Answering Islam W/@TheAlMaidahInitiative

Introduction to the Answering Islam Series

Hey everyone, the following conversation is a continuation of a series we did last year with a good friend James Raymond. It was called Muhammad and the origins of Islam. This is a continuation of that series entitled answering Islam.

Recorded all the same day. This is gonna be a three-part series. We're gonna be talking about Really how to understand Islam given the current geopolitical climate this was recorded last year. So we hope you'll find this as a fascinating conversation.

Additionally on top of having James in the studio if you remember when he was on we have another guest I bars who is really fascinating to talk to him as he is somebody who is a former Muslim who grew up in Turkey.

Now a Christian have very unique perspective. So I hope you really enjoy the next three parts of this series and as a reminder Cultish here is a 100 crowdfunded ministry. It's because of our supporters like you Who've been able to generously give and help us out the last few months that we've been able to have this content come out to You on a weekly basis and to make sure that everything is accessible to you for free without a paywall.

So if you want to partner with us and be part of the mission to change lives here at cultish. Go to the cultish show calm. There is a donate tab at UN and we ask you Consider giving generously as we want to be able to continue our mission to be able to give you resources to impact The kingdom of the Colts in this case give you resources on Answering Islam so all that being said enjoy this upcoming three-part series.

Reintroducing the Guests and Their Backgrounds

All right, welcome back ladies and gentlemen to cultish. My name is Jeremiah Roberts one of the co-hosts here joined by Andrew once again. Thanks for joining us back, man.

Absolutely, man. Excited to be here. It's gonna be a blast. Awesome.

We're back with our good friend James who gave us a good three-part linear overview of the kind of this historical linear Timeline cover India Indiana Jones timeline going here and there and everywhere just talking about how Islam came to where it was today.

Good to have you back my friend. Thank you. Still haven't changed my clothes. Yes. I know I know I. Yeah, I lost my team my sweatshirt. So definitely the studio always gets warmer as it progresses throughout the day.

So Andrew I noticed you're without a sweatshirt now, too. So we're definitely thin out as much as we can. We're also joined by your friend Ibarra who came along with you. Good to have you. Good to have you here.

Awesome man, so we are the first three part of our series we kind of gave just a historical Timeline is of Islam and really the trajectory of where we are headed is to really talk about What it's like to dialogue and engage in the Muslim world.

So we figure you know, we're talking yesterday. I thought hey, you know what? Let's let's bring you in because I think you'd be a great valuable contribution to this conversation so just tell everyone just a little bit about yourself your background and And what this conversation means about you why is this whole.

Conversation important to you. So connective tissue to the last episode, right? We talked about the Mongol invasions. We talked about the Ottoman Empire the modern nation-state of Turkey and then everything that's happened in the Muslim world for the last hundred years including Afghanistan and I was represents all of that to some capacity.

Well, awesome. That's quite a spotlight. Thank you. I mean look at him. He looks like Kublai Khan with a modern haircut.

Marco Polo series, that's right. So a little bit about myself I am a Turkish believer. I was born in Turkey in 1974 my father is an Afghan from Northern Afghanistan. He's in Uzbek. My father was a Muslim Poet he he wrote poetry to inspire the freedom fighters in During the Soviets and and during the attacks of the Taliban to inspire people to keep fighting when he Started doing his political activity.

He got on the radar of the king of Afghanistan. His name was Zahir Shah and My father eventually had a price tag on his head. So he had to leave in the middle of the night with a couple of his friends and they walked across the mountains of Pakistan tried to get asylum in Pakistan and then Iran and then eventually in Turkey where he met my mother became a Turkish citizen, but in the mid -70s my my country was Trying to be destabilized by the Soviets.

So my dad said I've already been through enough political turmoil in my life, and I I don't want to go through this again. I'm gonna move my kids somewhere. So we we he went and looked at France Germany in the United States, but everybody knows that you know, the streets in America are paved with gold, right?

It was a place he wanted to go to yeah, and um, you know, that's where we landed. We landed in New Jersey. I grew up a Muslim kid around Italians and Italian Catholics and Irish Catholics and Hispanics and and Haitians.

And we never really fit in really anywhere, you know. We ate on the floor and people had you know. Normal people sit at a table, right? We ate at a floor and the rug was hanging on the wall.

And.

