Chapter 1 - Towards the Revolution of Hearts in an Age of the Soul Wound
Living Presence — Divine Essence
HU—
Existence
Beat
Breath
Life
Perception
We can start big, or we can start small, but in an era where we focus most often on our exterior self, our appearance, it is best to start small here and as close to home as possible within ourselves. Close your eyes, feel your body, feel its energy, focus on your breath and strengthen your focus. Try to let go of all the fleeting thoughts that are constantly coming in and out of our minds, the time has come to shift the center of our perception. Keep breathing, if you have a mantra or a dhikr that helps you clear your mind then repeat it with your tongue silently. The one that I most often use is لا إله إلا الل - La illaha il Allah (there is no Reality, but Allah). With this clarity let us start at our core by focusing on the center of our human spiritual existence, that of our…
Heart
Our heart is spiritually and physically the center of everything for us as humans. In my spiritual tradition as a Muslim the heart is the center of human existence, the center of our consciousness, and the center of our perception, and it is also the seat of our soul. In a culture that focuses so much on thought and information and lives mostly within our minds, we have forgotten and neglected our spiritual heart. Do not think here of the physical heart, or the heart as greeting cards would remind us of, but instead feel your spiritual heart.
Stop, close your eyes and feel your spiritual heart.
From this space try to feel through your heart, try to think through your heart, try to imagine existence, and try to perceive that eternal force and giver of all life and existence that created us.
Allah Hu———— Allah
Feel the divine essence pulsing through you. You don’t feel it yet? We ask you by all of your divine names Ya Allah to open our hearts to your divine secrets and ultimate realities, Ameen.
But perhaps that is getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Each of our hearts have the ability to know Allah, but each of our hearts are different, based on where we were born, the traditions that we were born into, and the state of our hearts at this moment will effect what each of us is capable of feeling. Our hearts are like the biggest vessel we can imagine, almost anything and everything fits into it, and what ever we put into it turns into a big mixture that formulates the state they exist in. We must then be very careful with what we put into our hearts.
This is perhaps easiest understood through examining the stages of life that we go through. Each of us it is said in the Islamic tradition is born into a state of fitra or primordial existence, meaning that we are born inclining to goodness, and towards our Creator الخالق. This is obvious when you see the light and powerful energy that comes from newborns, and young children. Young children in this state can perceive things that grown humans cannot, as often times you will see children looking above you, or at something that seems to the side of you. Some have written that these children just fresh from the womb, can actually sense and see spiritual light, angels and other things from the unseen realm of our existence. While we are each born into this state, who we are is ultimately constructed by our surroundings.
Our parents, our family, the area we live, the society we grow up in, its traditions or lack thereof, and all the layers of socio-historical realities each of us are born into and which can bury us in an avalanche on top of what was once a tranquil, beautiful God centered child. All these layers, this is why this is all so complicated, how do we get back to anything that resembles wholeness in a society that in many ways is proud of the fractured nature of our beings and the historical moment we live in.
I have been thinking lately of this scene of a family room, a communal space that has changed over the last two hundred years little by. First is a scene of a traditional family structure, where family lives together in community and we gather together in our tribes. We sit in a circle and at the center are our elders, are parents, and all gather around, the children play on the ground together and run around. We tell stories, and pass down traditions to one another, we keep the family and our tribes alive in this way. With colonization and westernization all of this changes.
We jump to the 1940s, or 1970s, we gather around the radio or the television and ideas of the elite who can afford to reach us through these means come into our homes and they begin to define who and what we are. We jump to the 2010’s and our era in the 2020’s a family sits together in their home and the parents and the children sit together, the extended family is mostly gone now. While they are together each of them are on their varying devices, phones, computers, iPads, including the small children who no longer play outside much.
We go on another generation like this and through our phones, virtual reality headsets, we go outside less and less. We isolate more and more, and technology has taken us over, we are plugged in at almost all times of the day seeking dopamine hits, through temporary interactions as we no longer have our family and tribes holding us up. Artificial Intelligence is next and it is attempting to not only take away so much of our creative work, while it exists based on our creative work, it also is meant to control narratives by narrowing what we consume and where we get information.
Veil upon veil, upon veil, all cover our hearts, but as this world of veils crumble around us we know that now is a time for Truth. Down with falsehood, down with lies, the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we tell each other, and down with our lives that are built upon the oppression of other people and the destruction of our world.
But how? How do we remove these veils? How do we open ourselves up to the spiritual existences of this reality? How do we live our lives with Truth as our organizing principle and shared global communal goal. These are things I have been thinking about my entire adult life, and while I have often failed, I have always kept striving. When I fall I get up, I ask Allah for forgiveness as a process of istigfar, I dust myself off and keep going while keeping my humbled heart to the ground while recognizing that which guides me. This is really about emptying our hearts of those things that hurt us, and replacing those things with realities that fill our hearts with spiritual light.
