Transcription
Hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I'm delighted to welcome back Dr. Abdullahi. You're most welcome, sir. Asalam alaykum!
Thank you very much! Great to have you! I'm very impressed with your bookshelf; it's even more impressive than mine, which I like being upstaged! It's really good. So, fantastic! And you're in Medina?
Yes, I'm in Medina, alhamdulillah.
Fantastic! We have to come and visit me here in the library. All I want to see is your library!
No, I’d love to go to Medina. I've been before; it was an extraordinary experience.
For those who don't know, Dr. Abdullah is from Sweden and grew up in a non-Muslim family. He converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He traveled to Medina and studied a BA at the Islamic University in the Faculty of Sharia and completed an MA and PhD in Islamic theology in the same university. The title of his PhD thesis was "The Reputations by Western Scholars of Contemporary Atheism: A Presentation and Critique." Fascinating title!
In this way, he specialized in refuting atheism both from an Islamic theological and Western scholarly perspective. He also attained a BA in the History of Religion and an MA in Psychology of Religion from Swedish universities.
Dr. Abdullah has studied most of the Islamic sciences with many different scholars in Medina on subjects like theology, tafsir, Hadith, and so on.
But today in this podcast, he will be looking at pathways to Islam, exploring who converts to Islam and why, and looking at strategies for da'wah—how we can reach out to more people with the message of Islam—and other topics as well.
So, over to you, sir.
Thank you very much! I will open this presentation. Ah, here we go.
In today's lecture, insha'Allah, or in today's presentation, I will talk about three main things. First of all, I will talk about how to study Islamic theology—how it is studied and the difference between that and religious studies in academia in the West—and how we can take benefit from both of them when it comes to spreading the message of Islam.
Then I will talk about reasons why people convert to Islam, who converts to Islam, especially in Sweden, what we can see right now. Finally, I will talk about some strategies for da'wah: how we can benefit from our theological knowledge, from religious studies, and other strategies to spread the religion of Islam.
As we see today, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, alhamdulillah.
So, why is this important? I think that we are in need today to have knowledge of both traditional Islamic sciences and at the same time take benefit from the kind of sciences when you study religious studies in Western academia. Alhamdulillah, like you mentioned, Paul, I've studied both of them, so I've seen both sides. I think that there are things we can take benefit from in our da’wah today so we can be more effective in reaching out to people with this beautiful religion.
As a convert, I am passionate about seeing how this beautiful religion can be spread to other people. We're living in an age today of globalization; we can reach out to people in a way that was totally impossible just a couple of decades ago.
So we have a lot of opportunities today, alhamdulillah! This is also a time for us to think about how we have been trying to reach out with the message of Islam before and how we can improve it in the future.
Today, when Muslims talk about the state of the Muslim ummah, we can see that some of them have a more negative approach when they're speaking about that, focusing on negative aspects. On the other hand, others are focusing on more positive things.
Of course, there are many negative issues happening in the Islamic ummah today. Just look at the genocide happening in Gaza right now and the attacks on Lebanon and other places, the neocolonization occurring in Muslim countries, islamophobia spreading, and so on. So, there are many negative aspects happening right now.
But at the same time, there are also many positive things happening, and Islam is spreading in a way that it has never spread before. For example, I will discuss how Islam is spreading in Sweden.
Sweden was a country, as I discussed on your channel before, where about 100 years ago there were 10 Muslims in the whole of Sweden. Now we have about 1.2 or 1.3 million Muslims—people with a Muslim background—in Sweden. The population of Sweden is about 10 million, so that’s around 12% of the population in Sweden, and that's the highest percentage I know of in the Western world today.
That's higher than in Germany or France even. That's remarkable!
Yes, it is. The population is much bigger there, and there are more Muslims living there, but it’s a higher percentage.
These are many positive things we see right now regarding how Islam is spreading. However, I also see that we can spread Islam even more if we can have a more knowledge-based approach to da’wah and understand more about why people convert to Islam and how we can convince more people to convert to Islam.
I like to see the glass as half full, and this is also from the Sunna of the Prophet (saw); he used to love to be positive. We should not ignore the bad aspects, of course, and we should do everything we can to try to work on the things that are negative right now.
But at the same time, we should have a positive attitude and try to focus on how to make things more positive, insha’Allah.
So, when it comes to Islamic studies and Islamic theology, how do we usually study Islamic theology?
Usually, you start by memorizing. You memorize the Quran, you memorize hadith from the Prophet (saw), and you take short texts and memorize them in creed. This is usually how you start your journey. It’s text-based on memorization.
Then you attend lectures by scholars. Scholars make explanations of these texts that are called "Mun," and you study them text by text and line by line so you can understand them better. After that step, you read larger and larger books. You can see all the books I have behind me here.
Now, you're not only studying Islamic theology; you’re not only studying and focusing on the Islamic creed, but you're also studying other sects of Islamic theology and other groups. Moreover, you're studying other religions and ideologies.
For example, I took my PhD from the Islamic University in Medina. In the Department of Creed, you study four main things: Islamic creed, other sects, religions, and modern ideologies. However, what we can see in many universities is that when you study other sects, religions, ideologies, and so on, it’s usually text-based.
So, for example, when you study Judaism, Christianity, and other religions, you're mainly focusing on studying their texts. You're studying their theology, you're studying parts from the Bible, biblical criticism, and so on. You're focusing on these parts, and you usually do not focus on the religious human being.
You’re not focusing on Christians and what Christians living today actually believe because there’s usually a gap between what the religion says and what laymen and common people are believing.
Very true. You could never know before you meet a Christian what they are going to believe. You've got to actually ask them. It’s a big mistake to assume. It’s like we assume that all Christians are evangelicals. No, most Christians are not evangelicals at all!
So we need nuance and complexity; we need to understand that the individual, the person in front of you, and actually listen to what they have to say about themselves.
Yes, and this is what I see as a problem. We take a lot of benefit from Islamic studies when it comes to studying Islamic creed and Islamic theology, understanding it. Alhamdulillah, it’s very good, and this is what we need when it comes to conveying the message of Islam.
But when it comes to understanding the other side—understanding the Christians, Jews, and Hindus—if we think that we can understand them and reach out to them with da’wah just based on studying parts of their books or their theology, we can understand what happened at the Council of Nicaea and so on, then we can understand Christians living in Britain today, it’s not that simple. There’s a huge gap there.
So, I think that in many instances, students graduate from Islamic universities; I’m not talking about the Islamic University in Medina—I’m talking about, in general—they might think that they understand more about other people. But there’s a gap there.
So, this is why I think that we can take a lot of benefits from how you approach religious studies in Western universities that are more human-based.
If we look at Western universities when they study religion, they are usually studying religion together with other disciplines. They’re studying religion together with psychology, sociology, anthropology, or history.
So they are more focused on the psychological aspects of the religious human being or the aspects of society as a whole or groups—religious groups—the dynamics within the groups, and so on.
Anthropologists of religion, for example, many scholars of religion have gone to villages and remote areas and jungles and have lived with people there. They’ve studied them for long periods to understand their religious beliefs and the culture they have in these societies.