Conflict with Islam and the Search for God

As I grew up, I Kind of started coming into conflict with Islam. First of all, because my my friends were not Muslim. I didn't have my people I didn't have my community around me. We were the only Muslim family around and as I got older I experienced a Kind of hypocrisy from people who said that they were Muslim now my father's political following some of them followed him over to the United States and started coalescing around him.

And we would house them for the weekend in our home. And I remember there was one time where My my mother who hosted all these people who took care of them You know a hand and foot bringing them tea and food and doing all the dishes and all the cooking Came to them after they had prayed and Brought them tea and when when she walked out of the room, you know they started making fun of her because she was Turkish and she didn't speak Farsi and I think that was like a flashpoint moment for myself because I remember looking at that moment and being like if that's Islam I don't want to have anything to do with it.

I slowly started this distance myself from from that and I started doing what other 16 year olds do you know 14 15 16 year olds do I started doing drugs, so I started hanging out with You know the burnouts and and I was hanging out with musicians.

I was a very very bad musician. And I started you know Doing things that I shouldn't have done and I'm not very good at those things. I was always getting caught. So by the time I was 23 years old, I was facing some steep consequences for my actions.

And I remember I had my moment of truth I was handcuffed to a bench in the Trenton City lockup next to a Transvestite prostitute who was looking at me and licking his lips and I you know, they don't handcuff you behind your back, right?

They handcuff you underneath the bench so I was just so high and coming out of it and then I'd come to and I'd look and This guy was you know staring at me and like I like to tell people that's when I started calling upon the name of the.

Lord I.

Started looking at my choices. I got out. They released me on my own recognizance and then I wound up Walking out of that that police precinct and thinking that I couldn't stop. I Couldn't stop doing the things that I that I was doing and I remember asking God for help.

And that kind of opened a spiritual journey for me where I started looking at different world religions. I looked I have a tattoo on my arm. I have a tattoo on my arm of a yin-yang in the shape of a Sun and that's kind of sums up The religion I had created for myself.

I call it transcendental pharmaceutical ism. Right a little bit of drugs and some Eastern philosophy and a whole lot of hippie stuff and blood zeppelin. So After I was you know going through this process started evaluating world religions and and where I landed again.

Was I believed in a God. I believed in one God. I didn't believe in praying my ancestors. I didn't believe in multiple gods. After all, who was I talking to when I got out of the jail cell. Mm-hmm and then in my search I Talked to my dad.

My dad was very knowledgeable and well-connected and I told him everything that I was going through and then I asked him Spiritual questions about Islam as well. But if you understand Islam, you understand that, you know, my dad who knew a lot about Islam Was not going to answer my questions.

He wanted me to go to an imam and He knew people so he was gonna try and get me trained as an imam and I was on board with this. I thought this was a great idea because you know one it provides structure to it's gonna answer all my questions.

And you know, it's a path right in the middle of chaos. We all want paths and You know one day I'm gonna write a book titled a funny thing happened on the way to the mosque. Because that was my path a musician that I was working with his girlfriend introduced me to her friend who was a born-again Christian.

And long story short. She invited me to church and I said sure let's go. And that church wound up being a messianic synagogue in Philadelphia, and I don't know, you know, your audience is familiar with messianic synagogues.

They're Jews that believe in Jesus, but worship in a Jewish context in a Jewish way. So when you walk into a messianic synagogue, like I did that night people are wearing prayer shawls. But it's kind of charismatic worship and they're dancing And blowing shofars and everything else like that.

And it's just it's pretty wild and for me. It was just a cultural experience. And then the rabbi gets up and starts giving his sermon and I just literally was staring at the carpet back in 1997 I didn't have a cell phone.

And.

During the message the rabbi said one line he said Saddam wants to destroy Tel Aviv, but Yeshua won't let him do that and I remember thinking who's Yeshua. Yeshua, if you don't know is the Hebrew name for Jesus and It was like I was sitting there and it was like the lights came on around me and This thick powerful presence drew close to me and it was so thick I couldn't lift my head and I heard him clearly say I'm Yeshua and I didn't say anything.

There wasn't like a like a like an altar call or anything like that. I just remember thinking I'm coming like this was what I was looking for. And then after the service, you know I just sat there the rest of the time pondering.

After the service their young people told us about another messianic congregation closer to me. That was in Philadelphia. I was in New Jersey. And I went there two weeks later and I wound up staying for 15 years.