To even speak of the heart is something that I know I am in no way the most qualified to do. There are spiritual masters amongst us, most of whom are unknown who could pour forth the true secrets of the heart that few people will ever know. I have sought out these people and whatever good is contained in these pages likely begins with their spiritual light and spiritual insights. The words here are reflections on how I even came to recognize my own heart and these teachings in my own life. Because the reality is there was a time when my heart was in great pain, it had no feeling, and and it had fallen into a space of great anxiety.
I remember a specific moment when this really all struck home for me. I had just visited the U.S./ Mexico border for the first time in my life in Ciudad Juarez, a city bordered by El Paso, Texas where both of these cities downtowns are literally on the border. We had driven up to the top of a mountain range that surrounds this valley and there you could see exactly the inequality of an upside down world. The planned, spotless American streets with skyscrapers, the tallest of which lit up at night as a five story American flag shinning as if it was taunting the people on the other side of the militarized border fence in Mexico. In the borderlands we see all the inequalities of our world laid out bare in front of us.
On this trip we were staying in the developing edge of the city where the poorest parts of the migrant community new to Ciudad Juarez were living. There we met many children playing soccer on a dirt field next to the border wall in their neighborhood. One of the children’s name was Jesus a young boy maybe seven years old whose body was so deformed on his leg and arm that he had to flip to walk. This child was filled with the light of Allah as he ran and played with his friends the best he could. Here we were, US raised young people thinking we somehow had something to give to these people, when the reality was he gave us everything in that moment. But the reality is that this child’s body was like this because he had Polio, a water-borne disease that was supposedly eradicated from North America decades ago. These children, these families, with no access to water, and right there in front of us just across the border fence stood the University of Texas El Paso campus, with all the running water, swimming pools, and access to everything an American campus has to offer right there. For this child to see but never to touch, and yet he was the most beautiful heart, content, humble, filled with love and light.
I have never forgotten Jesus more than twenty years later after meeting him, but in that moment I was inspired by him, but broken by the systematic realities created by hard-hearted politicians more interested in money than they are in human life. In that moment I also questioned like we all do, why this suffering exists around us at a theological level. The anxiety grew on that trip so much that I actually ended up in a public hospital later in the week in El Paso after I thought I was having a heart attack, in reality my first and only sever anxiety attack in my life. This is what I always have called TMD, Too Much Dunya, when the material world is so heavy around us and we don’t have access to any spiritual practices then the world is too much for us to handle and we look for ways to escape, which for most people is mostly drugs and alcohol.
For many of us that have attempted to change our lives feeling this strong revulsion in our hearts, and the pain and emptiness of a life without a relationship with our Creator, this reality we live within is one where our hearts are literally inverted what is called in Arabic Qalb al Haqiq or the inversion of reality. Our hearts are upside down and through submission, through prayer, through fasting, through right action, good character and high virtues we have attempted to do the hard work of repairing our damaged hearts.
Towards the Revolution of Hearts in an Age of the Soul Wound
We speak of revolution, and yet we have no true conception of what the destructions of our civilizations have meant to each of our lives in losing our true spiritual power rooted in our hearts. In this sense there is no true decolonization, in so much as there is so much that we can never get back. Even within our traditions, much of what has survived which is easily accessible are the material aspects, the forms of our beliefs, without the deeper spiritual realities that don’t easily fit within colonial modernity. From lives lived with divine assistance, to lives of the isolated mind alone with our ideas. We become today intellectuals instead of friends of Allah (awliya). To break through to the other side of existence is to chisel away at the covers surrounding our hearts and with each strike of the blade the spiritual light grows stronger. Maintaining this spiritual light involves moving to new ways of being and ways of knowing as the central goal of the spiritual path as the goal is living our lives within the state of divine presence with the direct knowledge of Allah, a long term ma’rifa, spiritual tasting and knowing the divine realities that can last in each of our hearts. As we begin, we bring our spiritual chisels along for the journey in the form of a tasbih (prayer beads) and come with me as we commit to the deep radical work of transforming both ourselves and our world.
We must each move through this process ourselves, to move our families and communities for the diaspora of hearts to connect and create truly revolutionary change, and an ummah wide reality. This is the only way forward as we face genocide after genocide that have gone on for more than 500 years now with an inevitable planetary destruction at our doorstep through rising fascism and white supremacy that refuses to give up its grip of power, nuclear disaster, or rapidly worsening climate change. These are the extremes of this age of the self (nafs), what the Mayan have called, the era of death, as scientific extremism with no limitations has led us to this existential moment for humankind. Yet we cling on to this hub of dunya (love of the material world), because the realities of dismantling these systems would be too difficult for most of us who lack any connection to the divine presence. This work begins in each of our hearts, and it is hard, deep, life long work in dealing with the intergenerational trauma living within our families and communities.