Usually, we don’t find these kinds of studies at all in Islamic universities. I have never heard about a Muslim scholar from an Islamic university going to a remote place to live with them for even a week to study and understand the human beings living in these societies and understand their beliefs, and their culture, how they interact, and so on.
It’s more focused on the books themselves, the scriptures, and so on.
Yes, and what you were saying is very true—it didn’t used to be like that. I was just trying to remember a book behind me by a Muslim scholar who traveled widely during, as we would call it in Europe, the medieval times. He actually witnessed a Viking funeral.
This was real pioneering scholarly work. He didn’t want to pass judgment because I think one of the dead man’s wives was required to die as well. And it was horrific for him, but he tried to suppress any emotion and just tried to record objectively as he could what he saw.
This was long before the West was doing anything academic, and this is a fantastic pioneering anthropological study of a religious rite—because a funeral in the Viking world. It’s the only account we know of in history that we have of an actual person who witnessed a Viking funeral and all of its rituals.
So in a sense, we’ve lost that. You’re saying that we used to have it in the Muslim world.
Yes, subhanallah. Like you mentioned, when I studied religious studies in Sweden, we had a course where we studied Norse religion—like the former religions they had in Scandinavia before.
We were studying this religion, so they asked, "What are the sources we have?" They said, "This is the main source we have to understand the Vikings religious practices," so they used to have some scriptures and we can see some archaeological findings from the Vikings and some other books that are later than that.
But he was the one who actually lived among them and wrote down what he saw from their rituals and so on. So this is very interesting!
As a Muslim scholar, he wasn’t a Western scholar.
Yes, yes. So this is how we see the different disciplines when you study religious studies in Western universities.
You focus on psychology or sociology and so on. You can even see the subject psychology of religion when psychologists have conferences—psychologists of religion attend their conferences and they attend each other’s conferences.
So there's a blending of studies between these two. You have people in the religious department of religious studies and people from the psychology department both studying the same things in some instances.
But psychology of religion focuses on the religious human being and not on psychology in general. So what I mentioned when it comes to Islamic theological studies, it’s text-based, or you study with scholars; you take the knowledge from a scholar, but it’s not based on the religious human beings of today.
So Western religious studies are based on four main things. You have the data, the raw information out there about human beings, about people that are religious. Then you need a methodology.
The methodology can be qualitative or quantitative, and you base it on interviews or you make a quantitative study to gather as much information as possible, or you deep dive into a specific number of humans.
Then you have specific methods that you use. For example, you could conduct interviews. You take 20, 30, or 40 persons and make a one- or two-hour interview with them, or you conduct a survey with hundreds or even thousands of people to try to understand them.
When you study this, you study these methods—you read thick books and take courses just to understand the methods and to implement them in the best way.
So as an example, when I studied methods of religious studies, we had a 400-page book just on how to conduct an interview and how to analyze interviews.
They’re putting a lot of focus and emphasis on how to gather the data and how to analyze the data you have.
So it’s not just sitting down and talking to people; this is a real discipline—it’s something that you really study in depth.
Then you have a framework or a lens on how to interpret the religious data. You have a lot of data, and now you have collected it, but how can I understand the framework; how can I understand all this data that I collect? This is what I will talk about later, insha’Allah, when I talk about L. Rambo’s theory of religious conversion.
You have a theory to understand the different steps that most people go through when they convert to Islam, which can give you a lens to analyze the data in a more structured way.
Usually, when you study in Islamic universities, you don’t have any theories that you base it on in that way. You’re studying scriptures straight away, you’re studying books and so on, and you’re usually not using these kinds of methods like interviews or surveys.
Some universities might use them, but generally, it’s more textual-based than you can see in Western universities today.
So what kind of benefits can we take from Western religious studies? It’s very interesting when it comes to understanding religious behavior and motivations; so you can understand the psychology of people, psychological insights on why people are believing and what they are believing, how they really believe.
And like I mentioned, there’s a big gap; like now if you want to understand a Christian today, you have to ask him or herself.
But if we want a more knowledge-based approach to make da’wah, it could be possible to study specific groups we want to reach out to. For example, we can have people—understand more about what British Christians are really believing today. Are they really believing in the Trinity?
Are they really believing other things when it comes to the scriptures? Because if we think that they believe in something but they’re actually believing in something else, and we are making our da’wah in a way, trying to show that there are many contradictions in the Bible, you can see this, and you can see that, and he’s like just sitting there saying, “Yeah, I don’t believe. I believe there are many contradictions in the Bible.”
So what are you talking about?
Can I give another example? So talk about Jewish people, okay? So religious Jews—I’m not talking about atheists.
How do we find out what Jews believe about God? Well, it’s easy—we read the Torah; we read the Jewish scriptures. That will tell us what they believe. But that may be true, but the thing is most Jews today believe in reincarnation.
Now, this may come as a shock to people who don’t know this. I’m not making this up; it came as a shock to me when I discovered it. But I can tell you there’s no reincarnation in the Bible, and I’ve read it from cover to cover; it’s not mentioned.
So where on earth do these beliefs come from?
Now, the point is if you anticipate what your discussion with a Jew is going to be like based on your reading in the Bible, you’re probably not going to get the full picture.
So you’ve got to really know what actual people believe by doing phenomenological research based on the actual experiences of people.
And that’s why this method, the Western methodology, to some extent, is useful, I guess, because it’s based on actual empirical research rather than a kind of a priori, creedal, or scriptural-based understanding.
Because people of the Book, particularly Christians and Jews, have a very interesting relationship with their scriptures, whereas in my experience, the vast majority of Muslims I ever meet, I know what they’re going to think in advance. I don’t have to wonder, “What is this Muslim going to believe about X?”
I know what they're going to believe because we pretty much follow the mainstream Sunni traditional path. There are exceptions, but they’re not that common.
With Christians, you have no idea what they’re going to believe, and similarly for Jews, really. And it’s very different.
So if we are operating from a Muslim kind of expectation—oh, they’re a bit like us—they believe different things; that may not be the case at all.
Yes, and even more so when it comes to Hindus. You can see Hinduism in different parts of India—it’s like a blended religion.
So Hinduism is actually a Western word for all of these religions in India. They’re actually like different religions that have some common patterns, but they are very, very different when it comes to different things.
You can also see these new age kind of movements that we see today. Many of them don’t have the same kind of scriptures that we have. They’re taking some parts from here and some parts from there, and they’re blending these kinds of things and so on.
So understanding people better can be the first step if you want to reach out with da’wah.
Another thing that we can understand more about when it comes to the psychology of religion is the common human needs of addressing religion. What are the things that people want?
What are the things that people just based on pure psychology that they long for? So we can see things that people search for meaning, Brotherhood, and different things that you can understand in a deeper sense when you study it from a psychological level.
So you can also learn about persuasion—how can we persuade them and convey the message of Islam in a way that can really appeal to them? So we don’t only focus on the things that we think are important to us, but also try to understand what are the things that might attract them when it comes to da’wah.
So, and also trying to adopt communication—adapting communication to different people. You can understand that people are different!
