Discussing Wael Hallaq and the Impossible State

And that's that's that's his whole the impossible state is all about how evil the nation state is. Yes. As if that's the source of the evil. Right. The the the the as I've been saying, the model isn't the problem.

Yeah. The model isn't the source of the evil. Yeah. The Kufra is the source of the evil. Yeah.

The West would behave the same under any under any model. Whatever model they have, they're gonna be the same. It doesn't it doesn't matter. And we're basically the same. Regardless of what model we have, we're the same.

We behave the same. How has the nation state model severely negatively impacted the religiosity of Muslims? There was a period. There was a period, but that was directly the colonialist period and immediately afterwards. But over the course of time, as we got further and further away from direct colonization

Yes.

You've seen the Islamic movements grow and grow and grow. And Islamic practice and religiosity has has reached Optimal. Great levels. Well, not optimal, but great. Yeah.

Fantastic levels. Again,

as well as we do.

In the nation state.

Yeah. I I can see how the HD types can just run with whatever it is that they want to derive because they

have their

own internal.

Of course. Because they're because they're just like him who thinks that the model is the problem. The model is the is the issue. Yeah. And everything is is is determined by the by the model.

Everything about the society is determined by the model of governance, which I think is is out of touch with reality. This is this is people who live too much in theory and not in not in the real world. Because in practice, as I've said many times, most people are not affected by government in their day to day life, in their choices, in what they do and so on. What's the actual practical impact on a day to day basis for most people, what their government is, what their form of government is.

Like in America, comparative, you know, between being in America and in Malaysia. There's a slight difference.

Yeah. But the difference yep. But the difference isn't the model.

No. It's not the obviously

This is what I'm saying. That you're obsessed with the model. Halak is obsessed with the model. Hezbo Dahrier is accept is is obsessed with the model. And they're they're all pointing to that as being the cause of the problem or the cause of the health of a society.

And it's not. In my opinion, it's not. This is a deflection.

The the phone book

For Halak, it's a deflection. Maybe not deliberate.

Yeah.

But like I said in the chat, it's embedded in him to avoid acknowledging the real problem which is Kufr. That's the real source of the problem. It's just like I said, the West isn't going to behave differently if they have a better system. If the West had a khilafah, Yeah. They'd still be the West, they'd still be the same.

Yeah. It's not but it doesn't make any difference.

Yeah. Which is why we have dyestipes coming from West. Yeah. I mean, they have an appeal. It appeals to a certain type.

Because again, I think people who read him and interpret him want to latch onto the criticism of the

The West.

Of the West and the model in which it's created, right, the governance in which it's the model of the West. But he does acknowledge the form and the content. He doesn't just isolate the form, as in, you know, just the state, but, you know, without acknowledging the content. And, you know, he he cites the example of a knife. A knife can be used to

Right. But that but that but that ends up contradicting his entire premise. Because his entire premise is the state. That the state is the problem. The nation state structure, the nation state model is the whole problem.

The the West Western model is filled with valueless amoral systems.

Which will be the case in any system they have. This is what I'm saying.

Yeah.

You're you're you're looking at the wrong thing. It has nothing to do with the model. Yeah. The model isn't it's irrelevant. The model is irrelevant.

It's the fact that you're you're disbelievers.

Right.

And having a better system or a better model of governance isn't gonna suddenly make you, you know, believers or righteous or behave like Muslims. Okay. Again, I think that, like I said, he acknowledges the power and the influence of corporations. But he's still focused on the governance model. As if the government, the model of government has more effect and more impact on the daily life and the moral character of the society than the private sector.

I don't think that's accurate. I don't think that's accurate at all.

Yeah. Sorry. At some point, says the state has the the the state has to go up. The state has to, you know and, like, what do you mean by that, mister? I mean, you know

Well, that's that's why he's getting invited by Hazrat Tahrir.

Yes. Like, what so it that that becomes a a a like, sort of like a Trump CS. Like, you don't provide a solution. You just give some anarchist. Yeah.

Which he also says in the interview. I don't have a solution.

Right.

I don't have an an alternative model. Because you don't need one. Because again, like I keep saying, the model isn't the problem. The model isn't to blame. In You you have to you have to really show me how the nation state model in Muslim countries has been a devastating force on the society.

He he doesn't say that. He he says that the

But you say that the nation state is necessarily this way.

That and is

And that therefore and that therefore a nation state cannot be Islamic. He says that. It's anathema to Islam. To an Islamic form of governance. No it's not.

Okay. That's because you are not a Muslim so you don't understand. If the nation state, if the government is populated and person the personnel of the state is are Muslims, every Muslim understands that he is a slave of Allah and we are all under the sovereignty of Allah So, how? This is you're giving just like with HT and just like the political Islamists, writ large, all of them. You give way too much importance to the government.

You give way too much importance to the government with regards to its relationship to Islam in the society.

Yes.

And you are, in my opinion, you're misunderstanding the role of government in Muslim society. And you're misunderstanding it in a way that the early Muslims did not misunderstand it. You're ascribing a responsibility to the state, to the government, to the whatever, to the rulers, something that's not their job. Their job is to see to the affairs, the dunya affairs of everyone who's under their jurisdiction. To keep them safe, to keep them secure, to keep their needs met and so forth.

