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I hope that a new generation can listen to our own experiences and then make up their own minds.

Now, let me go back to 9-11.

9-11 occurred and I was a graduate student in Medina.

It's clicheed now to say that it was a wake-up call

for so many of us.

It was definitely a wake-up call for me, and it made me realize that my place was back here,

preaching and teaching to my own peoples in the English language that I needed to come back and give that where there was just so much misinformation about

Islam so much fear so much antagonism and so I you know wrapped up my master's program instead of

completing a PhD in Medina I came back to America and started my PhD here at Adiel.

And you know for the first few years I was busy teaching with our Institute, you know, Basel was one of our

earliest students, very active on our forums.

We taught all types of classes, Akhida and Fechadeth and Sahibukari.

But you know, there was this unspoken rule that we don't talk about jihad and we don't talk about foreign policy and we don't talk about America's involvement in the Middle East. Why? Why did we not do that? Primarily because it was very very difficult. Our own government, our own countries, our own, you know, the Western world, America in particular, the people were still in complete shock from 9-11, and they were so traumatized that to merely attempt to explain, to merely attempt to contextualize would have been perceived as a justification.

At that point in time to be brave and point out foreign policy issues, right?

You know, if you were Noam Chomsky, if you were, you know, white Caucasian preaching out against

American foreign policy, you would be marginalized and just not mainstream.

But if you were a brown skin cleric, you would be in Guantanamo, frankly, or at least in jail,

you know?

If you were a brown skin Muslim cleric in that time frame where the

paranoia and emotionalism was at an all time high and you know we knew of people I know

people and Basson knows people who are totally innocent and are still sitting in jail right now as we speak you know for nothing except thought crimes and for maybe some who are a little bit more than that but not actual terrorism,

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