And then you know, I was involved in ministry. I was a youth pastor there for a long time and then I moved to Seattle with my wife and then three children and I went into ministry with a friend of mine who runs a messianic synagogue in North Seattle and He hired me to be his assistant rabbi.

Wow, yeah.

I've ours. Let's look. I want that's first of all, I've got the goosies when you said that it was like it was Yeshua. He's like I'm Yeshua. I gave me the goosies, man. I was getting the goosebumps there when you said that.

Backing up to um when you were young growing up. What did you think about Jesus? Were you ever taught. Didn't did anyone ever talk to you?

So Jesus a funny funny thing is I went to Catholic school. My parents had a Delicatessen in Princeton and it was right across the street from the deli. So my parents sent me to Catholic school for five years and It didn't make any sense right to me because everyone else got to participate in Catholicism except for me.

They made me sit there. So we'd go to mass and everybody would go up for communion and everything like that and me and the other you know Hindu kid would sit there and twiddle our thumbs. And I would just remember staring at this big statue of this guy on a cross, you know in this room.

And it's not a knock against Catholics. They were all very nice. It just wasn't what I was being taught at home. And then you know, there were several instances where I would go home and my father would essentially deprogram me.

So I would tell him about what I learned in school and then he would say well, you're not you're not, you know Catholic. You're Muslim. You're Turkish. It's your identity. This is this is what Turks believe.

And you know, he would essentially just take Jesus out of the equation. Wow.

Why Christians and Muslims Misunderstand Each Other

Yeah. So just just some things to maybe they need to give us some connective tissue of my own is that you know. In our last series, you're kind of giving some syncretistic. Talking about the syncretistic involvement of just Muslim as Islam as a whole.

Like you are like one microcosm in a just a whole Group or segment what I want to call it just people all throughout the world who have you know An underlying worldview ideology belief system that like need to be reaching this in this demographic.

So like with all that you see. Like with all that with all your background. And James you could Charlie jump in here a second a second with all your background and given a quick summary of of all That you know and have been through.

Like what do you think is most important about what James is doing?

I think what we're doing is immeasurable because Christians don't understand Islam and Muslims don't understand Christianity. There is a huge amount of informational discrepancy between them. You know my my parents and a lot of the Muslims I grew up interacting around just had a conception of the West, right?

It was a conception that all Americans are Christians and therefore all Americans are You know godless because they might say that they're Christians. But look at the way they live look at the things that they do.

Look at look at you know I don't know. Look at the wars in the Middle East. Look at all of those things and it just became like a straw man argument for them. It was easy for them to be able to deflect and not have to get into things because The Quran was essentially like giving them permission their Islam was essentially giving them permission to just say well, you know.

They weren't saying they were infidels, but it's an undercurrent. Yeah, and I think what we do. And what James is, you know. Kind of brought about by his efforts with al-maida is is to kind of bridge this gap like bring people to the table have conversations.

The stuff we produce is fantastic. And honestly, it's taught me a lot and I grew up Muslim, right?

Um, maybe you could both answer this give your own thoughts. In this could you mention that the both both tribes don't understand each other. They misunderstand each other. So from both your perspective, what's the biggest thing that Christians that misunderstand about Islam?

And what are the biggest things that Muslims misunderstand about Christianity?

Yeah, so I think the things that Christians generally misunderstand about Islam is I think. We're used to thinking in terms of Sola scriptura and we're used to thinking in terms of a conservative liberal spectrum.

Right. So our experience in church is yeah. Sure. You have some different denominations but in general you either believe the Bible or you don't and The people who believe the Bible look a lot like each other even if you have some, you know John MacArthur's and Jeff Durbin's and you know, and some you know, some people who are more charismatic right in general.

We kind of believe in the same thing and the same causes and stuff like that. Yeah, and then there's the Liberals who you know fly rainbow flags and have a different course, right? So we're used to thinking in that terms that you if you believe the book.

Then you do you look like this if you don't believe the book you look like this.

Stereotyping. Yeah. Yeah, um and.

In general that works in Christianity because the source material is, you know concise it's Accessible and if you're gonna take it all seriously, it's not like it. You know, you read three chapters of the Bible today.

You can have read it in a year. Yeah in Islam, it really isn't like that because it's not a solar script or a religion. Mm-hmm. It doesn't believe it isn't. I mean, we know like a guy who believes in the Quran as the kind of.