The trauma of colonialism, enslavement, and generations of exploitative capitalism that lives off the sweat and blood of our labor lives on in each of us as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), various forms of addiction, as minds unable to rest in a peaceful state (ADHD), and ultimately as the plethora of diseases destroying our lives and families like cancer and heart disease. Within Native American indigenous psychology this reality has been deemed by the community as something much deeper than the incoherent conception of the soul in Western psychology as a reality of, “spiritual injury, soul sickness, soul wounding, and ancestral hurt,” what Eduardo Duran calls, the soul wound. For Muslim communities the reality of this soul wound is described throughout our sacred texts as it relates to goodness and evil in our world, living a blessed life versus living a cursed life. This decolonization then is both an individual process and a communal process, as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ described when he said, “The parable of the believers in their affection, mercy, and compassion for each other is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.” What we have faced over the last five hundred years as a community then as a process of intergenerational trauma is what we could call, an ummah wide trauma.
The Martinican poet and politician Aime Cesaire wrote of colonialism as a poison that is distilled straight into the veins of the colonizing race. What of our world 60 years after the revolutionary era of the 1960s when Cesaire was writing where popular pundits speak about “retiring” words like colonialism. Where politicians like Barack Obama as the first Black president of US Empire, talk of Black suffering and enslavement as the United States, “original sin,” but never speak of the settler colonialism and series of genocides throughout the Americas that laid the foundation for the global spread of European civilization and US imperialism. Many White people today do not know or do not care to recognize their own ancestry and check “American” on census forms as if their families were immaculately born into these lands who just arrived here with no story, and no past. Yet these same people dine in the restaurants of White nostalgia to almost every era of White existence in this country whether its the Cracker Barrel, 1950s dinners, or Applebees, so how are we surprised when they so easily buy into this cult of white supremacist nostalgia that is, “Make America Great Again.” This reality of living without past and without tradition is one of the goals of the monoculture of globalization that wants to act as if these systems of power do not exist as it uses diverse names like “Islamic Finance,” but in reality these are often attempts at putting lipstick on the pig of unfettered financialization of our world and westernized global capitalism run amok. Aspirational whiteness can build the wealthiest cities in the United States today that are majority people of color and yet they follow the masters playbook laid out for them in their gated communities.
It’s interesting that a 2022 NY Times bestseller is today saying many of these same things, but without saying them as explicitly. In Gabor Mate, the famous physician and psychiatrist, newest book he writes of this poisoned culture of Cesaire, what he calls a “toxic culture,” in his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, that this toxicity includes, “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.” This is a trauma informed understanding of therapy, that sees the world unraveling in front of us as we continue to ignore the root causes of our illness in making the world as a White supremacist myth, and how this reality of colonial modernity is making us all sick in an unprecedented way. The process looks something like this:
Colonization / Enslavement
Genocide / Epistemicide
Trauma / The Soul Wound
Intergenerational Trauma
PTSD
ADHD
Illness
Neoliberal capitalism gave rise to the unfettered global corporation
Which now has led to the rise of Techno Feudalism.
The Fight for Survival in the Algorithms of the Nafs
We are controlled today in this late stage of capitalism by monopolistic corporations keeping us constantly distracted as we are tethered to our desire machines of our phones, computers, digital watches, our virtual reality headsets, and our generative artificial intelligence chatbots. Our children’s lives are connected to what I call the algorithms of our nafs (desirous self) at earlier and earlier ages. Those of us who are just a bit older we remember life before these tethers (phones) emerged where we would go out for the day and not be pulled in many different directions by texting friends, by social media, by ideas of the internet, and our greatest desires that rule our lives - food, sex, sports, gambling, shopping, etc. Realities people of course have been addicted to for generations but not in the way that we can be now with all of our connected devices. These machines monitor our every movement in life, every step, every click, our every base desire, then these desire algorithms spit it all out for us as an endless feed of content. Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted right in front of you, don’t look away or you might miss something. The world burns around us, our children grow older, our families pass on, and these algorithms of our nafs keep us tethered to them as if they are actually giving us something besides dopamine addictions to this endless scrolling. How are we to live a spiritual life without shutting off these desire machines permanently?
The Situationist philosopher Guy Debord wrote about this world in a time even less filled with imagery and illusion based unrealities than our own in his classic book, The Society of the Spectacle,
“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation… The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated —and precisely for that reason — this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness, the unit it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation.”
Taken from a spiritual perspective, this separation is the goal of this death machine of colonialism / neo-colonialsim / US imperialism / Neoliberalism and globalized White supremacy as identity of the mono-culture of the internet age. When this spectacle of unity at the center of our lives, social media, creates deeply depressive isolation through the falsehood of a shared consciousness with globalized standards of beauty, identity, so called success, and ways of being and knowing all baked into it. This is what the rapper, Brother Ali has called, “the mass religion of the algorithm,” a reality that in some Silicon Valley tech circles is deified in a way through generative artificial intelligence as if these engineers are creating god. These ideas were represented on screen in the 2020 FX television show, Devs, created by the dystopian filmmaker Alex Garland.
