Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:49early on. In political life, you were one of the founders
00:00:52of the Damascus Declaration in 2005. You were arrested in
00:00:552007 for two and a half years,
00:00:57and religious then quickly joined the Syrian we are living it now. I mean, in revolution in political activism. Islamic geography, "Let
00:01:01There was a stage during
00:01:04the Syrian revolution, from
00:01:05wise from the coalition to the interim government to the constitutional committee,
00:01:08and between supporters and opponents of this
00:01:12tortured, exhausted, unable political experience. This
00:01:23one of our professors in your life was not limited or confined
00:01:27to the dental clinic, but that political
00:01:30and social questions in Syria and in Syrian society
00:01:34Fajr. I mean, this would take you to a wide
00:01:36been explicitly stated. When there is and broader path than the clinic and would require
00:02:42and my father, may God have mercy
00:02:46in
00:03:32afflict except for a sin.
00:03:39However, prioritizing the Sunnah over rooted in age, rooted in
00:03:41that books
00:05:11in the eighties. You know the dangerous crisis that we faced.
00:05:15We were born in '65, young, and therefore,
00:05:19God Almighty spared us from entering into this crisis, and we did not go
00:05:23to
00:05:26organizations at that
00:05:36including my dear brother Muhammad Barro,
00:05:39were about 16 years old. Even
00:05:42teenagers and those who were involved, whether they entered or not, I mean, my uncle,
00:05:46who was 15, was a month older than me, and yet
00:05:50in '80, they took him to
00:05:53Palmyra prison and he remained there until
00:06:09was happening and we didn't understand why
00:06:13all these events were happening
00:06:16and why
00:06:18the religious current or the conservative current was always
00:06:22afflicted, to find
00:06:33Saeed. They were leaders of the Brotherhood in the 1980s,
00:06:35meaning in Deir ez-Zor. Yes, in Deir ez-Zor.
00:06:39Exactly. How was it in the seventies? In the eighties,
00:06:43you know that everyone was, well, the
00:06:47organization in Syria was completely eliminated. But the organization was secret. I mean, there were
00:06:51public, well-known leaders,
00:06:54the general supervisor, and at the same time, there were secret leaders inside Syria,
00:06:57hiding. I mean, what was your father's and uncle's
00:07:09massacre on June 27,
00:07:131980, Law
00:07:15No. 49 was submitted to the Syrian People's Assembly, which stipulated the execution
00:07:19of anyone belonging to the Muslim
00:07:24basis, everyone who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to submit
00:07:28their withdrawal and leave the group. This was combined
00:07:32with the enormous number of arrests
00:07:34and the amount of torture that all Islamic
00:07:38currents were subjected to at that time. Therefore,
00:07:41you can say that political work after 1980
00:07:44no longer existed in Syria. Uh-huh.
00:07:46And this, by the way, we may touch
00:07:50upon it later, it played a major role in
00:07:54the international community's lack of understanding of Islamists in
00:07:57Syria, as they
00:08:01still believed that the momentum and strength of the Islamic
00:08:05seventies in Syria continued until the Syrian
00:08:09revolution and then after the Syrian revolution.
00:09:43the positive, sudden shift was in
00:09:461992 when they were released,
00:09:49and one of the surprises was that many of them
00:09:52spoke with utmost clarity and frankness that
00:09:56we must conduct reviews,
00:09:59reviews of the ideas that we hold,
00:10:03and that the ideas that we held
00:10:06turned into behavior,
00:10:08and the repetition of behavior turns into personality.
00:10:12The combination of personalities turns into culture.
00:10:16And this was not taken into
00:10:20account in our societies,
00:10:23whether Arab societies or Islamic societies, or even Syrian societies.
00:10:26Whereas, if we had
00:10:30in Syria, the Arab world, and the Islamic world great sociologists
00:10:34who studied such issues, perhaps
00:10:37they would have moved
00:10:40people towards another world.
00:10:43Aha, because no renaissance can take
00:10:46place without thinkers, without
00:10:49wise men who tell people or
00:10:52generate great ideas.
00:10:56The existence of a group of wise people, especially
00:10:59university graduates, or let's say high school
00:11:02graduates who understand what the
00:11:05wise men say. By the way, the country's wise men do not need more than
00:11:0940-50
00:11:11ideas. And usually, these are elderly people,
00:11:15their ages exceed 60 or 65. It is difficult for them to
00:11:19engage in society. Who transmits these
00:11:22ideas to the public along with the
00:11:26wise? The wise understand what the wise men say, then transmit them to
00:12:26even this is one of the problems we faced in the Syrian
00:12:30revolution, that the diagnosis was not
00:12:33done in the way doctors diagnose. Doctors' diagnosis
00:12:35has four stages: diagnosis
00:12:39of the symptom, then reaching knowledge
00:12:42of the organs that
00:12:46disease, then knowing the causes that led to the infection
00:12:49of these organs in the human body, then studying
00:12:52the environment in which the disease originated.
