Omar Suleiman
Expert Palestinian perspective and analysis

Omar Suleiman
American Islamic Scholar and Imam
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Imam Omar Suleiman is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research and an Adjunct Professor of Islamic Studies in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at SMU (Southern Methodist University). Suleiman was born to a Palestinian family in New Orleans in 1986.
Questions Answered (4)
Expert responses from this voice
Dr. Omar Suleiman explained in this video:
The prophet, peace be upon him, said that the first person to be judged on the day of judgment will be a Shahid, a martyr who is brought forth in front of Allah. Allah will mention his blessings, his favours upon that person, and the person will acknowledge all of those blessings. Then, Allah will say what did you do with those blessings? He would say that I fought in your cause until I lost my life. Allah would say you have lied. Rather, you fought so that people would say what a brave man you are, what a courageous man you are. You wanted that to be said and it was said. In this Hadith, the Prophet also mentions a scholar who only taught or who only recited the Quran so people would praise their recitation or their knowledge.
There are five things that the scholars mention:
- A sign is a person who doesn't renew their intentions. We're a religion where we are taught to renew our intentions every single day every single morning before every single act of worship.
- If the only time you do good work is when other people see it then that's a sign.
- If you're disappointed when you're not celebrated.
- That you quit when you're attacked.
- That you walk when everybody else walks away. Things capture our attention and everybody gets excited about a noble cause and then eventually attention moves on. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. There are going to be people that are going to look around and say no one's talking about this anymore no one's posting about it anymore no one's protesting anymore no one's praying about it anymore no one's giving to it anymore I guess we can all move on now.
Dr. Omar Suleiman said in this video:
By insisting on facts. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for as long as Islam has existed in the Muslim world. Anti-Semitism is the crime of the West. You have historic Jewish communities in the Muslim world; show me that counterpart in the West; it doesn't exist. Zionism is an inherently racist project and in and of itself has a layer of anti-semitism to it because the idea was to dispose, in many ways, of the Jewish people from Europe and the West. Palestinians did not just wake up one day and start hating Jews. Islam was not the problem. Occupation is the problem. If Muslims came and kicked Palestinians out of their land established an illegal state on their territory and mistreated them the way that Israel is mistreating them then we we would resist that Muslim state. This has nothing to do with religion. This is based in, not just a lack of facts, but based entirely in fear. Religion cannot be scapegoated nor should religion be used to continue the war on the Palestinians.
Senator Lindsey Graham said that Israel is in a religious war and I stand with Israel unapologetically. It's clearly not us who have the problem of religious fanaticism. It is the speaker of the house. It is multiple members of Congress. It's the president of the United States who stands unapologetically as a Zionist and who speaks with such disregard for Palestinian Humanity and the children who are being slaughtered in his own country and abroad. We have a president whose Legacy will be genocide. We call him Genocide Joe for a reason. You can't fight that evil if you can't name it properly and it is important for us to no longer allow the Democratic party or a Democratic president to say well I am the lesser of the two evils. How much more evil can you get than an average of 10,000 civilians being killed a month you don't get much more evil than that so we're not going to fall for it anymore we will hold him accountable and we look forward to holding every single politician that has stood for this genocide accountable come November 24.
Dr. Omar Suleiman mentions in this video:
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says in the Quran:
وَمَنْ أَظْلَمُ مِمَّن مَّنَعَ مَسَاجِدَ اللَّهِ أَن يُذْكَرَ فِيهَا اسْمُهُ وَسَعَىٰ فِي خَرَابِهَا ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ مَا كَانَ لَهُمْ أَن يَدْخُلُوهَا إِلَّا خَائِفِينَ ۚ لَهُمْ فِي الدُّنْيَا خِزْيٌ وَلَهُمْ فِي الْآخِرَةِ عَذَابٌ عَظِيمٌ [البقرة: 114]
This means: Who does more wrong than those who prevent Allah’s Name from being mentioned in His places of worship and strive to destroy them? Such people have no right to enter these places except with fear. For them is disgrace in this world, and they will suffer a tremendous punishment in the Hereafter.
In this video, Dr. Omar Suleiman mentions:
So Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was one of the few co-sponsors of a bill that has been on the floor of Congress for years, initially sponsored by Congresswoman Betty McCollum, to penalize Israel for its detention of child prisoners. Thousands of children arbitrarily detained, put in military courts, solitary confinement, and yes, sexual violence, that's been documented by human rights organizations, against them, and there have been no repercussions. So I want you to think about this. You know, just the thought of conditioning aid to Israel, you know, so that it doesn't indiscriminately bomb entire populations has not been able to find any home in mainstream American politics for years.
Just trying to stop Israel from picking up children and throwing them into military prisons, where they disappear for decades at times, has not found any thrust in mainstream American politics, whereas any resolution that is pro-Israel will make it past both chambers relatively quickly. When people talk about Israeli hostages and then talk about Palestinian prisoners, there's already a problem with that framing. First of all, all 2.2 million people in Gaza are hostages. Every Palestinian that lives under occupation is a hostage, but all of those prisoners that have been picked up, women, children, innocent people, with absolutely no process of making sure that they're treated right or given fair trials, or even given a communication line with their families or with any government to help them, is absolutely criminal. All of those prisoners are also hostages. And when you already propose this idea that there are Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, you're already implying that one group is complicit in their own devastation, whereas another group has had devastation visited upon them entirely out of their own doing. And so it's important for people to learn about children prisoners, who are indeed hostages to an apartheid system, and even what happened during that four-day truce, which all of us hoped would be extended and become permanent, where 150 Palestinian prisoners were released. Israel just went and picked up another 135 in the West Bank and threw them in prisons. That's what I mean when I say you're not addressing the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the occupation. The root of the problem is the apartheid. The root of the problem is the desperation that then drives the creation of all sorts of circumstances that will only further lead to the devastation of everyone, right?
The root of that problem is the dehumanization of the Palestinian, because no one is raising alarms for those Palestinian hostages in Israeli military prisons, no one's putting up their pictures, and no one's talking about who they are and their human stories, and the violence that's been wreaked against them at every level. So if you don't solve, not just the root of occupation, but also the dehumanization that drives the occupation, which is, unfortunately, so pervasive right now in the discourse, then you're going to continue to have this gap in how the world sees the plight of the Palestinians and how, unfortunately, the American public sees the problem of the Palestinians.
Abraham Accords is nothing but an agreement in which you slap the name of Abraham on arms deals. In exchange for countries being able to undertake their own unholy pursuits, they use one of the holiest names in history and continue to erase the main victims of this atrocity. And so the Abraham Accords are an insult to humanity, an insult to the Palestinians, and an insult to the name of Abraham.