's a German who's studying primitive religion it's the best study of primitive religion his name is bill humschmidt and i had a whole slide about him but i must have deleted it by mistake but bill humschmidt he writes a book it's in german it's called der bursche von der bursche die it is the origin of the idea of god it's about 12 volumes and never translated into english and even germans have a hard time reading it that's his life's work and he collects careful anthropological information himself and few others mostly through others about all primitive people in the world and what they believe about god so they call it the origin of the idea of god and first of all what is a primitive person but the definition of primitive people in the world today is better expressed as micro societies or kinship societies because that's all they are you see they they are societies in which you don't have a government you don't have kings you don't have administrations you know everybody is who they are because of their kinship so the head may be the elder of the oldest man okay and um then you know you will stand by me because you're my brother you're my cousin these are primitive societies and they usually tend to be small although arabia was a primitive society in that way it had just kinship groups it didn't have governments and it was not backward in any way they were honorable people with an incredible language okay and um primitive societies though today they are a little isolated societies because that's you know kinship groups are protected that way you have them in certain parts of america africa asia ciberia and so forth and so he's studying all of these little micro societies and again are they older than we are if i go today to the tier del fuego in the very south of america and i see these three tribes that are there that are primitive aren't they living in 2013 today or is it 2013 bc did we take a time machine there or an airplane we didn't go there by time machine we went there in 2013 but we assume that they preserve certain elements of the past just a presumption and then that becomes a valuable presumption if we look at all micro societies and compare them and see what they have in common and when we look at them and we see what they have a common we find that all of them believe in one god all of them what was the narrative you may have heard that no they were animists because the idea of one god had to be evolutionary and like the geos must have developed this they evolved this idea now absolutely not the bible doesn't say that and history doesn't say that see and then the early people they had to worship spirits and send their spirits in the trees and spirits in the water and then they sort of get smarter and say well like hey that's just a tree but so let's look at the spirit out of the tree then they worship the spirits and then they say like wouldn't it be better to have gods and then we have families and what about just one god isn't that a better idea you know that's absolutely false you know the the primitive religions all believe enter one god wherever you find the bill I'm sure it will give you the names of and they usually believe that god is good and they believe they always believe god is good they believe that he is the source of morality they have marriage and they believe that marriage is sacred because of god they believe that adultery is evil there are very few exceptions to that okay and um you know so this is very valuable and this is one of the things that thornby depends on then he said there and this is what schmidt says is that there must be ancient prophecy how do people know these things we can say well they're to be football too there's the natural self as well but um you see and then so but this this is why thornby says that I believe the primitive people the ancient ancient people were very spiritual and they believed in one god and then also another thing is that um how do you think how do you think what what is essential to your thought one of the most important things of all is language you know if I don't have a language I cannot think you know language is what enables me to look at my thoughts language is what enables me to show my thoughts to you and then you try to look at them because you have the same words they may not mean to you what they mean to me and you're going to work on that okay this is how we think so if you want to destroy a people oh destroy their language that's like what the africans were brought here from west africa um usually their languages were taken they had very beautiful languages and they had very beautiful cultures very sophisticated cultures all that's taken apart all I say and then you will learn english but it's not going to ever teach you you know I'm not going to teach you english grammar so you know you just speak it any old way you can as long as you can obey me when I say cut the sugar that's okay and if I say put the sugar in the the grinder and and and press it that's all I need from you you know eat sleep drink you know work and you know you can talk this English any funny way you want it to because you're an immigrant you know and you never learned how to speak right you don't have a good accent you know so again as long as that person has this broken language it has no continuity with the linguistic linguistic history of the