00:14:40who approve
00:14:44legislation and approve
00:14:47political decisions through
00:14:51consultations or, I mean, political consultants
00:14:54and... deputies or those who come up with innovative ideas
00:14:58or those who criticize dead ideas in society
00:15:02or fatal ideas, as he used to say. Correct, but I am talking about the state level.
00:15:05Yes, at the state level, certainly,
00:15:09the wise ruler is a statesman,
00:15:13and there is a big difference between a statesman and an amateur.
00:15:16In a recent
00:15:20lecture, I said that one of the biggest
00:15:24problems in Syria over the past 100 years is that we have always
00:15:28sought the desired
00:15:30state,
00:15:32but we have not been able to achieve it. Why have we not been able
00:15:36to achieve it, even though we had a historical
00:15:38opportunity after independence to
00:15:42establish a state?
00:15:45In fact, some international researchers, led
00:15:48by Gordon Torrey,
00:15:51wondered in his book
00:15:54titled "Syrian Politics and the Military between
00:15:561945 and 1958,"
00:15:59why the democratic project failed in Syria, why the military
00:16:03seized power in Syria, and how.
00:16:06And the third question, which is the most dangerous and important, is why he believed—and
00:16:09he wrote this book in 1963—he
00:16:13believed that military rule would last for a very, very long time in
00:16:16Syria. And he concluded that there are real
00:16:20problems in the structure of the Syrian people. This cannot
00:16:23be resolved except with the presence of an intellectual elite,
00:16:27first of all,
00:16:30wise men who can diagnose
00:16:34the sick reality in Syria throughout the past 100 years.
00:16:38Then they conclude with results that the
00:16:43the wise men carry and transmit to the common people. In a very important
00:16:46book called "Revolution Without Revolutionaries"
00:16:49by the American writer of Iranian origin, Asef
00:16:53Bayat, he made
00:16:57book between Khomeini's revolution in
00:17:001979 and the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt
00:17:04during Morsi's time. He concluded that there were a number
00:17:07of points that should have been taken into consideration, among them,
00:17:11for example, that in the Iranian revolution, there were thinkers who generated
00:17:15ideas, such as Ali Shariati. Ali Shariati focused
00:17:18his entire life on half a line, which is
00:17:21social
00:17:22justice.
00:17:26Between us and Egypt, there were no great thinkers who generated such
00:17:29ideas. Also, in
00:17:31Iran, there was a charismatic personality, Khomeini's personality,
00:17:34who was able to greatly influence people.
00:17:38Then, at that time, there was the intermediate society, who were
00:17:41the wise people who were conveying these ideas to
00:17:45the common people, and the common people by nature in Iran,
00:17:48according to the Shiite structural composition,
00:17:53On the contrary, Syrians, regardless of his point of view, in the end, it's a researcher's
00:17:57point of view. Some believe that there were thinkers and wise people, but
00:18:01subsequent events led
00:18:04things to where they ended up. But let's go back to
00:18:07the nineties, the first stop, or
00:18:17the eighties you were a child and you were asking questions:
00:18:21Why is this happening? Why are people being arrested? Why
00:18:24is Hafez al-Assad so authoritarian? Why are people being killed? And
00:18:27so on. But in '92, when
00:18:32releases of detainees began,
00:18:35you started hearing from them the word "reviews." Of course, reviewing
00:18:38mistakes. We want to, I mean,
00:18:41focus on this point: What does "review" mean?
00:18:44And what was the discussion exactly about which mistakes
00:19:15in Islamic movements, says that the more
00:19:19we increase in suffering
00:19:22and pain, the closer we get to God. And this is not
00:19:26true. This is a prevalent opinion, of course, and,
00:19:29I mean, a prevalent description. I mean, fair and just. I do not
00:19:33agree with it, and this was one of our reviews as a result
00:19:45prevalent at that time. Of course, the conviction was
00:19:48that the more we suffered,
00:19:52the closer we got to God, and that God Almighty had decreed
00:19:55this upon us,
00:19:59and that these sufferings are a test from God
00:21:04the reviews that we discussed with our group of young people
00:21:07and brothers in Deir ez-Zor initially, and then in
00:21:11Syria in general,
00:21:13is
00:21:15that there are many, many concepts that
00:21:18need to be corrected, otherwise the Muslim mind
00:21:21will not be saved. Our conviction was that
00:21:25there were deep injuries that afflicted the Muslim mind
00:21:29across
00:21:31generations, especially after the control of the Salafi current
00:21:35at an early stage. The school of Ahl al-Hadith
00:21:38and Athar on all aspects
00:21:40of intellectual,
00:21:43social,
00:21:47life in the second Hijri century,
00:21:50and the crushing of the rationalist school, the crushing of the
00:21:53Mu'tazilite school. This led to
00:21:56the prevalence
00:21:58of the idea
00:22:02that the literal, unadulterated text
00:22:07delving deeper into understanding the religious
00:23:04text a fixed understanding
00:23:08that does not change with the change of time
00:23:11and place? I mean, one of the points that
00:23:15the young generation took great issue with
00:23:17was the understanding of Sheikh Nasseruddin,
00:23:40according to what our sheikhs understood.
