From the Aqida War on Tradition to the War on Terror
Part 4 of the Introduction to Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World
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.