In the brilliant documentarian, Adam Curtis’s film, Century of the Self he charts the emergence of the field of public relations and advertising led by Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Freud to show how Bernays used his uncles ideas of Westernized psychology to create advertising to turn humans into desire machines. This reality of advertising has today turned algorithmic as our desires constantly flow to us every time we pick up our phones throughout the day. The key difference between Bernays age and ours was he was creating advertising which were designed to create desires in consumers, our age of algorithmic based marketing is advertising that is responding to our own personal desires which is obviously much more powerful and dangerous. We search the internet for something or our phones listen to us saying that we want something in a conversation, this data is shared with advertisers through internet cookies and suddenly a few hours later we receive an advertisement for that very thing, what can seem like an unconscious form of magic, but of course a deeply scientific process designed through computer programming.
The world we live in now is much different than the one I grew up in during the emergence of the internet in the 1990s. Growing up as a young White man on the plains of Colorado in the suburbs of Denver as a teenager I would roll in bed at night sleepless with questions in my mind about my role in the world as I questioned every part of this reality I was presented through endless spectacle as imagined tradition. My racing mind would not stop as I questioned the meaning of life, I questioned the world I heard footnotes about in Hip Hop music versus what I was told about the world at school and by the media. These nights were often accompanied by the intoxicants of a westernized lifestyle as I would suddenly be woken up sober as could be. The drunk state of these intoxicants might seem fun while you are in that state, but it all comes crashing in within you heart as the false expansion becomes clear and the pain sets in. It was in these moments feeling the pain in my heart, that I first questioned this reality I was born into as a White Methodist United States citizen and the ways in which I was initiated into this existence through the culture of spectacle and the use of drugs, alcohol, and sex in dealing with trauma, pain, and loss. It’s a story for another time in explaining the full process of how I went from that pain in my heart, to standing in Mecca just a few years later praying that Allah heal my heart, open, and transform it to serving His divine realities.
In a world that placed the status of class, race, and gender in a secularized worldview of technological advancement and scientific progress as the only signs of achievement that matter it is not surprising then that a world stripped of spiritual meaning is a world filled with nothingness for many people with ever increasing rates of addiction, overdosing, and suicide. For our meaning in this material world, is only that which is right in front of us, so if we aren't successful in a material sense then we see our lives as a failure. How then are our families expected to be whole when the baseline conception of what it means to be human are so far removed from a holistic understanding of existence balanced between this worldly life, and the life beyond this existence.
For most people raised in this Westernized worldview our lives have three basic choices do we seek in life truth, do we seek power, or do we crumble in the midst of these systems that wield so much power in our lives and numb ourselves to escape dealing with reality in any meaningful way. Most seek the baselines of power throughout their life in the midst of economic warfare that makes living so difficult that the majority of working class people work their entire lives not out of a love for their craft, but to simply survive. This question of power or truth is a trick question because in the context of coloniality, dealing with all the layers of remnants and realities of white settler colonial systems like the United States and Israel you must understand and attempt to deal with both. Power is so all encompassing in our lives today as the powerful control nearly every part of our lives, so the reality is we must deal with power, and understand it, for us to be able to seek the deeper realities and ultimate truths of our existence.
From the Aqida War on Tradition to the War on Terror
For Muslims it is not just a political system that has been changed through colonization, but an entire education system of Islamic learning and the production of Muslim religious and spiritual leadership. It is also a theological war that was led by the Saudi state and its Wahhabi partners that has been willing to wage war against other Muslims if their aqida (theology) wasn’t in alignment with their version of Islam. So this then, is very much a war for understanding and having access to both Truth and Power which for Muslims these realities are reflected in the divine names of Allah ٱلْحَقُّ Al-Haqq (The Ultimate Reality / Truth) and الْقَادِرُ Al-Qadar (The All Powerful Lord of the Universe).
As the Caribbean Philosopher Sylvia Winter has written, Western White Men have placed themselves at the center of existence as Man with its overrepresentation in terms of Being/ Power/ Truth / and Freedom, and removed from existence any conception of what it means to be truly human. This reality of what we call egolatry here is when we take our self, our nafs, to be our false lord as the ultimate form of idolatry in our world today. We have built imagined diversity in the context of global epistemicide, as diversity, equity, and inequality programs in our world to make sure everyone, especially White people, are comfortable enough with each other as long as there is no real ideological difference that would place us outside the norms of the settler colonial state.
The global war against Muslims over the last 35 years, in US military parlance known globally as the “War on Terror,” has been yet another stage in placating Muslims into Westernized ways of being. The realities of the narrative of the war on terror creating Muslims as the primary planetary “Other,” has allowed actual war against Muslims to move far beyond the United States, and Europe into genocidal campaigns against Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Burma, Kashmir, India, and the Central African Republic against indigenous Muslim populations in each of these countries.
