To be fair IT is not as narrow minded or rigid as many of his suppoters make him to be but there are times he goes over board. Thus an example of such behavior is where is goes on to declare that, "Being like non-Arabs is Makrooh!" For those who are not familiar with Arabic and Islamic terms, the word Makrooh means disliked. Now if you a student of post-colonial studies and the word Arab is subsituted with the word European then you would cry, "Imperialism!" We can give Sheikh IT the benefit of the doubt but the fact remains that it does sound like at least borderline imperialism. People now a days worry about the end of cultural diversity in the Muslim world, well here is one instance from where the people who want to make the Ummah a homogenous bunch get their theoretical argument. Here is the except from the text written by the grand Sheikh IT himself. (By the way it is taken from an "aauthentic" site: http://muttaqun.com/arabic.html Its authentic with two a's mind it.)
As for becoming accustomed to talking to one another in a language other than Arabic, which is the symbol of Islaam and the language of the Qur‘aan, so that this becomes a habit in the land, with one’s family and household members, with one’s friends, in the marketplace, when addressing government representatives or authority figures or when speaking to people of knowledge, undoubtedly this is makrooh (disliked), because it involves being like the non-Arabs, which is makrooh, as stated previously.