So it’s not just because you’ve read a couple of books about Christianity that you understand two billion people or you understand one billion Hindus and so on. You can understand that people are different, and you understand different perspectives on a human level that make them different.
So you can try to customize the da’wah in a way that you reach out to people in the best way—with the best kind of methods of da’wah.
Can I put a slightly bizarre example? Recently, the Pope himself—Pope Francis—in Rome was in a conference somewhere, and he made comments that were recorded. I think he was meeting in Malaysia or some place like Indonesia; I can’t remember where in the Far East.
He made comments that sounded very much like, “Well, all religions are just different paths to God. They’re like languages; they’re just different languages.”
It was very much a pluralist, kind of universalist message, which in no way required that you become a Christian or believe in Jesus.
This is not actually the Catholic Church’s teaching!
So you could say, “Well, if I were to give da’wah to the Pope, at least I know what the Pope thinks because he believes what the Church teaches.”
You can’t even assume that. You know the cliche: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
People say, you know, this is a joke. Well, of course he is!
So even the Pope, you can’t be sure in advance of what he’s going to believe because he says stuff which is not really the teaching of the Church.
Isn’t that strange?
Yes, and they are much more firm on their religious beliefs than the Protestant Church of Sweden, as an example.
So they’re still not allowing a lot of things that they are allowing. Still, you don’t understand them.
And this is the clergy—this is like the Pope himself! What about the layman? Everyone else?
Exactly! So, like we can see, there are many benefits from the approaches they have with Western studies—academic studies of religion—but at the same time, there are many problems also with the study.
I wouldn’t recommend everyone listening to this presentation to just sign up for a university course about Islamic Studies or other studies in these universities because there are many problems.
For example, when I started to study in Sweden, the first course—the first lecture that we had—the teacher was talking and he said that we are basing our studies on methodological atheism.
So, we base our studies on the premise that there is no God, there are no jinn, there are no angels, there’s nothing else than this material world. This is what we believe in, this is how we base our studies.
What you have as your ontological beliefs—what you believe yourself—that’s another thing, you know, but this is how we conduct our studies.
So, this really narrows the studies that they have if we want to— it’s problematic when it comes to faith, but it’s also problematic when it comes to the methods themselves because, like I will be talking about later, when people convert to Islam, there are many things having an effect here.
So Allah (SWT) guides people because of different reasons. These things Allah (SWT), the Creator, uses to guide someone is not something that you can study in Western universities.
Even though this is the main reason why the person is converted to Islam—the guidance of Allah (SWT).
So, they are not studying this at all because they are not believing in it. This will make their understanding of conversion to Islam very narrow because they’re only looking at some psychological factors and so on, and they’re not looking at the essential thing—the basic reason why people are converting to Islam—and that’s the guidance of Allah (SWT).
Another problem that we can see today is that you need theories to study and to have a lens to understand religions. Many of the theories that they are using today are these kinds of postmodern theories that they are using in other social sciences today.
So they have the feminist approach to study religion, they have these different ways of approaching religion in a very relativistic sense and so on—which can be very problematic in how they look at religion.
The basic thing that they say is that religion is a social construct, so this is something constructed by human beings. We should look at it as a social construct, not as a divinely revealed religion from Allah (SWT) like Islam.
Another problem that we have is the orientalist approach to studying Islam.
The Islamic studies that they have in the West came from it. It has a very bad background.
They started to study Islam in more depth during the colonization age, the imperialistic age. They wanted to understand Muslims because they had specific reasons to take over their countries or other things or spread doubts.
Many of the first scholars they were actually Christian missionaries and so on that were striving to look to spread doubts among Muslims.
So, we can see a lot of the literature that you will study has this orientalist approach.
Now they’re trying to talk about post-orientalism and so on, and post-colonialism, but still, many of the scholars of Islamic studies in the West today are part of this whole Islamophobic industry.
They are writing articles, they’re writing reports and so on—they’re working many instances for governments or they’re working for organizations or think tanks and so on.
So they are conducting studies based on this whole Islamophobic industry.
Because why am I calling it an industry? It’s because there’s a lot of money in it.
So this is a way for them to gain money—to write these kinds of reports about Muslims and Muslim organizations and so on.
The whole culture among many scholars of Islamic studies can be this kind of culture that you see, especially after the war on terror that started after 9/11.
I won’t mention his name; that might be a bit too much. But as an academic at Oxford University, he’s a Christian, and he wrote a book—a year or two ago—telling his Christian readers that, unlike the God of Christianity, the God of Islam is a remote, transcendent God.
He is not close to his people.
He went on like this, and obviously, you can cite some Qur’anic verses that talk about the transcendence of God, but it was extraordinary!
This guy is a PhD, and what he’s saying is completely false. Even I know that; you can just, you know, there are lots of verses talking about how God is near the believer, how God answers when you call on Him, God is near to you, and God’s love for you, and so on.
It was an extraordinary twisted narrative!
This came from a serious scholar at Oxford who was talking about how he specializes in the Qur’an.
This is precisely the kind of problem.
If you were to study with such a guy, I mean, goodness knows what you’d be told. You’ve got to know your Qur’an and be able to refute or correct his orientalist, Christian prejudice, which is just so distorting.
Yes, yes, and this is just one example. If you want other examples on how they are seeing things that might even be worse than that, try to demonize Muslims.
Making reports, writing about Muslims in different articles and books and so on can be very horrible.
Another problem we have is that most studies are conducted by non-Muslims on non-Muslims.
If we talk about psychology of religion, as an example, I’m going to talk about the conversion theory—it was conducted by a non-Muslim, and most of the examples of people converting—it’s not about people converting to Islam; it’s about people converting in general.
So who are they conducting their studies on? Usually, people that are close to them!
So they are conducting the kind of studies about psychology of religion in the West on Westerners, usually.
Okay, they’re conducting other studies too, but it’s more focused there. And this is something that they mention themselves.
They say that this is a problem that we have. Psychology of religion is usually based on Western psychology of religion.
Sometimes you can read some of the theories they have or conclusions that they have that are biased because of their background and so on.
So they even say that we need more studies by Muslims on Muslims.
So this is true.
Sorry, one of the great books I read by a guy called William James—he's seen as the founder of modern psychology of religion. He wrote a marvelous book called "The Varieties of Religious Experiences."
It was published at the beginning of the 20th century—an absolute classic!
It really is fascinating. I highly recommend it, and just as you were saying, the examples that he gives are numerous accounts of people’s religious experiences—atheists have religious experiences, secular people, Christians obviously, and others.
But the examples that he has are all very interesting, and he has a detailed methodology; he’s an empiricist and so on.
But they’re overwhelmingly taken from the West—mainly from the United States—and there are only a handful, very few Muslim ones, and even they are not really properly understood.
And that’s it. There’s very heavy bias! Now, he’s aware of this problem, just as you were saying; he’s aware of it.
But still, over 100 years later, we still have the same problem. What’s the excuse in today’s Global World for having this very limited sort of research field in that way?
You can even see today that some of the scholars are even more lax than they were before.