And obviously, to be Muslims. Yes. They themselves are Muslims, have to be Muslim. You're putting so much emphasis on the model of the state, or the structure, or what have you, and you keep using and he will even say, it's funny to me because when he's trying to explain modernity, which he ties to the nation state model, He can't tell you what modernity means. He says you have to have been listening to me for ten years to know what I mean by these terms.

And he described it as like a football that has all the hexagons on it. And each one of them is a component of modernity and it is interlocked with the others and then all together that is the whole thing is modern. You're talking about kufr. Yeah. That's all you're talking about is kufr.

Modernity is just a euphemism for Kufa. And that's what your problem is. Because surely you don't mean technology. But you mean all of the ideas. The so called freedom and liberty and all of this.

And the complete unregulation of business and free market and let the businesses do whatever they want and so forth. All of that's modernity, all of that's just Kufr.

And the past progress

I mean he's right in many things that he said. Yeah. In that in that their their model takes the human being out of

it. Yes.

And and and any interest in the welfare of the human being, you forget that the state or the government is supposed to exist for them.

Yeah.

But the reason you are like that is because you're Kufar. Kufar. This is why. Yeah. It's not the model.

Yeah. And like as you have identified that the the the whole authority and power of nation states fast growing up in international affairs, but domestically, they have no hesitation in meeting our violence today

in population. Yeah, but for whose sake. This is the point. This is the point that he also and many many people are behind the curve on this one in in my opinion. That the private sector is where power resides.

Period. In the West especially, power power resides in the private sector. And state power, governmental power is subordinate to the private sector.

Yeah. And the private sector not only just has wealth, it also has its private armies, it has its private

Well it has its Okay. It has its private armies, but it also has the national army. Because the military is part of the state and the state is subordinate to private power. So they're not going to send their military anywhere except for business interests. Like I've talked about before.

What do you have what does America have to do with anything that happens in the South China Sea? It's absolutely none of your business. But it's the business it's the business of business. They're concerned. But the average American, it has no effect on you whatsoever.

But it has an effect on business. So the army and the military are subordinate to the interest of business, period. Everything is subordinate to the business, to the interest of business. And then you have the issue of the fact that because you have let corporations become transnational, multinational corporations, that ends up making them a national corporations, where they have no affiliation and loyalty, or patriotism or nationalism to any particular country whatsoever. You have globalized elites.

You have a floating imperial structure now. That's super national, it's above everything. It's it it transcends borders. It floats across the world. So what does that do now to to your nation state model?

What what is that what are the implications and the ramifications and the repercussions of the fact that power now isn't tied to a nation state? And that that changes the whole nature of colonization, the whole nature of imperialism, and the whole nature of anti imperialism, anti colonization. That that whole thing has to change. The way that you approach that, the whole strategy with which you approach that has to change.

Right. Their own society. Right. In order to be subordinate to.

No. You know No. Because for the same reason that Walhallaq said that in the Islamic societies, they prohibited the creation of corporations. The reason that they prohibited corporations is because they're Muslims. And the idea in Islam that everyone is accountable and liable for their actions.

You can't have limited liability. You can't pretend, well, I'm not responsible because I can hide behind a corporate logo and pretend that it was a, you know, they did it. America and the The UK first, UK and then America allowed for corporations because they're Kufar. And they fundamentally don't believe in accountability. So that that that's their problem.

Again, it's not that the nation state allowed corporations, it's Kufar allowed corporations. And then and then so all all we see is the manifestation now of the development of structures of power that Kufr has allowed. That's that's all. And and and this isn't going to work in the Muslim world. But in terms of them being able to subsume state power, that's not a thing.

That's not a thing that can happen. Because in in most parts of the Muslim world, what they will call corruption protects them against that. Because the the state power is tied with the private sector. In terms of ownership, the people who are in charge of the state also are in charge of the private sector. So they they're not going to get subordinated because they're in control of both.

And no one from the outside is going be able to come in and overthrow them. They won't allow that. This is this is this is one of the most important things that I've heard him say. Yeah. When he's talking about Edward Said.

Yeah. And Edward Said who seemingly Uh-huh. Was anti orientalist Yes. And was trying to correct orientalist tropes and so on, and was critical of of of all of that. But he himself obviously went, okay, you're Arab, but you're Christian, which makes you a minority.

And you're looking at your own region with from as an outsider to an extent. To an extent. Obviously, you're Arab, obviously, all of that's given. But the point is this is a Muslim region. Overwhelming majority of people are Muslim.

And you're viewing it from the outside. And you would naturally have an affinity in one way or another whether you are conscious of it or not with the West. Where you are. Yeah. Yeah.

Where you are and the religion you follow. What he said was that Edward Said, in describing something, makes that thing what as as he's describing it. So if you mis define, mis describe, and you're doing that from a center of power, then the people themselves can actually start to adapt and conform to your description and your definition. And that's what's happened with a lot of Muslims with regards to Islam and their concept of governance. In my opinion, like people like HT and the entirety of so called political Islam, whatever they want to call themselves, Islamist or whatever they want to call themselves.