This this sort of final authority in practice, but we know one of him. He's great. We love him, right? But that's not how most people think about it. Most people it's much more like Roman Catholicism, but lacking a pope in a lot of ways.

Yeah, so it's this complicated web of people and traditions and history that you know people relate to so. We don't understand the complexity of the different points of view here. So we think so the West has tended to think yeah, Osama bin Laden Conservative Muslim your neighbor who is nice is a liberal Muslim because if they were conservative they'd be doing the suicide bombings and stuff.

Right. All right. That's that's that's kind of a misconception on the Christian side. It's not as bad as it was now and say like 2003, but that's still that's still there to some extent and then yeah, I think in general the straw man we often make about other religions is.

We think is we think of Christianity versus other religions as faith versus works, right? But no other religion out that believes in salvation through works alone. It's a it's a mix of you know, faith and good deeds.

They get a person's power. Yeah, so Muslims believe that God is merciful. They believe they have to rely on that mercy. But they. But there's there's the works are a huge part of it, too Like, you know most other religions are so I think it's just an unnuanced idea.

Yeah, and you take the average Americans idea of what Islam is you can find a you can find that it's true in one case or another but it's definitely not like universally applicable. Yeah, and then conversely I think People in the Middle East think of Christianity as either Roman Catholicism or MTV.

Mm-hmm.

So they think of it as this, you know huge sort of formal, you know thing.

And.

Or they think of it as something with with no rules at all, which is just you know, you know wild sex all the time. Right, you believe in a God who slept with Mary and produced a demigod and now you're all sleeping with each other.

Makes perfect sense kind of thing, right? That's the kind of that's the general way. So in general what Muslims think of Christians though is they think there were nice people with completely incoherent ideas, right?

No, that's good. And what about your and what's your perspective to like the coin saw it bounce off of him? Like what do you think are the biggest? Misunderstandings both sides have of each other. I.

Think that Islam particularly in the Middle East tends to view Christianity through a Political realm political lens, right? So A lot of the things that have happened Particularly with the West like I guess you would from their perspective from the Muslim perspective you would say like kind of meddling right interfering or whatever and That's not what Christians do.

That's not what Christians are supposed to do. So Essentially, it becomes a game of caricatures, right? Like what's the caricature of the person in the West? That makes it easier for me to live over here in the East and then what's the character caricature of the person in?

The East who makes it easier for me to understand what they're doing over here in the West so for instance if you see a person who's. If I tell people that my father is from Afghanistan, you know, they automatically think that my dad wore a big turban and had a big bushy beard.

You know and and his wife like had a head covering or you couldn't see her face at all. And that's not at all. What he was like, that's not at all. What my family was like, you know. So when you explain to people, you know when you're a kid for instance when you're Muslim.

But then also in light of other things that have happened. So in the 80s, there was the bombing in Lebanon and I told a Christian soldier American soldier that I was a Muslim and he freaked out on me.

Because he was like my friends died over there, you know, you know like Muslims are trying to kill Americans, you know and and I mean was my mom trying to kill you like. You know, what's my was my dad trying to kill you?

We lived three doors down from this other family. We never tried to kill them. Yeah, and I find that when I go to the Middle East when I visit my mother. There it's the same problem right it's again a game of caricatures right like this is what the West operates like this is what Americans think this is what Israelis think and You know the more you go into I guess you would say like conservative Islamic territory in the Middle East the worse the caricature gets.

What was it like for you experiencing going through and processing 9 -11?

So I was a believer already. But while I was growing up My father being politically active just had all of these publications lying around and occasionally there would be some in English and being my dad's essentially like Translator of his thoughts into English, you know, whether it was the electric bill or a letter.

He wanted to write to somebody. Some of it was in English and I'd read about this guy named Osama bin Laden who was Practicing state-sponsored terrorism and how you know elements in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were funding him.

And.

You know when 9 -11 happened I wasn't. I was shocked just like everybody like the way it happened and everything else like that. But when people started associating it with the Sama bin Laden for me, it was more like.

The gears just finally clicked like oh, yeah, I've heard about this before. This is the guy who was active in Afghanistan. This is the guy who you know, my father would like talk about and I'd be like, yeah, whatever dad, you know.