You can see that some scholars in Sweden they won’t even go outside the city to conduct interviews. They want to go to the main cities. They don’t want to go too far away from them.
The kind of motivation that you could see before—how many of these scholars used to learn maybe 10 different languages and lived among the people and so on—you don’t see that as much as you used to see it before.
But still, like I mentioned, most of the studies have been and are conducted on people living in the West by people from the West.
So there are many biases in the studies, but that doesn’t take us away from the importance of the methods themselves or the approach itself on approaching the religious human being.
So as an example, when we look at a religious human being—a person—if we would base it on the way that we can see in many Islamic universities today or in madrasah or how you study Islamic theology and then study about other groups and so on, you would mainly focus on the religion itself, the core beliefs.
This is the religious human being: he’s a manifestation of the religion. But that is not really the case!
So we are influenced by different factors such as the culture that we’re living in, local customs, traditions, social norms, upbringing, family values, early education, our schools, personal psychology—people have different individual personalities, emotional experiences in life, and social environments, such as our friends, surroundings, our community, and historical context.
The context that we’re living in today, like you mentioned with the Pope, the Pope 100 years ago would never say the kinds of things that the Pope today is saying.
He would be seen as a heretic! He would absolutely have been seen as a heretic. Indeed, many traditional Catholics do see him as a heretic, but you can’t really say it openly because then you—oh, you’re not being a good Catholic.
So they are often quite quiet about it, but yes, it’s an extraordinary phenomenon!
Yes! But I think that it’s very important when we are making da’wah—we try to reach out to people that we try to understand these different influences.
There are more influences than that, but religion, Christianity as an example, in the USA today will be much influenced by capitalism.
You see these big churches that they have, and they’re collecting money in a way that’s not the same as Christianity being practiced in a village in Africa, as an example.
So the society as a whole and the ideologies in the country and other things are all having a big influence on the religious human being today.
So we can see, as an example in South America, different socialistic Catholic movements during the Cold War that were more on the socialistic side, and then you have in America people that are more capitalistic.
We have liberal Christians; we have liberal Muslims today and so on.
All of these ideologies, all of these things are blending together to shape and form the human being that we are trying to reach out to when we are making da’wah.
So we should take all of these things into account when we try to reach out to people.
We don’t just have this rigid picture of a religious human being that we’re trying to reach out to.
We should try to understand the complexities and the nuances so we can really try to reach out to them in the best way.
One of the very important things that we can do when it comes to Islamic theological studies is that we try to really reflect upon the Quran regarding guidance and misguidance.
There are many verses in the Quran regarding this topic. I looked today through the many verses that have been mentioned and there are well over 40, 50, or 60 verses—quite a number indeed!
Reflecting upon these verses regarding guidance is very important when it comes to making da’wah.
We can say that guidance in Islam has been mentioned in different contexts, but there are two main forms that have been mentioned in the Quran.
What is called is the kind of guidance that we try to convey—that the prophets used to convey—and that people making da’wah try to convey.
Humans or people making da’wah can never guide the hearts of others.
This is what it’s called.
So, as an example, no one could make better da’wah than the Prophet Muhammad (saw)—he had revelation from Allah (SWT), and Allah chose him to be His Prophet.
But still, not everyone believed, even though he made da’wah in the best ways. Even though he tried to reach out to his own uncle, Abu Talib with da’wah, he did not believe.
So it’s not in our hands; to understand this and have this approach when you make da’wah is very important because you can try to convey the message and do whatever you can as much as you can, but at the end of the day, it’s not upon you.
You have done what you can; the only thing that is upon the messenger is to spread the message in a clear way.
This is what we should do, and at the end of the day, it’s up to Allah (SWT) to guide whoever He wants.
But we can also see in the Quran that Allah (SWT) mentioned many reasons why some people are guided and others are not.
Reflecting upon these verses is extremely important because this is Allah (SWT), our creator, who tells us about human beings; they are those Allah (SWT) created.
So He knows us; He knows the psychology of us as human beings and the reasons why some people are guided and some people are not guided.
Here are some of the verses—sorry!
Before we come to that, I remember some time ago—I regularly go to Speaker’s Corner, that reprehensible place—but I was struck a long time ago by the regular reading of the Quran.
The Quran is almost like a psychology text! I could understand the types of people I was encountering at Speaker’s Corner and the way the Quran was throwing light on this—on these psychological types.
The mocking atheist, the kind of the Christian who believes that, as also there’s another verse at the beginning of Surah Al-Baqarah in English translation says, “As for those who persist in disbelief, it is the same whether you warn them or not; they will never believe. God has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and their sight is covered. They will suffer a tremendous punishment” (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:6-7).
These verses, it’s very let’s say—helpful. I don’t want to trivialize them, but they were very insightful and helped me to frame what I was experiencing because, as you rightly say, we can’t convert anyone; that’s God who does this.
But some people will never believe because God has sealed their hearts, because they have, for some reason, rebelled against their Creator.
So, these are very powerful words, which help me to understand what I was encountering at Speaker’s Corner.
Yes, and these are some of the verses from the Quran where Allah (SWT) mentions why some people are guided and others are not guided.
One of the things we can see that makes people guided is that they seek the pleasure of Allah (SWT). They want to follow the religion of Allah (SWT).
So we can see that if someone just wants to follow his own desires—“I want to follow the religion that is suitable for me,” and “I want to take some parts of some New Age religion and some from Buddhism, and something from Hinduism because this suits me”—the person is not interested in following what his Creator wants from him.
Then this is one of the reasons why he will not be guided because Allah, He has to be open for guidance!
He has to turn to Allah (SWT). As Allah (SWT) mentions in Surah Al-Anfal and also in other verses—one of the most important things is humility.
Someone who is humble as a person—we can see people that are stubborn. Just take as an example with Pharoah; he was someone who saw all of the signs, all the miracles in front of him.
He saw Moses making da’wah on him. He saw the miracles with his own eyes, but still he didn’t believe.
Allah (SWT) said about him—Allah (SWT) conceals the heart of all of the transgressors and stubborn people.
So he was a transgressor; he was a wrongdoer, and at the same time he was stubborn as a person. So Allah (SWT) did not guide him.
Also, being truthful as a person—someone who is constantly lying.
We can see some missionaries today; they’re lying about Muslims, and they’re not truthful people. You can see with them that they are not really interested in the truth; they’re more interested in some other things that they are striving for.
Some of them have big status amongst their people in their church and so on, so it’s very hard for them just to turn away and accept guidance.
So these are some of the things that I really encourage every Muslim to do—reflect upon the Quran and look at every verse that has been mentioned in the Quran where Allah (SWT) mentions guidance and who He guides and who He does not guide.
This can be good for us because we’re always striving to do the things that can lead us to guidance and take us away from misguidance.
It can also be very important for us in da’wah to understand if we are talking to someone and just trying to take argument against argument and so on.
If the person is not humble, we have to try to reach out to the person in another way so he can be more humble to us as people—start to like us more and so on.
This can lead you to try to reach out to him more, and I will talk about that later when I come to the psychology of persuasion, insha’Allah.
So another thing that I will talk about is—I mentioned the theories when it comes to studying Islam and religious studies.
