Hamza Yusuf’s Fall from Grace

Clarity comes from perseverance through privation, not knowledge

Salina Khan

In a newly released video from a 2016 conference, American Muslim “scholar” Hamza Yusuf is seen snickering as he asks Syrians,

How’s that revolution working for you? Huh? You know what the slogan of the Syrian revolution was? Huh? “The Syrian people will not be humiliated.” They were shouting it in the streets. Now all these poor innocent people are begging non-Muslims to let them into their countries. Allah can humiliate whomever He pleases.

What he forgets to mention is that he was also on the streets in September 2012 leading a Syria Freedom Rally in Washington, fully encouraging the Syrian people to join a (now-failed) regime change plan orchestrated by America and Israel and their Arabian and Turkish lackeys. Shouting from the stage, Yusuf promised that “the Syrian people will not be humiliated” in their fight against the so-called “tyranny” of the Syrian government.

However, four years later in the video he is seen sitting on a cushioned sofa in the coastal town of Samsun, Turkey, laughing as he discusses the plight of the Syrians who were duped into destroying their own country by people like him. Now he claims Muslims are “fluff” and don’t have the capabilities to choose their own leadership (conveniently ignoring that the Islamic Republic of Iran successfully overthrew a 2,000-year-old monarchy in 1979 and replaced it with an Islamic government).

Chastising those who rebelled against Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, Yusuf says, “‘If you humiliate a [legitimate] ruler, God will humiliate you.’ That’s a hadith in Tirmidhi.”

Once again, he neglects to mention that it was he who was bashing Muslim leaders of the Axis of Resistance at the Syria Freedom Rally,

The leadership... in Lebanon and Iran [allies of the Syrian government] have revealed themselves to be the political machiavellian people that they are. They have revealed themselves to side with the tyrants against those who are oppressed.

The irony of it all is that since insulting the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanese Resistance in 2012, it is Yusuf who has fallen in disgrace, tumbling in the eyes of the Muslim masses as he revealed his true self by insulting the Black Lives Movement, affiliating with the UAE government’s peace forum, becoming a human rights advisor to President Donald Trump, and crash landing today with the release of this video. He tried to humiliate the Axis of Resistance through the Syrian crisis, but it is his comments on that very issue that are destroying him on social media today.

It’s not a coincidence that the final nail in the coffin of Yusuf’s respectability (whatever little he had) as a Muslim scholar came on the day of ‘Ashura’, when Muslims around the world commemorate the triumph of good over evil. There are so many political lessons to be learned from Karbala’. If only more Muslims would remember, understand, and analyze the events and personalities of Karbala’, they would clearly be able to recognize the Husayns and Yazids (and Yazid’s court scholars) of today.

 

Salina Khan

(First published in October 03, 2019)