While Whiteness is a signifier of global power, the regimes of neoliberalism are not just led by White people but those interested in maintaining their individual or family power at all cost within the global system of White supremacy. This is power led by the unprecedented reach of the United States military industrial complex as the largest military in history with bases all over the world and in the vast majority of Muslim majority countries. This while most Muslims countries around the world have never had a multi-part process of decolonization like has taken place in Latin America and many parts of Africa. Instead Muslims have had rulers like the Saudi Arabia who are directly beholden to their military and financial relationships with the US, while also leading their own campaigns against any type of democratic rule throughout the Middle East. In most of the world the colonial era of direct Western military rule, was followed by neocolonial states led by leaders directly chosen by the Western powers. Move outside of this and political assassination has been the norm from Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, to Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s to the slow political assassination of Muhammad Morsi after the Arab Spring in 2019 in Egypt, and the Great March of Return in Gaza from March 2018 to December 27, 2019 where 223 nonviolent Palestinian protesters were assassinated by the Israeli Occupation Forces.
Simultaneously this war is not just a military war, it has always been an ideological battle which removed traditional Islamic learning systems around the world. In its place the vast majority of Muslims receive first a westernized education and a mostly minuscule education that teaches Muslims how to pray, and how to read and memorize the Quran with almost nothing beyond these baselines for the majority of Muslims. The most powerful example of this within global Muslim literature is Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane from Senegal. Written in 1962 Ambiguous Adventure is seen as a largely autobiographical tale about a young boy Samba Diallo who was raised within a lineage of Sufi Muslim Shaykh’s (religious scholars), but instead of following tradition and following his families long line of classical Islamic education, he is instead the first generation sent to the newly opened French school in French colonized Senegal. The book is a back and forth between tradition and spirituality, and modernity and the disbelief of westernized life as lived and embodied by Samba Diallo as he moves to France to study for his PhD and then returns to his village in Senegal years later totally transformed. As Kane reflects throughout the text on the role western epistemology has played in colonizing the heart, mind and spirit he writes of this key moment,
“On the black continent it began to be understood that their true power lay not in the cannons of the first morning, but rather in what followed the cannons... The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of cannon and of magnet. From the cannon it draws its efficacy as an arm of combat. Better than the cannon, it makes conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body, the school bewitches the soul. Where the cannon has made a pit of ashes and of death, in the sticky mold of which men would not have rebounded from the ruins, the new school establishes peace. The morning of rebirth will be a morning of benediction through the appeasing virtue of the new school. From the magnet, the school takes its radiating force. It is bound up with a new order, as a magnetic stone is bound up with a field. The upheaval of the life of man within this new order is similar to the overturn of certain physical laws in a magnetic field. Men are seen to be composing themselves, conquered, along the lines of invisible and imperious forces. Disorder is organized, rebellion is appeased, the mornings of resentment resound with songs of a universal thanksgiving.”
This is the deeper role of this globalized system of Western education, whose ultimate goal was stated most explicitly by Richard Henry Pratt, one of the architects of the Indian boarding school system in the United States and Canada who would take indigenous children from their parents on reservations, and place them in White boarding schools. He said the goal of the schools was to, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
So as Kane said, the reality of Western education is that “the disorder is organized,” that being what White people imagine the disorder of tradition to be, instead replace it with systems of bureaucracy and hierarchy. This is the reality of global colonial modernity where we have to understand three different layers of colonialism, coloniality, and internal-colonization / neocolonialism working all together. There is the militarized act of colonization and its remnants in the systems left in its wake, the coloniality of power where we find the systems of education mentioned above. Then there is the reality of the internal colonization / neo-colonialism of Islamic knowledge and tradition, led by a very small group of powerful Muslim majority countries which have led the output of Wahabi modernist Islamic learning, within institutions like the University of Medina. Within this internal colonization Wahabi’s have attempted to narrow the scope of what Islam is through these wars in terms of narrowing the definition of aqida (theology). While the aqida war has been a mostly one sided affair, and they know they cannot edit the Qur’an, they can translate it how they want, and they have taken liberty in editing out anything in the greater Islamic tradition and in the Hadith literature and the very life of the Prophet ﷺ in terms of his Seerah that does not fit their literalist, modernist ideology.
It’s important to note here, that while Saudi Arabia as a client state of US empire has been the most powerful neocolonial nation state in spreading its hyper conservative vision of Islam to the world, every group, Sunni, Shia, and Sufi groups therein have had neocolonizers willing to sacrifice the Ummah for their own wealth and power. This has been as present in the war on terror, as it has been in pervious generations. Muslims living in the United States know this all too well as we have faced the largest counterintelligence program in the history of the FBI (COINTELPRO) within our Mosques and institutions over the last twenty-five years. Whereas in previous generations the FBI used COINTELPRO to disrupt grassroots political movements ranging from anarchist and Marxist movements, to social movements like the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement within communities of color. COINTELPRO in the midst of the war on terror has been used to disrupt, divide, discredit, dismantle, and destroy, everyday Muslim institutions with upwards of 15,000 paid informants within Muslim communities. The true scope and scale of the disruption of our communities will not be fully known for generations to come.