So processing that was hard and then you know, I was working in a maintenance organization at a university on the East Coast and I kind of my friends started the distance from me because of my like my Spiritual and you know national background before I became a believer.

And it was just kind of like this lonely period I remember. It's a good thing. I had my congregation. Yeah, you know, they loved me and That never happened, but my parents were super afraid of what was going on.

I remember leaving work that day to go be with my family. I called my mom. She was crying. My father didn't say anything.

And.

You know, I had to just be the one that was there as a believer assuring them that you know God's in control. He loves you. You know, it was actually a moment where I was able to talk to them a little bit about the gospel.

But in the long run, you know. Dealing with it dealing with 9-eleven and living on the East Coast and I was dating a girl who lived in Nutley, New Jersey and I would drive from New Jersey, you know past Manhattan on the outside on the New Jersey Turnpike and I just watched this fire.

It was smoke coming up and and then it was replaced by lights going up to the sky. And it was something that I just kept on thinking about the conflict Between how I was raised and where I was then. Yeah.

Loving Muslim Neighbors and Handling Hard Conversations

Andrew do it before you on the sex site next to him. Do you have any thoughts or questions you want to ask?

Yeah, I was wondering about like your relationship with your parents after you came to Christ. Like what was that like?

It was it was strained. They didn't like that. I got saved and they really didn't like that. I got saved around Jews. And they got really conspiratorial about it. I Had to move out. I was living with them when it happened.

I had to move out for a couple years and just kind of like you know. Figure out who I was what my identity was in Christ, you know. Learn to have a quiet time without you know. My dad standing over me going, you know, that's a false religion.

You shouldn't do that. I mean he deprogrammed me when I was young. I'm sure he thought that he could deprogram me when I was older. Yeah.

Yeah, um, so we're also we're really making the segment and this is all been so great so far. I really appreciate everyone's contribution so far. We're really gonna be focusing in on just the Islamic sources and how the average Muslim relates to those I know for me, like I said, you speak of September 11th.

A lot of things we're gonna talk about I associated with You know 9 -11 and the whole geopolitical world but but again these sources have Years like thousands of years of history as you we talked about in the previous episode but um.

What's a good starting point to really talk about that? Do you want to maybe add some webbing in here about that that modern Muslims? We're no longer could this is a big an area of like defining terms.

Really, you know bridging the gap as far as like dialogue goes like what do you think is the best starting point for all this? For people who can understand that.

Well, yeah, that's something we need to make sure we have a lot of time for. But as far as I wanted one thing is a helpful case study here. We're talking about Osama bin Laden and 9 -11 and stuff like that is understanding like How Osama bin Laden's position?

Exists right because it's not you don't just open up the Quran. It says yeah, when your enemies get too powerful crash a plane into their buildings, right? Right, there's no skyscrapers. There's no airplanes when the Islamic source materials are produced but what someone like Osama bin Laden is going to do and this comes through an interpretive tradition called is from Starts with Ibn Hanbal who he talked about like two episodes ago.

Then a guy called Ibn Tamir who is a Muslim during the Mongol invasions then the guy called Syed Qutb who starts a movement during the Muslim Brotherhood times and basically, they're thinking is that Most conservative Muslims would believe that it's Inappropriate to wage jihad and the word jihad means struggle, right?

It doesn't inherently the word doesn't necessarily mean fighting. It could mean in a struggle as well in the Islamic sources. It means armed fighting though. You read the book of jihad in sahih Muslim.

It means it's a book about warfare but most conservative Muslims don't believe it's legitimate to Fight a holy war unless you have a caliph. Unless it's defensive. So basically what these scholars like Syed Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri and then Osama bin Laden did was they kind of built their case like this.

Yes, correct. You cannot wage jihad without a caliph. However, if the Quran says if somebody is making mischief in Muslim lands then you can fight them and What could be more mischievous than having? American boots in American military bases in Arabia near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

This is you know, this is an invasion. This is This is territory. And yeah, the reason America was there by the way was to stop Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait. Nevertheless that put us there to protect our interests so they saw this as you know provocation and as a reason that our blood was legitimate for them they had a righteous quest so.

Um.

So then okay, but still in Islam generally that people frown upon killing civilians in warfare. So, how do you justify that. And what they did is they took a verse from a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari which says that.

The.

