Full Lecture Transcript (Cleaned)
Yoga's Hindu Origins — 40:18
The same principle applies to yoga as well. Yoga is a controversial issue. Multiple scholars have said it is haram, and I respect that, because if you actually go to an authentic orthodox Hindu temple, yoga is an actual mechanism of ritual worship. It is their version of salah — I'm not exaggerating. That's like one of the paths to moksha, to nirvana. The priests, the pundits, they're supposed to be in those postures for lengthy periods of time as an act of worship.
How Yoga Came to the West — 41:09
Now, when the first people from this land went to India during the hippie movement, they really liked what they saw and they brought it back to California. They started their yoga centers in the 1960s. They basically started it as a fad — a left-wing, liberal fad — devoid of any Hinduism. And then it became just stretching your limbs and having some exercise.
The way that yoga is currently, by and large, practiced in North America, there's no ritual at all. It's literally just bending and making your muscles more flexible.
A Context-Based Fatwa — 41:42
Therefore, the fatwa will be based upon the context. Listen to me carefully: I actually believe yoga should not be allowed for people living in India who are Muslim, because in that culture everybody associates yoga with Hinduism. Whereas here in America, nobody by and large associates it with that — it's gone.
So if you join a yoga class in your gym, nobody even knows that this is a Hindu ritual. This is a context-based fatwa. The pagan roots in India still play a role because it's still paganism, whereas in America where they resurrected it, reshaped it, rejuvenated it, completely disconnected it — that fatwa cannot apply in America.
You cannot say that if a sister goes to a sisters-only yoga class in the local gym that she's doing shirk. There's nothing there. It's completely mubah.