In a generation pulled in every direction, ROOTED is a series about the ones who stayed grounded. The scholars who sat at the feet of their teachers and carried the tradition home.

Sh Muhammad West is one of the few in his generation who carries two worlds at once. A graduate of the Islamic University of Madina and a chartered accountant. The imam of one of the oldest masajid in the country, Boorhanol Islam in the Bo-Kaap, and the treasurer of the Muslim Judicial Council. He is the Madina graduate who refused to come home and cut himself off from the community he disagrees with on secondary matters. He chose the harder road, the road of staying in the room.

In this conversation, we sit with the formation of a scholar in Jeddah and Madina, the texture of his return, the Athari and Shafi'i fault lines, the cost of refusing tribalism, the romantic but halal proposal, the autistic son who is the happiest person he knows, the burnout he is only now learning to name, and the institution he is now responsible for the finances of.

We talk about the MJC honestly. What it is, what it is not, why our forefathers thought it was non-negotiable, and what the path forward looks like for an organisation eighty years old that is finally being asked to explain itself.

A conversation between two scholars and a long-time colleague about formation, friction, and the institutional servant’s reckoning.

This is your deen. You deserve to understand it.

00:00 Cold open: just die as a Muslim

00:22 Opening monologue

02:25 Quick-fire opener

07:43 Jeddah as a child

10:50 Madina University from the inside

13:18 Coming home in 2011

17:45 The parents' search across Malaysia, Egypt, Jeddah

22:30 The mother's record

27:40 The maternal grandfather and the Silo gym call

33:30 The Madina student years

39:20 Teaching the Sirah from a minority lens

49:20 The Woolworths meeting

52:00 Athari, Salafi, and the time and place for debate

57:00 Sami Hamdi and the politics of Quran and Sunnah

01:00:40 Palestine and the heart right now

01:11:30 Just talk to Allah

01:17:25 The Romantic Proposal

01:21:00 The life of an alim's wife

01:31:30 Burnout and sharpening the saw

01:33:50 The MJC: what it actually is

01:46:35 Baytul Ulama in the absence of a Khalifa

01:55:50 Living with politics

01:57:55 Final advice for the seeker

02:00:00 The point of all of this

#ROOTED #IsnadAcademy #IslamicScholarship