You have these theories that you base your understandings on, on the data that you try to analyze and so on.
The theory is a structured framework for understanding and interpreting religious beliefs and behaviors and experiences; it helps scholars to analyze complex aspects of religion through established concepts and methodologies.
So it can be very useful to organize all of the data that you have. You made a survey with thousands of people and you made interviews for hours and hours—now you’re trying to make sense of all the information that you have.
You can use these theories that are based on a huge amount of other studies, and they’re trying to come, based on these studies that they have, to some conclusion of a framework on how you can understand religious conversion, as an example.
But they have some limitations; they’re not universally applicable.
As an example, I’ll talk about L. Rambo’s theory of conversion. He mentions seven different steps, and when I made interviews with people and did surveys and so on, we can see that some people did not go through all of these steps; some people went through a couple of them and so on.
So it can differ between individuals, but these are general frameworks to try to understand and interpret the data in a better way.
So this can be useful, but it should not be taken as something that is written in stone; you should always interpret the data based on these theories.
So this person, L. Rambo, is a professor in psychology of religion in the United States. He wrote a famous book called "Understanding Religious Conversion," and he presented this theory of religious conversion.
This is just one of many theories when it comes to religious conversions—there are many other theories that people are using.
But I’ve seen that this theory has been used in many other studies, and I also think it’s good because it mentions steps of a human being before he starts to be interested in religion at all, and also what happens after he converts to the religion.
So it’s more inclusive than just focusing on the step of conversion itself; we can see with other theories.
So he mentions that all of us come from a context, we come from a religious background, from a cultural background, like I mentioned—the different things that influence us as human beings.
We’re living in a specific age, a specific place, and all of these things shape us as human beings.
For the second step, the person is from a specific religion; he’s a Christian, he’s a Jew, or something else.
Usually, that person goes through some kind of crisis in his life, and when he’s talking about crisis, he’s not just meaning someone has an identity crisis or someone in his life is dying or so on.
It’s something that makes him or her question the religious framework or the religion that he or she came from.
So something happens—he finds something in his religious scripture, or someone secular—someone close to him died as an example, or he was himself sick.
So he starts to reflect upon death—something is shaking his everyday life.
This is usually what happens with people when they convert to Islam. It does not have to be a specific moment; it can be different steps, but usually, it’s something that makes him think about his context that he came from.
So this leads him to the third step, which is the quest. He has this context from a Christian family, Christian background, or something else.
Something happens in his life, and he starts to look outside of the framework that he used to have—starting to look, thinking, “I might get answers to my questions outside of my religious or my the background that I came from.”
So this leads him to a quest; he starts to look around.
Then comes the fourth step, which is the encounter. It can be that the person met Muslims or stumbled upon a presentation of Blogging Theology or somewhere else where he encounters someone from the other religious system.
So he’s searching around, and now he encounters something.
Then comes the fifth step, which is interaction. He starts to interact with them—listening to more lectures, maybe going to the mosque, maybe sitting down with Muslims and trying to live among them or trying to be with them and understand more about the religion.
So this is the interaction stage.
After that, you have the commitment stage, when the person says his or her shahada and commits to the religion and becomes a Muslim.
Finally, the seventh step is the consequences—what happens after that? How it will transform the person's life, how it impacts the person's life in different ways.
Of course, this is a book of hundreds of pages; he explains all these steps in depth—explaining the context, how we can understand the context in different ways, how the crisis can happen in different ways, mentioning different examples with people, and then the quest, how people search, the encounter, interaction, commitment, and so on.
So why is this important to understand these different steps for us as Muslims? It’s interesting for us to understand religious conversion in general, but also to understand especially the step of the quest between the quest and the encounter because this is a chance for us as Muslims to reach out with the da’wah.
We have a lot of people around the world; they have different contexts, and they are going through different forms of crisis in their life.
What he mentions is that all of us go through different crises in some way or another during our lives, and this can make them to search.
Some of them become more committed to the faith that they have, but some of them look outside.
So this is the chance for us really as Muslims to try to reach out to these people with da’wah because reaching out to people when they are questing, when they are searching and when they are looking for something else, it’s much easier than reaching out to a person who might feel that he is happy with the kind of life that he is living right now.
He doesn’t want to change anything—he’s very stressed, caught up with life and so on.
So, as an example, people trying to reach out to people in the street and giving them pamphlets and so on—he’s maybe just busy in his life, just wanting to go to work, and so he’s not interested in learning about a new religion.
So one thing we can do through the internet is to analyze where the people that are questing are right now.
People in the quest, people that are searching—what are the kinds of things that they are looking for?
What are the things that people are interested in? It might be the meaning of life—what happens after death?
They’re trying to find some kind of community and trying to understand these people in order to reach out to them when they are searching.
They are not searching for a new religion or another—becoming Muslims—but we as Muslims should try to reach out to them when they’re in this stage of conversion.
Insha’Allah, is there anything you are thinking about when it comes to this theory and so on?
No, no, it’s very clear. I mean, it runs parallel with the Quran’s own analysis which really goes to the spiritual depths of what’s happening, but this is a well-recognized systematic analysis of this.
I’ve come across this before; it’s very helpful.
Oh, another thing that I think is quite interesting is to study the psychology of persuasion.
This is a book written by Robert Cialdini. He’s a professor in sociology or psychology of religion or psychology—something like that.
I don’t remember, but he is a professor of psychology and he studied persuasion in general—especially when it comes to people selling things. He said that there are—he conducted a huge number of interviews with people, looking at how they are persuading others when it comes to sales, when it comes to different movements that try to persuade people and so on.
He said that most of these things come back to six main principles that he mentions:
One is reciprocity. If someone is acting in a way of kindness, this leads the person to some kind of liking; he wants to give you something back.
He mentions stories about how people are selling things—they’re first giving you something so they want you to buy it based on that. This is something we can see from the Sunnah of the Prophet (saw); this was a way he was making da’wah, especially when it comes to people that are very influential among their tribes, sheikhs of tribes, and so on.
He gave them gifts, opened their hearts in different ways, and acts of kindness lead a person usually to want to give something back or leads to liking; that can make the person listen to you.
Another thing is commitment and consistency.
This can be a way when it comes to da’wah, that you make a person take the first step, and it should only be a small step—it shouldn’t be a big step.
But when you take the first step, it’s much easier to take the second step and the third step, and so on.
Because a person usually likes consistency in their life. If they took one step, it’s easier for them to take the second and the third and so on.
So commitment and consistency can be very important.
Social proof is one of the most important things that persuade us; it’s what other people do.
That’s why you go into Amazon, and you have all of these comments; you look at how many stars different products have and so on.
You look for social proof; you don’t know the people. You don’t know the person who’s writing the review; he might be working on Amazon himself or somewhere else.
Still, as humans, we are looking for social proof; we are looking at what other people are doing.
I have seen myself when we go out on social media and we say, “There’s a new person converted to Islam today, alhamdulillah!”
We will see that more people are writing to us after and becoming interested in Islam because they saw that someone else converted to Islam.
This makes them more interested!