00:23:43What the Messenger said according to what we corrected from hadiths.
00:23:47What the companions said according to what we imagined from their sayings. You know the discussion that
00:23:51happened according to what we imagined. Of course, the discussion happened
00:23:54in contemporary books. There was a discussion
00:23:57between what Imam Al-Shawkani, may God have mercy on him, presented and what
00:24:00Imam Muhammad Abu Zahra presented about the authoritativeness of the companion's
00:24:04saying, etc., etc. What I want to get to
00:24:08is that
00:24:11Muslim mind at an early stage of Islamic
00:24:14history, which resulted in
00:24:18the prevalence of the school of Athar and Hadith, even though the Prophetic
00:24:21Sunnah is agreed upon by everyone as the second pillar or the second
00:24:25source of legislation.
00:24:29the Holy Quran had consequences.
00:24:33I mean, it reduced the possibility of what
00:24:43said in their definition of the Sunnah that the Prophetic
00:24:47Sunnah is the Prophet's understanding of the Quran in his
00:24:50era.
00:24:52Therefore,
00:24:55there became a possibility to find a kind of
00:24:59coexistence with contemporary
00:25:02proposals
00:25:36It is not but a revelation revealed," if you read the context, it is exclusively in the Holy Quran, in the Holy
00:25:40Quran. I just want to point out that there are
00:25:43intellectual schools that have discussed this
00:26:01However, Omar ibn al-Khattab, our master Omar ibn al-Khattab, may God be pleased with him, when in the time
00:26:05of famine, in the year of famine,
00:26:08he suspended the ruling of
00:26:18be pleased with him, issued a fatwa in a matter that seems very clear
00:26:21regarding inheritance. Yes, he issued a fatwa in a certain
00:26:24year and then in the following
00:26:27year, others came to ask for a fatwa on a similar
00:26:31matter, but not necessarily identical.
00:26:35So he gave them a different fatwa than the one he gave the previous year in an inheritance
00:26:45He said to them, "That was according to what we ruled, and this is according to what
00:26:48we rule." Uh-huh, according to his calculation. So there are
00:26:52differences, the time factor, the temporal circumstance, the spatial circumstance, also
00:26:59no one pray Asr except in Banu Qurayza."
00:27:02I mean, look, this particular incident gives you an idea,
00:27:06as if it's a clear lesson. Certainly,
00:27:09especially the Prophet, peace be upon him, did not
00:27:13blame the conservatives and did not blame the rationalists
00:27:16who found that the Prophet, peace be upon him, told
00:27:19us this exactly. While, for example, Ibn Hazm al-Zahiri, whose
00:27:23school prevailed for a period of time, always
00:27:26said that no companion had the right
00:27:30to pray Asr except in Banu Qurayza, even if they did not
00:27:34arrive until
00:27:43especially since its
00:27:59we are in dire need
00:28:03for Islamic proposals to be logical
00:28:07to contradict the clear
00:28:10to contradict the sound transmitted text
00:28:14nor the clear intellect. I mean, when
00:28:17there are things that flatly contradict clear intellect,
00:28:21I mean, we also need
00:28:24to respect this intellect that God Almighty created and with which
00:28:28He blessed many nations.
00:28:31he thinks in contradictions,
00:28:33and by the way, that is,
00:28:36one of the most important proposals being put forward now to save the Muslim
00:28:40mind is to extract it from the great
00:28:42contradictions in it between behavior and emotion, between
00:28:46his
00:28:48thinking in this angle and then his thinking
00:28:57very painful points is that the Muslim mind,
00:29:01throughout our history, over the past
00:29:04centuries, did not
00:29:14it has been in the minds of contemporary
00:29:17Islamic groups that we must act and we are not responsible
00:29:22despite the fact that Allah Almighty stipulated in the Holy
00:29:26Quran that He will not intervene
00:29:29with direct divine power to save
00:29:32the believers unless they have exhausted
00:29:35all the means leading to victory, the premises,
00:29:38of course. So if they have exhausted all the premises,
00:29:42Allah will intervene. Allah Almighty
00:30:12just because they were believers and they did not do anything. Muhammad, peace be upon him,
00:30:16listened to the advice of Al-Hubab ibn
00:30:20Al-Mundhir to change the location, and
00:30:22also the distribution of forces,
00:30:26choosing a specific type, meaning that he exhausted his effort
00:30:33been taken by the Muslim mind so that we do not
00:30:37fall into catastrophic results
00:30:39that were, until this moment,
00:30:43and it is as if you want, that is, Islam does not mean disabling
00:30:47the mind, nor does it mean separating
00:30:50the conclusion from the premise, for sure. For sure, how do you separate the premise from
00:30:54the conclusion? Is it revelation or is it reason and consultation in the battle
00:30:57of Badr? For sure, for sure.