Towards an Islamic Decoloniality Rooted in the Integrative Epistemology of Islam
Any Islamic Decolonialty must then account for both truth and the reality of power through the lens of what the Malaysian polymath Syed Muhammad Naqib Al-Attas calls, “the worldview of Islam.” While we take from the colonial / modernity project of decolonilaity we understand that in discussing a process in decolonizing the heart from a integrative Islamic episteme this form of knowing Allah through direct experience (marifa) has always been a part of the Islamic tradition from it’s founding. Further, the Prophetic example of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ life itself is within line of what I am proposing here as he had to conquer both truth and power in laying the groundwork of the faith, in creating a Prophetic community based on this process of self transformation and power building, and in creating a permanent home for his community in our world.
As the larger project of decoloniality makes clear, we have to build a world where different knowledges can live, as the Zapatista slogan makes clear, “Luchar por un mundo donde otro mundos estan possibles” (struggle for a world where other worlds can exist). Because right now the system of White supremacy tells the world, that only its forms of, ‘scientific,’ and ‘unbiased’ knowledge are acceptable. The weight of these colonial systems have continued to buckle amidst this war on Gaza as the remnants of a reemergent third world, led by South Africa, has taken imperial Israel to the International Court of Justice for their genocide against the Palestinian people. Despite the ICJ ruling that Israel is committing genocide, the war wages on with its final solution in motion in Rafah as I write this.
While decolonial philosophers have argued for the validation of indigenous epistemologies, what we argue for here is a world where Islamic knowledge can be at the center of the lives of one-quarter of humanity, for the more than two billion Muslims on this earth. Unfortunately, these realities of coloniality are so ingrained even within the study of Islam in the United States and Europe that even Islamic Studies, and Quranic Studies have to be decolonized according to Joseph Lumbard who has written, that,
“Muslim epistemologies cannot operate within the cognitive cartography of secular humanism, which reduces intelligibles to a corpuscular empiricism. A Muslim postcolonial approach must prioritize reinstating the cognitive order with an overarching understanding of the ontological order that informed all modes of intellectual investigation from the first centuries of Islam until the dawn of the modern era. Such an endeavor will contribute to a more holistic understanding of Muslim intellectual traditions and better enable the application of their teachings to the exigencies of contemporary humanity.”
In my own personal journey on this path a key understanding for me has always been this decolonial spiritual move of getting out of my mind in thinking through the world, and into my heart in experiencing existence and divine presence, and knowing the difference between right and wrong in that seat of my soul (my heart). For Muslims as Rudolph Ware has made clear in his seminal text, The Walking Quran, Islamic knowledge is embodied knowledge it is what is inside of us embodied in our character, our lives, and most foundationally this is about our own personal relationship with our Creator.
It is also about the ability to be self reflective through that vehicle of the heart in understanding what is and isn’t good for us. Then undertaking the healing path of muhasaba (self reflection) and stopping those things that harm us and making istigfar (repentance to Allah) with the commitment not to return back to those things. Within this book then we take tradition and prophecy seriously as revealed knowledge is foundational to our worldview as Muslims. Certain decolonial philosophers will close the book at this point, but how are we to take the series of thinkers in decolonial work, as important as they are, above revealed tradition, what is called in the Islamic tradition, naqli (revealed theology). For the great Sufi and Islamic scholar, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, even if Islamic knowledge is an integrative reality with the body, and the mind, the heart, and the soul all playing a role, the heart is the center of everything when it comes to the goal of our entire existence, which is to know Allah. This is especially important for us to understand as we begin here,
“The honor and excellence of the human, in which they surpass all other sorts of creatures, is their aptitude for knowing Allah, praise be to Him. This knowledge is human beauty and perfection and glory in the present world, and their provision and store for the world to come. They are prepared for this knowledge only through their heart, and not by means of any of their members. For it is the heart that knows Allah, and works for Allah, and strives toward Allah, and draws near to Him, and reveals that which is in the presence of Allah… For it is the heart that is accepted by Allah when it is free from all save Him, but veiled from Allah when it becomes wholly occupied with anything other than Him… The heart is that which, if the human knows it, they know themselves, and if they know themselves, they know their Lord. It is that which, if the human knows it not, they know not themself, and if they know not themselves, then they know not their Lord… They who knows not their heart, to watch over it and be mindful of it, and to observe what sines on it and in it of the treasures of the world of spirits (al-malakut), he is one of those of whom Allah, the Exalted, has said, those who forget Allah; and He made them to forget their own souls. Such are the rebellious transgressors! (59:19). Thus the knowledge of the heart and of the real nature of its qualities is the root of religions and the foundation of the foundation of the mystic traveler’s way.”