So it’s very important that we are open with our Islam and open with our conversion because this can lead other people to convert to Islam.
Absolutely one of the biggest—I'll just come off this so I can show one of the most famous recent converts is this guy, Jan van Cleef.
He was the crown prince of Gildas; this is what Joram was called. He was writing a book to refute Islam.
He was an MP in the Dutch Parliament, a leading Islamophobe in Europe, a very powerful influencer.
Halfway through writing the book, refuting Islam, he converted to Islam, actually, because he realized the arguments he was coming up with were completely wrong.
I think what made it for him was he was sincere. He wasn’t just looking for reasons to attack; he wanted to find out the truth of the matter.
When he did, of course, he converted.
He’s a very famous convert to Islam, and I’ve met him several times—he’s a really amazing brother.
When he speaks, huge numbers of people like to listen to his story because he is such an inspiring man, such a sincere individual, very intelligent as well.
You know, he knows what it is to be on the other side. You know, he was a committed Christian, an Islamophobe—a powerful politician in Europe who, when he looked at the truth, decided to convert to Islam.
So these are very inspiring figures.
I do recommend this book, by the way—very provocative in type because that’s what he gets called, of course, as I’m sure you and I do, occasionally by non-Muslims.
I mean, it’s a very strong word, but there’s a forward by Hamza Youssef and Abdul Hakim Murad, who were key to his conversion.
So I just wanted to share that for people who haven’t read that book. It’s really very inspiring.
I haven't read it. I’ve heard about his story; it’s fascinating!
But then read. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.
Back to you!
Yes! So social proof is one thing.
Another thing is authority because we are looking at authorities—people who are authorities in different ways. When they are talking, as an example, I’m talking about the Prophet (saw).
I’m talking about different—might be scientific miracles in the Quran that some people like and so on or other things that people look up to.
This can have a huge impact on people, and especially when authorities are converting to Islam.
We have seen some examples of that, and specific people that maybe him himself, I don’t know, but others that used to be authorities in their religious communities and so on.
When they convert to Islam, it has a huge impact on them.
We can see this is part of the Prophet (saw) too—he tried to reach out to leaders of different tribes and so on.
Usually, when they converted to Islam, the people from their tribe converted to Islam after that too.
We can see many countries that actually became Christian or Muslim after the king of the country became Muslim or Christian.
Yes! But today we can see the authorities—especially in the West—we don’t have tribes and tribal chiefs and leaders and so on.
But we have other forms of other kinds of authorities. We have influencers—people that have huge impacts on a lot of people.
You could just take an example with some football players; many of them have half a billion followers on social media! It’s a huge amount of people!
If Muslims could try to reach out to some of them—especially if they are closer to Islam—they could convert to Islam.
This could have a huge impact on many people today because people are looking up to authorities.
If they could convert to Islam, it could have a lot of influence insha’Allah!
Another thing, which is one of the most important things, is likening.
I think this is something that many people making da’wah today are forgetting about. They’re just focusing on the argumentative aspects—they’re having these arguments back and forth and so on.
But they are not focusing on the person really liking him, and we can see in the manners of Prophet Muhammad (saw), his character—people loved him.
Some of them mentioned that they used to hear so many bad things about the Prophet (saw) that he was the most hated person to them in the whole world.
When they met him, he became the most beloved person in the whole world because they saw his character, they saw his manners, and so on.
It’s very hard for us as human beings to take something from someone else if we don’t like them.
If it’s someone that we really hate and they’re saying something that is true, it’s very hard for us to accept it—even though we know it’s true.
The other way around, we can easily accept things from people that we like. So people that have good manners, people who are thinking about their behavior, and the whole charisma—and so on—it’s much easier for us to accept a message from them.
I think it’s very important that we focus on this when it comes to da’wah.
One of the things also is scarcity!
When something is scarce—something is hard to reach—or you don’t have a large amount of time to take that specific product, especially when it comes to sales, we are more persuaded to do it.
This is what companies usually use. They say, “You just have one hour left,” or “You have 24 hours left to buy this specific product for 20% off,” and we go and buy it just because we think it’s so scarce!
I think this is something that we should focus on, especially with people that are close to Islam, but at the same time, they are back and forth.
So reminding them that they might not have many chances in life to accept the message of Islam—maybe they will die, maybe something will happen to them that makes it impossible for them to accept the religion.
Focusing on the scarcity part, I think, is very important too when it comes to persuading people to accept the message of Islam.
Because if a person thinks that they have their whole life and can just do it.
“I want to do other things in my life, and I can do it later.” If you have that kind of approach, it might be hard for that person to take the step to convert to Islam.
So now I’m going to talk a bit about the survey in Sweden that I made.
I made a survey of over 600 people.
This is your own—this is your own work, your own research!
Yes, this is my own survey that I made in Sweden, inspired by my studies in psychology of religion.
I’m focusing on trying to get a more scientific or knowledge-based understanding of the converts because what I see many times is that people are talking in anecdotes.
They say that most of the people that are converting today, they are like this—okay, based on what?
He met five or ten persons and then he is making some kind of hasty generalization based on that.
Of course, I know that 600 persons in a survey is not enough; you can do a much bigger survey than that, but in a small country like Sweden, just focusing on the converts there, it’s quite good data, alhamdulillah.
So it gives us kind of a picture when it comes to the people converting to Islam.
One of the interesting findings that I found in the study is that 77.9% of them converting to Islam were female and 21—22.1% were men.
This is very interesting from many aspects. One of the aspects, of course, is how Muslim women are portrayed in Western media and social media, and so on, that they are trying to portray Islam as an oppressing religion to women.
We can see in a country like Sweden—which is one of the most secular and feminist countries in the world—that we see that most of the people converting to Islam are actually women.
It’s quite an interesting number to see, but this is also something we see in Sweden—in the UK and in the United States as well, apparently.
When conversion occurs, this is also quite interesting. There are few people converting before they are 15—just 3.2%.
Most of them are converting at this specific age of 15 to 25—63%—and that’s quite a lot, to be honest.
Then 28% are between 26 to 40, and very few that are older than 40.
I think that one of the reasons for that is the thing with consistency and commitment; people who are older—they have stuck to their specific religion for most of their lives.
It’s harder for them to accept the truth. It’s not always like that. Alhamdulillah, a lot of people are accepting their religion too, but we can see that it’s much easier to reach out to people when they are in that specific age from 15 to 25 because they are not—they don’t have the whole consistency thing; they’re just beginning their adult life right now.
We can see the ethnic background; 60% are ethnically Swedish—both of their parents are Swedish.
18.1% have one parent from Sweden and another parent from another country—most of them from European countries, so from Finland and from other Western countries.
So we can say that almost 80% of them are from either both parents or one parent from Sweden.
Then we have people from other countries living in Sweden too that converted to Islam.
This is one thing that is very interesting when it comes to former religion.
Sweden is portrayed as one of the most atheistic countries in the world, but still when it comes to the converts, only 21% said that they were atheists.
88.5% said that they were agnostic, and quite a big number said that they were believing in a higher power.