Muslim the person who funds a Muslim warrior while he's on jihad gets the same reward as the soldier himself. So if the Muslim Benefactor gets the same reward as the Muslim warrior then the American taxpayer who funds the mischief in the Muslim lands through their taxes in the US military is therefore a legitimate target for the Muslim for the for jihad.

Right. Hmm, so you can see that they're making their case by appealing to several principles, but you can also see how a Conservative thoughtful Muslim could argue with all of those and say, okay, that's not the right equivalent.

This isn't exactly how this should be happening.

And.

You know, yes, that's what that's how you can start to see the nature of how people have to relate to these things In order to make their case. So it's just you're much more complicated than people want it to be.

Yeah, it's also.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because earlier I could have heard you guys wrong. We were talking about one person specifically will hold the Quran is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice for them. That's their objective standard.

Yeah, the majority of people that are in Islam don't hold that. So how can they have a sole objective standard to say it's not correct or it is correct in terms of Let's say attacking a taxpayer citizens.

How do they have any form of Moral-objective standard to say that this is definitively Islam if the Quran is not the sole infallible rules faith in practice.

Well, here's the thing and we're getting and we're getting back to the last hundred years again at one point. The system depended on having a government with one central figure who could say that kind of thing.

Right who could say I am the caliph. I represent all Muslims. You do not represent Islam. Stop doing that and. Now there's a power vacuum and everybody's trying to fill it. So without that sort of central leadership structure.

You have all these sort of different types of scholars. Drawing different things from the different Islamic source and kind of constructing different versions of Islam and the only real point of appeal is The scholars.

Well our scholars say this well our scholars say this. Well, those aren't the real scholars. No, those aren't the real scholars, right? You just you're in this. You know the kind of infinite cycle of arguing about human authority and that's kind of one of the central problems in the Islamic world today.

Hmm. Hmm. I think it's also important to understand that.

Where.

Islam and radical jihadism are today didn't happen in a bubble right like it was, you know the tactics are inspired by Political revolutions that have happened in the last hundred years like Rhodesia for instance.

Or You know what the the track that the PLO took and then what the track that Hamas took and what their Justifications were and then how that turned into you know What al-qaeda did and then now what Isis has done in other groups.

So fun fact. The foot is not a fun fact.

It's a horrible fact that the first suicide bombers In the Middle East were organized not by radical Muslims, but by a atheist Japanese communist woman. What inspired by the kamikazes in the Japan use in the Second World War?

Wow, what's what was the purpose? Well, so basically.

If you really look at the into the origins of kind of Israel and Palestine, it doesn't start as a religious conflict. It really starts in some ways is almost like a leftist civil war. So all of the early Israelis were you know, mostly kind of very very socialist kind of borderline Communist and most of them like Ben Giron, for example, the first Prime minister of Israel didn't believe in a god.

So or he's a Most agnostic right and he was you know, left-wing. It was very socialist. And a lot of the early resistance to them were different Socialists who were taking up the sort of Palestinian cause as part of their cause.

It's only later that both the Palestinian and Israeli population start getting more, you know religious. So that's why the Palestinian cause has actually been left-wing cause longer than it's been a Muslim cause in some ways at least at least not with that kind of intensity.

And so you have all sorts of people getting in there so if you've ever seen the movie, you know 12 days and in Tebbi There's a flight hijacked from Israel and taken to Uganda by any I mean the people that did that were German communists.

Hmm. So there's always been this kind of very complicated connective tissue there that You know, you read Osama bin Laden. There's there's there's some sprinklings of Karl Marx in there, too.

Yeah, well, that's where the marriage of tactics happens, right. When you take a left-wing, you know a hard like leftist tactic like terrorism and then, you know kind of. Add your own flavor to it, right?

And then gradually like you were talking about it evolves into a religious cause and not a spiritual cause. Yeah, I'm sorry. Religious cause and not a political, right?

How does so with everything we've discussed so far in this episode? What is how does. Like how does that help in you know? Make creating relatability to the Muslims you've been in dialogue with because I mean obviously this is their world, too.

So they have knowledge of it and I think that's I'm assuming that's probably very helpful though, right?

Yeah, it is helpful. And I think Like being able to be fluent and this stuff is great. But I think what's Almost as helpful with much less work is just having the mind that understands that it's a complicated web.

Yeah.

And allowing place for the individual in front of you to be able to express their own place in that. Rather than you assigning them a place to that, right? Yeah um and and having some sort of category of this.