Suleiman, Imam Dr. Omar

Muslim scholar; founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research; professor of Islamic Studies, Southern Methodist University; civil rights leader

Omar Suleiman: Islam

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 17, 2023

• Omar Suleiman
• Islam
• Yaqeen Institute
• Islamic prayer and Ramadan
• Hajj and Mecca
• Malcolm X
• Muhammad Ali and Khabib Nurmagomedov
• anti-Muslim bigotry
• Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis
• Israel-Palestine

Core ideas

Suleiman lays out the foundations of Islamic belief in traditional terms: one God, described as compassionate, merciful, and utterly unique, accessible to believers directly through sincere supplication without clergy or intermediary. He describes submission to God as initially difficult — particularly for those whose experience of human authority has been damaging — but ultimately liberating, since it replaces the burden of being "your own god" with trust in a wisdom beyond one's own. He roots much of this in his personal history: his mother, a Palestinian immigrant to Louisiana who suffered strokes and partial deafness yet was renowned, in his account, for radiating warmth and deliberately including people left out of gatherings; he describes her illness and eventual death as formative to his own theology, teaching him that "the material world disappointed early on so that we could see beyond it," and that suffering has meaning within a framework of divine wisdom and an afterlife of ultimate accountability and recourse, even when its immediate purpose is inscrutable to human understanding — comparable, he says, to a child who cannot understand why a loving parent stops them from a dangerous action.

He explains the Islamic view of human nature as a spectrum between angelic and animalistic (or even "devilish") potential, where humans — unlike angels, who have no choice but to worship — are distinguished by their capacity to freely choose righteousness, and describes intentionality as central to Islamic practice, where mundane acts (eating, sleeping, a smile) become spiritually meaningful through conscious devotion. He walks through the six articles of faith (belief in God, angels, scriptures, prophets, the Day of Judgment, and divine decree) and the five pillars (testimony of faith, five daily prayers, obligatory charity, fasting during Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca), describing the physical and emotional experience of prayer (particularly prostration, which he calls the position of greatest closeness to God) and of Ramadan, which he frames as producing genuine gratitude and empathy for the poor through voluntary restriction rather than deprivation. He describes the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca — built by Abraham and Ishmael, per Islamic tradition — as a powerful experience of human equality, citing Malcolm X's account of his own pilgrimage as transformative in dissolving his earlier racial framework. He situates Muhammad as the final prophet in a lineage shared with Judaism and Christianity (including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, all referred to with "peace be upon him"), describes the Quran as, in Islamic belief, the literally preserved and unaltered word of God (contrasted with what he describes as historically revised or compiled earlier scriptures), and highlights Muhammad Ali and the UFC fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov as public examples he considers exemplary representations of Islamic humility, family devotion, and integrity.

On anti-Muslim bigotry, Suleiman argues the association between Islam and terrorism is empirically "lazy," citing disproportionate media coverage of violence committed by Muslims relative to other perpetrators and pointing to the much larger toll of 20th-century ideological violence (World Wars, fascism, Soviet-era atheism, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Rohingya genocide) as having nothing to do with Islam. He recounts leading his mosque community through armed anti-Muslim protests in Dallas around 2015 (amid Trump and Cruz campaign rhetoric and a Syrian refugee influx), describing a BBC-arranged encounter in which a protester who had expressed dehumanizing rhetoric about Muslims and Syrian refugees before meeting Suleiman and a refugee family was moved to tears and expressed regret afterward — an experience Suleiman uses to argue that direct human contact can dissolve dehumanizing narratives quickly. He discusses the 2017 Trump travel ban ("Muslim ban") as personally and communally disruptive (describing detained travelers and a mosque-organized prayer vigil at the Dallas airport), and his direct involvement, as a first responder and pastoral presence, in the 2022 Colleyville, Texas synagogue hostage crisis, framing his response as driven by simple human solidarity rather than any specifically religious calculation. He argues that violent extremism generally reflects political instability and dehumanization rather than religious teaching per se, citing ISIS's rise amid the devastation of the Iraq War as an example, and draws an analogy to Martin Luther King Jr.'s eventual opposition to the Vietnam War as a case of moral clarity following empathetic engagement with an "enemy" population.

The conversation's most contested section concerns Israel and Palestine, where Suleiman — speaking as a Palestinian-American whose family was displaced and who states he has never been able to visit his family's ancestral land — argues explicitly that the conflict should be understood as a political and human rights matter rather than a religious one, distinguishes "Zionism" (a political ideology, which he says can coexist with Jewish anti-Zionism) from "Judaism" (the religion), and states his position that Israeli policy toward Palestinians meets the legal definitions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing, citing findings from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and a Harvard Law Review analysis in support of that characterization; he describes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in strongly critical terms and expresses opposition to the Abraham Accords, which he argues use interfaith framing to normalize what he considers the further disenfranchisement of Palestinians. He emphasizes that many Jewish individuals and organizations (he names commentators and groups explicitly) share his opposition to these policies, and that Palestinian Christians are also affected, framing this as evidence the dispute is not fundamentally interreligious. These claims reflect Suleiman's own strongly held, publicly stated advocacy position on a highly disputed geopolitical conflict, presented here as his account rather than as settled or uncontested fact.

Suleiman closes on a personal note about resilience — describing how his father's example, his family's support, and his religious conviction that "slander doesn't stand" over time have helped him weather public criticism and threats — and on hope, framing his belief in the capacity for positive human change (illustrated by his account of visiting Syrian refugee camps and considering that any single act of contact or care might unpredictably shape a life or a larger trajectory) as inseparable from his religious conviction that consistent small acts of good, however modest, carry lasting meaning.

Excerpts