So they were believing in God in some way, but they were not ascribing to Christianity or any other religion.
But this is a part of society that I think we are ignoring when it comes to da’wah.
Either you’re focusing on atheists or Christians usually, but these are people—they’re in between. They’re not Christians, really, and they’re not really atheists too, but they are somewhere in between.
They believe in a higher power; they believe they’re not materialistic—they believe maybe in spirits and so on, but they don’t ascribe to a religion.
What we can see here is that they are quite open, it seems, to converting to Islam.
So focusing on this group—and I think you can see the same kind of percentage in many other Western countries too—focusing on this particular group can be very important.
This is very interesting when it comes to people who influence them, so we can see that most of those who were influenced when it comes to Islam were influenced by people around them—either friends or a partner, either a husband or a wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, or relatives.
So most people are affected by people around them. I think this comes back to the whole liking thing.
This is someone who’s talking to them about Islam, and they are liking that person.
It’s a different thing to listen to your friend that you know is honest for you and really likes you, and so on, then listen to someone who’s a total stranger on the internet that’s talking about a religion.
You don’t know him; you don’t know if he’s really sincere in what he’s talking about and so on.
So friends reaching out to their friends is a very important way to reach out to converts.
But still, we can see that 19.3% were influenced by the internet—of people that listened from the internet—and only 10% from books.
It might be one of the reasons is that people that are between 15 and 25 today—they are looking at the internet more and they’re reading books, but subhanallah.
This is what I think is very interesting when you’re doing these kinds of surveys and so on.
Because someone might think that the best way for us to reach out with the message of Islam is that we write very good books about Islam and try to reach out with that.
This is the best way. I don’t say it’s a good way.
It’s not a bad way; it’s a good way, alhamdulillah. You can write books; it’s still 10% of people converting to Islam, but it seems that this is not the main way to reach out to people today.
There are other ways that might have more influence on people, and this is just a study, when it comes to Sweden.
I think that we need more studies that are bigger on people from other countries to understand this specific thing.
When I asked them how much they’re practicing Islam today, alhamdulillah, we can see that almost 90% are saying that they are practicing Islam very much or quite much.
So this is very good to hear.
What’s the difference between very much and quite much? I mean, in terms of actual—I mean, are we talking about the difference between praying five times a day or not praying, or what exactly are we talking about there, do you think?
Yes, this is one of the problems you have with surveys: when you’re trying to reach out with percentages, people might be interpreting the question in different ways.
So this is why usually when you’re making quantitative studies, you’re making qualitative studies too so you can ask them in more detail about these things.
But this is just to try to see how they look at themselves; they look at themselves that they are really practicing the religion or quite much.
Objectively, it’s very hard to say because you can practice the religion in many different ways.
But alhamdulillah, still, these are people who have converted to Islam, and they are still practicing their religion quite much or very much, alhamdulillah.
And that’s good news! Because what I hear sometimes is that people who are making da’wah when they are focusing on people converting to Islam very quickly— it’s a thing that they’re taking the Shahadah.
What will happen after one week or two weeks, and so on? We can see that many of these people converted to Islam five years ago, ten years ago, or so on.
Alhamdulillah, they’re still committed to the religion, and this is very good news, alhamdulillah!
This is always something that is very nice to see.
Also, people are really feeling happier after becoming Muslims—much happier or a bit happier.
Like you said, this can be interpreted in different ways. But alhamdulillah, people are feeling that way, and it’s very few of them that say that they feel less happy.
When I went through the survey, I saw that those few who said that they were feeling less happy—I think it was about six or seven persons—most of them were not practicing the religion.
So, like they became Muslims, but it didn’t really have an impact on them.
Most people, alhamdulillah, after they became Muslims, they became much happier.
85% is huge!
I think that this thing—because striving for happiness is something that all people have in common.
I think so! Converts showing this openly on social media and other places that they are much happier now—I think that this can have a huge impact when it comes to social proof.
If you see one, two, three, four, five people that converted to Islam, you see that they are becoming happier—this might be something that leads other people to become interested in the religion.
Why are they becoming happier? What is it about the religion that makes them happier today?
So I think this is very important when it comes to da’wah—that people are more open with their happiness after becoming Muslims and feeling the blessing of Islam.
So people can see that this is another thing that’s quite interesting, that about 50% of people that converted have called other people to Islam—after they converted to Islam.
I think this is something we should focus on more—that people who have converted to Islam can get educated about Islam and also can get some tools on how to convey the religion itself.
Because it has a big impact on people when they can see that someone who is a convert went through the whole thing themselves and then talking about Islam.
So equipping new Muslims with tools on how to spread the religion, I think is very important because this can lead to a chain effect.
So, we can see many of those— we said that 4% converted to Islam through relatives.
So they had maybe a brother or sister or someone around them that converted to Islam first, and then they called them to Islam.
So trying to strive for this kind of chain effect in societies, I think it can have a huge impact on spreading the message of Islam.
So this is quite interesting statistics that I saw when it comes to reaching out with the message of Islam.
Now we can see the social media timeline—I converted to Islam in 2002.
95 million people around the world had social media at that time. Now, in 2024, five billion people around the world have social media.
What’s the population of the world—is it double that? I mean, what is the population of the planet at the moment?
Around eight billion!
So that’s five out of eight, so that’s the majority of people in the world now are on social media.
We can see the timeline—this is something that has been happening just in two decades!
So this is a huge difference that is happening right now.
It’s a huge opportunity to reach out with the message of Islam!
We can see that many people in Western countries—before, the only way they knew about Islam was through schools or through media and so on—and they never encountered Muslims themselves.
So the picture of Islam was something that was portrayed for them through schools or through media and so on.
But now they really have the chance to listen to Muslims themselves.
So this is something new that has never really happened in history before—that people all around the world can listen to Muslims themselves talking.
So this is a very interesting time!
Like I was talking about, the glass is half full in that way that it’s optimistic.
The half-empty version of that is, you know, the first time in recorded history ever that we can be aware of and see genocide happening on social media.
Literally, it’s just constantly scrolling through Twitter, and you can’t help but come across pictures of dead bodies and babies that have been slaughtered by—by you know who.
And it’s very distressing!
But this has never happened before in history that we can actually witness this, so this can’t be covered up.
You know, maybe five billion people are aware of the genocide now in Gaza and in the West, and now happening in—we can see that it also had the impact that a lot of people in the West are turning against them now.
Especially the younger generation that are not taking their information from books, like we saw—they’re taking their information from the internet and from social media.
They’ve changed their minds, and this is really bad news for Israel!
Because now, people can really see what they are doing there.
Many people, it seems that when you can see the shock that people are going through, many people in the West are actually shocked—they didn’t know before what was happening there.
So this is something that can really reach out to people in a whole new way that you couldn’t before.
So what I’m focusing on here is that we can reach out with the message of Islam in a way that was impossible for us just a couple of decades ago.
I can say that you can go back to this lecture—the presentation that I had in Blogging Theology: "Can AI Help Muslims?"
We can take benefit; also, this is something new that is happening right now—the whole revolution of AI can be used in incredible ways, to be honest.