Living our lives with our hearts as the center of our reality is not foreign to many traditional Indigenous knowledges. The Zapatistas as one example, use the slogan that their politics are abajo y la izquierda, below and to the left which has a double meaning, but most importantly means that they follow the politics of the heart. The work of the legal theorist of decoloniality Boaventura de Soussa Santos is especially important here in his books, The End of the Cognitive Empire (2018) and Law and the Epistemologies of the South (2023). If as de Soussa Santos tells us, another knowledge is possible, then these knowledges of the global south must be taken seriously in our ways of being and knowing from global indigenous knowledges, to the realities of the worlds largest faith community, that of Islam. One example that de Soussa Santos uses is that of corazonar a term used by the Kitu Kara peoples of the Andean region of Latin America as both a political and spiritual analysis of the world.
“Such a proposal differs from the ones proposed by Marxist analyses on some social movements which have been more concerned with structural and socio-economical changes. Corazonar proposes, rather, the healing of being… From the point of view of corazonar it follows that one of the most perverse expressions of colonilaity is that it has colonized four dimensions, powers or forces—says, as they are called in the Andean world. Humanity has woven life out of these sayas: affection; the sacred dimension of life; the feminine dimensions of existence; and wisdom. All these forces should be colonized so as to achieve absolute dominion of life.”
This is what I call, the coloniality of the sacred, a reality at the center of this 500 year colonial process where Hernan Cortez conquers what is today Mexico and as his troops commit rolling genocides against the indigenous peoples of Mexica and Mayan lands, while the priests follow behind him burning the libraries of the indigenous peoples, as an act of epistemicide lock in step as part of the genocidal destruction. The literalist forces of Wahabi indoctrinated ISIS followers did similar things as they conquered lands and burned entire libraries even famously threatening the great libraries of Timbuktu, Mali, and blowing up maqams (graves) of Sufi scholars.
Destroying the libraries of sacred knowledge were the first part of this colonization, but the key to the secularization of our world is in placing our existence solely in the abstract reality of our minds and removing our hearts, our souls, our bodies, the integrative epistemology of Islam away from being at the center of our lives. If we do not feel or perceive with our hearts then of course we can do the most heinous of things in a world without limitations of tradition and faith based legal structures. The Qur’an makes clear mentioning over and over the reality of those whose hearts are dead, as if there is a cover over them that does not feel, hear, see or perceive of the divine presence, may Allah save us all from the depths of this impoverished reality, ameen.
Rijal al Dunya - The Earth Men & The Love of the Material World (Dunya)
"I don't believe, and no one in this world should believe, that a terrorist is someone who strives to make people's voices heard. A terrorist is one who commits genocide, supports genocide, stands by genocide, remains silent during genocide, and rejoices during genocide.”
- Bisan Owda, Journalist Covering and Living Through the Genocide in Gaza
As I write this introduction we are witnessing the destruction of Gaza and as perhaps the crown of these series of genocides that Muslims have faced over the last thirty-five years in the midst of the war on terror. This is a deeply reflective moment for Muslims around the world, and with this genocide, maybe we can see the depth of the systems and civilizational ways of life that we have bought into, as we begin to think of ways to dig ourselves out through purifying ourselves, our economies, and our communities.
This moment reminds me of the time when I converted to Islam in 2002, the only real difference is we didn’t have social media to show the scale of genocide that unfolded in Iraq as the US military strictly controlled the media narrative. We also didn't have global alternative news sources like Al Jazeera at the level they are at today. Since 2001 when I made my first Muslim friends, over the last twenty-three years I have seen our communities pushed into boxes focused on identities prefabricated for us and an endless stream of responses talking primarily about what we are not. It is because of this policing of our identities that we have focused so much on what it means to be American Muslim, British Muslim, Malaysian Muslim, Qatari Muslim, and on and on. I’ve also been blessed to live and build with Muslim communities around the United States and around the world from West Africa to Southeast Asia, North Africa, Europe, to the Gulf, so I’ve seen how these things are playing out in different parts of the world. As we started building my organization the Center for Global Muslim Life in early 2020, the original name we used for this organization was the Muslim Futures Foundation with the idea of creating something that is focused on building a vision for our community rather than simply reacting to whatever is thrown at us day after day, and year after year as ambulance chasers attempting to put out one crisis after another.
As this era of the War on Terror moves through its fourth decade, and we see a totally new world being birthed around us in the 2020s we have to think about what the next 50 years of our world will look like. In this time from 2020 to 2070 Muslims are expected to grow from making up one-quarter of the world’s population to one-third. So much of the military, educational, philosophical, cultural, and psychological wars that our communities face are meant to put us into this permanent reactionary state that diminishes our understanding of our own worldview and our own collective power.
So it has been in these realms that I have worked primarily through grassroots community organizing to build local power for communities, and in discussing the larger dimensions of the worldview of Islam and how we should understand the metaphysical realities of our spiritual lives to see how the world is changing around us. These latter points are both lifelong pursuits in understanding and knowing Allah, while also understanding your own self, and your heart in transforming your life.
