Towards an Islamic Decoloniality Rooted in the Integrative Epistemology of Islam
Part 5 - Introduction - Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World
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.