Salams sister. You’ve nailed it on the head – some people think that hip hop is a bad thing when in fact it may be a means by which people come into the fold of Islam.

At the same time, I know that entertainment and music can carry people away and turn them to addiction and obsessiveness and one must really be careful with that.

May Allah(SWT) help us all inshAllah and really help us carry the proper character of a Muslim individual inshAllah. Thanks for the insight.

lol! Thin ice!.. made my day.

Slippery ledge.

SDW

I had a run-in with Mr. Knight at the infamous “Muslims for Bush” booth during ISNA 2004. It was an interesting discussion – as we began talking about the hadeeth of the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, somewhere in the conversation, he interjected the idea that, “Well Aisha went to war with 'Ali because she wanted the caliphate for her father.”

I did explain to him the mistake, and he became quite silent. Needless to say, I don't think he knows much, and what he knows is mixed up in jumbles.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/11/generation.isl…

Imam Suhaib, any comments on this?

You would benefit greatly from reading this book on the topic of the American Muslim Ummah: http://www.amazon.com/American-Muslim-Women-Neg…

JazakAllah khair again for this, us youth living in America trying to make sense of it all need stuff like this… Wa Alaikum Assalam.

I can relate to what he says here as an American born Muslim youth who is the son of immigrant parents:

'They want to be American and they want to fit in badly. But when they see a brother, who is much more authentically American than they feel they are, and who is much more serious about Islam than they have ever been, grab the mic and praise Allah while expressing himself, think about what that does to their minds. I guarantee they will never look at their father’s prayer mat or their mother’s head scarf in the same way again.'

I think we basically agree, Sheikh. In a purely democratic forum, any number of misguided opinions could be mistakenly accepted as shari'i by the sheer force of the number of voices promoting them. Not that these opinions shouldn't be voiced; we should just be clear on where opinion ends and where knowledge begins.

Here's where I'm confused: have we been talking about shariah this whole time? I'm not so sure that that was understood by everyone in the conversation. Imam Suhaib, for example was mainly concerned with how hip-hop is used for dawa. Many of the commenters were coming at it from a cultural angle. Your original post, which started this conversation, didn't explicitly say anything about shariah or what it would say about hip-hop. It just gave examples of how recent, mainstream hip-hop tends to go against much of what we stand for as Muslims. There were nothing explicitly legal or binding about the text of the post. To me, that says, “Okay, the Sheikh is giving us his opinion and I'm free to agree of disagree with it.”

Of course, I understand that you probably base your opinions on your knowledge of Shariah. But how are we to understand how you arrived at your conclusions unless we're privy to your train of thought? Explaining what the Shariah says on these issues would be of great benefit to us all. Convincing us of your informed opinion, rather than simply giving it to us, would only strengthen us in our deen.

I think this is why many of us began quoting Dr. Abdallah — he explains his positions so that we are at least capable of understanding them. This is a core characteristic of the Muslim community in the West. We like to question things until we understand them. In my (normal, non-shari'i) opinion it's a strength, not a weakness.