The entirety of that is that you have you have reached your understanding about government in Islam from the Kufar. Period. And now and now you have become what they told you you were, even though we were never that. But now there's many people who have become what the Kufar have told us we are, and have told each other that we are. So that we are misunderstanding ourselves, And you this is combined with the fact that under colonization, Islamic education was greatly diminished and de emphasized.

And the the adoption of the prioritization system of the West in terms of what's valued, education became stupidly about jobs, getting what kind of a career you can have, and whether you can become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or what have you. That became the whole the sole purpose of education, whereas that was never the purpose of education in the history of Islam. The purpose of education is knowledge, period. Knowledge, understanding of the world, how to please Allah the best, and how to benefit the Muslims. But you because you you adopted these this system of prioritization of values of the Kufar, of the colonizers, you deemphasized and devalued Islamic education.

And then when you tried to come back to Islam, you came back to an Islam that they told you about. Instead of learning actually about Islam correctly. So then you you you become like this political Islam. Yes. But I mean like when he talks about the Sharia being so sophisticated, mind blowingly, you know, sophisticated as compared to Western jurisprudence.

Of course, he's absolutely correct. But he's also I I I don't know if he is ascribing the reason for that. You know?

For that I need to read what he has said of the Sharia.

No. Well, he can't he can't. He can't say what the real problem is. Yeah. And why Islam why Sharia is the way it is.

Because he also is he usually just refers to Sharia as a as a legal system. He can't say what the real problem is with the with the West, and he can't say what the real reason for the goodness is of the Sharia, except that he would become a Muslim. Because it's obvious, why? You know, there's no I mean, he talks about the the West and the nation state and and so on, and that it's it's like ethics, morality, and it takes ethics and morality and what not out of the state, out of government and so on. You're taking something that wasn't there to begin with.

It's not there to begin with. The nation state didn't do that, your kufr does that. And it's in it's in every element of Islam. In jurisprudence, in creed, in aqidah, in kulshay. It's there because of Islam, because of iman.

That's why it's there. That's why we have a heightened level. Because religion isn't about ethics. It's about understanding reality. It's about understand Allah like I've said many times, Allah telling us what reality is.

And the reality of ourselves, the reality of the dunya, the reality of the akhirah, all of that is explained to us. And that's what deen is, Actually understanding reality, and how to function in reality with that understanding. When you have the understanding of what reality is, then you know how to behave. And Allah gives us all of the ways of behaving, and that's why we have a level of heightened sophistication and complexity in our legal system. And and why a qadi from some village in some province has a more brilliant legal mind and a more complex and sophisticated mind than the top legal scholars in the West, in all of the history of the West.

Just a regular average village qadi has has the capacity to understand more, and and and to comprehend more, and to understand nuance, and and how the how you have to very very carefully and meticulously, what you have to do meticulously to arrive at a fair judgment. He understands it at a level that eclipses even the best legal minds of the West. But it's because of Islam. It's because Islam taught us how reality is, and what our role is, and how we're supposed to be, and how we're supposed to function. But you are in the darkness.

So you come up with things, and it's always simplistic, it's always wrong, it's always, you know Guided. Misguided. Yeah. So you'll come up with you'll come up with your model of government, but you don't get to blame the model of government for why you are the way you are, and why your society is the way it is. It's your fault.

It's just because that's how you are. No matter what model you come up with, it's not gonna work. Because the model's not the problem. Mhmm. I don't think that the model is is is a problem for us.

No. One model or another model. Because we are what we are. Mhmm. Regardless of what the model is.

Which is why people like h the h d types can actually say Malaysia is a you can actually go so far as to say that it's a capital country or

Of course, they will say it's a capital system. They'll say it's a Kufra system.

It's secular system, you know. Just because you have the civil cause, that was secular. You know? And that the the The Gulf countries, it's all secular. You know?

Like, you you don't have a public holiday on the oh, you're you're turning secular because Friday is not a public holiday anymore.

Because you understand Islam in a way that was taught to you by Kufar. Correct.

This is this is yeah.

And be because Islamic an Islamic society is an abstraction for you.

Mahrez, we understand

Muslims in the Muslim world, their societies like I've said, have just been developing on a continuum. And I honestly don't believe that they would be considerably different now than if what happened in 1924 hadn't happened in 1924. Certainly Malaysia wouldn't be any different. Malaysia wasn't impacted in any way, Indonesia wasn't impacted in any way whatsoever by Ataturk, what Ataturk did. They were impacted by colonization, they were impacted by the British and the Portuguese.

Yeah. The model is irrelevant, in my opinion really. Wallahi, I think that the model is completely irrelevant. If if it's if if your government is populated by Muslims, all of those Muslims will try to make decisions in line with Sharia Correct. Because every individual Muslim is bound to the Sharia.

Yes. That's why I that's why it's important to recognize the form as well as the contact. If if if if it's, you know, based.

Yeah.

Then the it's useless what the form is. Right?

Of course. Yeah. And if the content is Eman based, similarly, the the the model is irrelevant. I mean, that's my opinion anyway.