The sad reality is for many Muslims today, being Muslim is about identity more than it is about faith and calling the world to a higher purpose. The reality is, the rapid transformation of our world, and the breakthroughs in technology like generative artificial intelligence make this world difficult to look away from, as many prophecies have predicted.
There’s an incredible tradition from the Cheyenne or Tsi Tsi Tsa nation of indigenous peoples from the plain lands of the Rocky Mountains where I grew up (Wyoming and Colorado) pass down orally from a man they believed was a Prophet who was born of a virgin birth, and has a story similar to that of the Prophet Moses in his birth and upbringing. The tradition of this messenger of the Tai Tai Tsa, named Sweet Medicine, warns of a future time for this tribal group of great upheaval and transformation,
"There is a time coming, though, when many things will change. Strangers called Earth Men will appear among you, Their skins are light-colored, and their ways are powerful. They clip their hair short and speak no Indian tongue. Follow nothing these Earth Men do, but keep your own ways that I have taught you as long as you can. The Earth Men are too strong and his food will be too sweet and after we taste that food we will want it and forget our own foods. Chokecherries and plums, and wild turnips, and our honey from the wild bees, that is our food. This other food is too sweet. We eat it and forget. I am sorry to say these things, but I have seen them, and you will find that they will come true.!?"
In Arabic we would call these earth men, rijal al dunya, the men of the material world who have long lived outside of any tradition in their madness inducing pursuit of what Cristobal Colon (Columbus) lusted over, gold, glory, power and Christian dominance. To understand the Islamic side of this we have to understand that generally it is believed that we as Muslims have strong protections. That is until we follow the ways of people who do not follow tradition and that Allah warns us will lead us to destruction. There are two important books related to this by the Hadrami scholar who passed away recently, Habib Abu Bakr Al-Adani, the first called, The Concise Article-An Explanation on the Intermediate, Minor, and Major Signs of the Last Hour, and the second titled, Lifting Hardship from the Ummah. As the Shaykh mentions in his book these protections are clear in the Qur'an when Allah says,
“But Allah did not choose thus to punish them while thou [O Prophet] wert still among them, and Allah would not punish them while they seek forgiveness” - al-Anfal: 8:33
And further Allah mentions in the Quran,
"You are the best ummah ever raised for mankind, you enjoin in righteousness, forbid evil, and you believe in Allah." - al-‘Imran: 3:110
Therefore, this hardship, which befell the ummah in the past, come to us now and will continue to come in the future, for the following reasons, according to Habib Abu Bakr, first, the neglect of the conditions which make us a distinctive nation, and taking the course that led past nations to go astray. For example, if a person isn’t praying then they aren’t truly living Islam. One of the points the central points in Lifting Hardship from the Ummah, was Habib Abu Bakr’s usage of the term, ghutha’iyya period, in reference to the hadith where the Prophet ﷺ refers to a point in history where Muslims will be many but we will be like the flotsam (ghuta’) on the sea, as it relates to power and where “wahan” will be placed in our hearts. In the Hadith, it is asked of the Prophet ﷺ what is wahan? He ﷺ then replied: “The love for this worldly life, and hatred of death” (Abu Dawud). Again, this goes back to that point about identity, if we are Muslim, but don’t understand what the worldview of Islam actually is, then what will we create in the world? This is especially important for us to think about as one thing that the world pre and post-COVID represent (if such a thing exists), is a further acceleration of the worldview of unbridled technology.
How do we actually prepare for this future through our own worldview rather than as Muslims living through the lens of westernization, or the Chinese worldview, or some type of technological utopianism? If all that Elon Musk is trying to build came to fruition what do we as Muslims have to say about this, and do we participate? Of course, this is much bigger than just Elon Musk, but this is someone who is solving a problem we can agree on, in creating alternatives to fossil fuels, while also building companies that are trying to link our minds to computers, who will soon control up to 50% of the world’s satellites orbiting the earth in an attempt to beam internet to the entire planet, and of course, most ambitiously, trying to colonize Mars. While also paying billions to control discourse, and speech through his algorithmic messaging platform, formerly known as Twitter. He’s not alone in our world of billionaire mega barons whose central goal is the colonization of space or more immediately the colonization of minds through algorithms.
So like is mentioned in the above tradition from Sweet Medicine, the Shaykh believes this is the ghuthy’iyya period and one we have been in for some time at least since the beginning of colonization. Of course wealth isn't the only form of this love of dunya, just look at the leadership of the Muslims and how they hold to power and refuse to share power with the people. Then we see microcosms of this all over the place where we are building our little fiefdoms here and there without shared leadership within our communities, like many Mosque boards are a sad reflection of. As just one example of this, I recently overheard a conversation at a Mosque in the United States that is controlled by a legacy board and a community board. The legacy board controls the Mosque and its finances as the founders of the Mosque, and the community board is voted on but has no real power. The person talking was asking the member of the legacy board what would happen to his seat on the legacy board when he died, and without missing a beat he responded, it will go to my son of course.
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