I was talking to a brother who has an organization that is making da’wah to people in China.
He said that he has been doing this—this online da’wah; they’re not going there, and they can’t even speak Chinese, you know?
So they said that it was very hard to reach out to them because many of them don’t understand English, and it’s very hard to communicate in Chinese and so on.
So it was very seldom that anyone converted to Islam because reaching out to people that can speak English, they can talk to and so on was very hard.
But now they’re using AI for translation to make da’wah, and they say, alhamdulillah, a lot of Chinese are becoming Muslims!
So they are writing in English or Arabic or another language and translating it through AI.
The translation is such—so accurate; it’s not 100%, but it’s much, much better than it was before, like with Google Translation and so on.
So you can actually have a conversation with a person, talking to him about Islam and converting to Islam—and this is something that was impossible just a couple of years ago!
But it’s really happening right now!
What we can use AI for is to analyze people on social media.
Now we have five billion people out there on social media, and if we have the tools and we understand the psychology of conversion—of why people are converting, the different steps that I was talking about: people that are in quests, people that are searching, people that are looking, and so on—we can now have tools that we can analyze huge amounts of data to understand the different people that are out there.
Try to reach out with customized messages to these specific people.
So we could see, as an example, that many people converted to Islam when they were witnessing the atrocities in Palestine and in Gaza, and they saw the people in Palestine having patience when people died around them and so on.
This actually led to a lot of people converting to Islam.
So reaching out to people that are interested in the question of Palestine, you can reach out to them in a specific way.
You can reach out to other people that are more into Bible studies in another way; to people that are more into spirituality in another way and so on.
People are right now out there!
We have the tools that we can analyze people and we can, by understanding the psychology of these things and trying to study them more, we can try to reach out to people with a customized message, trying to reach out with the da’wah of Islam in a way that was impossible just a couple of years ago.
So what I think that we could have as strategies—and this is the last thing that I will talk about, insha’Allah, during the presentation—is that we should do more and better studies about conversion to guide the da’wah.
We can have the strategies that we have in da’wah that are more knowledge-based—more interviews with people that have converted to Islam that really try to analyze the reasons behind people converting to Islam.
More surveys, more studies and so on so we can have a broader understanding about people in different countries, people of different ages—people, different gender, between female and male, and so on—so we can have a better understanding.
And based on that, we can try to customize the da’wah in a way that we can reach out to them better, insha’Allah.
Another thing that I think is very important: we saw that most people—especially in Sweden—are converting through friends.
Equipping and educating Muslims in general—people are converts and people are not converts, their common Muslims—about their religion and how to reach out to others, to reach out to their friends, is very important.
Not that everyone should be like a big da’i going out in the streets and making da’wah in Hyde Park or something like that, but still—you can talk to your friends, you can talk to the people at work, and people in university and school and so on.
We can see that this can have a very big effect when it comes to da’wah.
So having these kinds of online courses focusing on equipping general Muslims with tools on how to reach out with the message of Islam, I think that’s very, very important!
Also encouraging converts and influencers to be more open with Islam—like I talked about social proof.
I talked about authority—people being more open with their happiness with the religion, showing what they’re going through.
Because people today are not interested just in facts; people are interested in the living person.
They’re looking at vlogs; they’re looking at social media—how people are living their Islam.
This is what people are interested in now, because we as humans, like storytelling—we need a story!
We need to see human interaction. We don’t just want facts—Islam is the true religion because one, two, three, four, five!
This is important, but we also need to see the lived religion, so people are more open with their Islam.
And this can have a big effect, insha’Allah!
Like I mentioned, we can use AI to analyze and reach out to people in a customized way on social media because now we have five billion people living out there on social media.
We can try to analyze those who are out there and try to reach out to them in a customized way, tailoring our content in a way that is more suitable for these people.
This kind of content is more suitable for them and so on, and this content is more suitable for others.
I think it’s also important to use chatbots to reach out to people who are searching.
A lot of people don’t have Muslim friends; they don’t have Muslim relatives; they don’t have anyone who is interested in Islam around them.
Alhamdulillah, there are some organizations in different countries that are very active in this da’wah online.
This is something that has been going on for quite a while, but especially after COVID, when these organizations could not work in the normal manner that they used to work in before.
So they started to do more da’wah on the internet, and what I know from many of these organizations—we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people converting to Islam through these organizations.
So it’s a huge amount of people converting to Islam, alhamdulillah, from different countries.
They have developed good methods in how to reach out to specific people in specific ways and how to do da’wah through the internet—talking to people and so on.
So we need more content out there; we need more people that are active in these kinds of organizations and this kind of da’wah.
And also, in general, people being more open with Islam and educating Muslims to reach out to their friends.
So this is my presentation for today.
All right, fantastic!
No, that’s amazing, and I must say I’ve noticed that even in my short time being involved with da’wah, there’s been a huge improvement and sophistication in leading sisters and brothers to do da’wah.
It’s quite astonishing.
I mean, remember the 80s? I don’t remember them, but in the 80s we had Ahmed Deedat, I think, who was almost the sole representative of Islam doing battle against, you know, the missionaries who were attacking Islam.
Now we have some very sophisticated knowledgeable brothers—I won’t mention names, but they are very well known—who really have an incredible level of expertise.
I’m not saying that’s the only answer, but it’s part of it!
Of the answer in terms of communicating real, uh, knowledge, which is not superficial, which is based on a thorough understanding of the topic, whether it be Christianity or Islam, in science or artificial intelligence, or whatever, whatever.
I mean, uh, Dr. SH, famously Edra University expert on uh Islam and Science, and you know what could go on a very long list of incredible uh people now involved in Da, and so I'm very encouraged, actually.
A lot of it is based in the UK, for some reason. No idea why. I mean, compared to say, I don't know, Germany and France, but maybe it's the language thing—English language.
But, uh, so in that sense, I'm really, really encouraged, actually. There's a lot to be proud of. I think it can be much better too. I think it can be much better too, and it can be developed.
We're seeing that there is a development; I agree with you totally. And I think it can be developed even more, especially if we try to adopt these kind of strategies, try to have a more better understanding of the conversion of people, uh, why people are converting, and so on.
And try to customize the reaching out in that specific way. I think, in tal, that the future can be very bright, inah.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And your own work in Sweden—being absolute a leader in Sweden—you're doing extraordinary work. So alhamdulillah, that's very important to recognize that.
And you've done—you have a YouTube channel, of course, and uh, you're active in other ways so people can learn from expertise, uh, in many ways.
Your own contributions to Da and deepening our understanding of the world around us have been phenomenal, actually, and you are part of that answer. I’m a small bit of a big puzzle, but alhamdulillah, I try to do something with the will of Allah and the grace of Allah.
Well, thank you.
Well, thank you, uh—whoops, there we go. Thank you very much indeed for your time. Another fantastic podcast, and it's very helpful indeed for us to get a really helpful perspective on this.
So thank you very much, and, uh, do sign up to Dr. Swede's uh YouTube channel. I put the link in the description box below, and any other links that pop them in as well.
So thank you very much, sir, for your time, and um, till next time, very nice to be here.