This audio is brought to you by MuslimCentral.com

Today's Qatira is going to be about a phenomenon that has swept the country for the last few years, and it is something that our teenagers, especially our youngsters, are involved in, and even many of us are caught up in this, and I wanted to give it a perspective from the Islamic lens.

And that is what is known as the cancel culture, what is known as the cancel culture.

All of you youngsters are familiar with the cancel culture, perhaps the elders are not fully aware of what the cancel culture is.

The cancel culture is a unique recent phenomenon, literally five years old, literally less than five years old, in which groups of people, society, deems specific famous people in particular,

worthy of being censured, or being isolated, or ostracized.

So they launch campaigns, and they say this person should lose their job, this person should not be invited, and so large campaigns are done, and the people are cancelled, the people are taken off of the public eye.

And this is a psychological empowerment to those who typically didn't have power.

What is happening is that, especially in the last decade or so, groups that have been marginalized, have discovered a very powerful tool, and that is the internet, that is social media.

Groups that have been downtrodden in the past, a simple example, and again not to be too contentious, but as a factual here, a simple example, the reality of molestation and sexual exploitation.

In the workplace amongst the Hollywood elites and what nots, people were taking advantage of lots of actresses for example.

There is no power, what are they going to do? They are not going to go to the police, the police can do nothing.

So what has happened is they have used this tool to come together, look at that famous Harvey Weinstein guy, the guy that was well known for doing this, groups of people have come together, and power is now on their side.

They can now be judged during executioner against people who should be tried by an actual court, but that is not going to happen.

And so the public now has a tool that they did not have before, and it is, as I said, a reversal of the tables, where those that didn't have any power, the masses, actually at times are more powerful than the ruling institutions.

They can literally get tenured professors fired, they can get some of the most famous actors and actresses, some of the most famous politicians, some of the most powerful political men on earth, or women on earth, they can get them literally ostracized.

Things are very interesting in this regard. So it's a social pressure to publicly shame an individual that the public deems worthy of shaming and then to penalize this person, how financially or PR or even more than this, so that a message is sent.

What is the message, or rest of you society, don't do like this person, or rest of you out there, this is not the role model that we should have.

Now, it really is, by the way, a very effective means of empowerment, and it has the potential to be a force of good, but as we are all painfully aware, it also has the potential to be a very chaotic force, and a very evil force.

And it can easily be flipped around, and it has been flipped around to become a force of evil, a force of division, and unfortunately our own youth and our own Muslim congregations are getting involved in this cancel culture for our own internal causes.

And today's brief khatera, I wanted to take this psychological, sociological phenomenon and examine it through the lens of the sharia.

What are some of the key factors that we need to be aware of when we understand, because in the end of the day, cancelling is a tool. I am not saying it is all haram, but like all tools, like all effective means, we have to look at it from the lens of Islam, and not from the lens of modern culture.

...