Prepare for the inevitable. Middle Nation Podcast (E:24)

Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wa barakatu, everyone. This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation podcast. This is episode number 24. If you deal in geopolitics, you deal in irreducible fundamental realities like geography, raw materials, and demographic characteristics and trends.

A country is always gonna be located where it's located. Its neighbors will always be its neighbors. What does or does not grow on the land or what is buried in the earth is generally not going to change. And the rate of reproduction of the population determines certain things about the way the future almost inevitably has to go. If you combine this approach with the study of history, you start to develop a fairly decent ability to objectively assess the general trajectory of world affairs, and the passage of time will only fill in the details.

While always being cognizant of the fact that Allah will do what he wills and anything is possible by divine decree, you can plan around predictable likelihoods that almost amount to being inevitabilities. Meaning, when you plan, it should not be around the expectation that predictable likelihoods will not occur, but that they will occur. And when you see a plan or a policy that runs against the grain that basically denies or defies the inevitable, you can be fairly confident that it will ultimately fail even if it enjoys a short term period of apparent success. The failure of a plan or a policy is almost always embedded in it from its inception, and that's often because either the plan or the objective of the plan itself seeks to circumvent the inevitable. This is usually because politicians only make short term plans, plans that can look successful during their terms in office or maybe even during their lifetimes, and they will never have to, be held to account for long term outcomes.

Like, say, China's disastrous one child policy, that was great for China momentarily, but it has doomed them long term. So let me talk about some inevitabilities and what sorts of plans and policies we might want to consider that adhere to those inevitabilities in such a way as to put us in an advantageous position once those inevitabilities become manifest. Because we should be proactive in responding today to what is most likely to come about tomorrow, meaning the world is going to look a certain way in fifty or one hundred years, and we can make decisions in our lifetimes that will improve the position of the Muslims who live in that world fifty or hundred years from now. It's just like buying a coat in the summertime because you know it will be cold in six months. Okay.

So the Western world, the global North, is depopulating. They are aging and dying and not reproducing. Across the developed world, they are in varying stages of demographic collapse. This will also mean gradual deindustrialization. The trend of concentrating wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands and the wholesale transfer of control and authority to the private sector will continue.

This will mean a steady deterioration in the quality of life and an increase in conflict both between states and within societies. Meanwhile, the populations of the global South, including the Muslim world, are robust and are at or above replacement levels, which will likely continue to grow their worker and consumer pools for at least the next thirty years or so. Asia, Africa, and Latin America are also the most resource rich regions in the world, and these factors will all increasingly make predatory elites from the global North focus their attention and effort on the so called developing world basically in extractive economic activities, plundering resources, swallowing local businesses, purchasing control through investments and loans, exploiting renewable energy options to power their own societies, securing ownership of arable land and monopolizing food production, and buying real estate to become the landlords of the global South. As much as possible, conflict will be stirred between states, between ethnic and religious groups, and particular countries will be appointed as clients to help manage and facilitate these agendas. Meaning, certain countries in the developing world will be empowered with economic and military advantages in exchange for serving the interests of capital that is centered in the North, the global North.

I think one of the most obvious likely candidates for this sort of appointment will probably be India. Now part of what I've just outlined pertains to geopolitical fundamentals such as demographics, and part of it has to do with the most predictable ways that power will behave in light of these fundamentals. And I would go so far as to say that this behavior is inevitable. But now let me talk about another dimension along these same lines. The demographic collapse in the West or the global North, the deindustrialization, the economic deterioration that will happen along with the conflicts and strife that will accompany those events will also worsen the cultural chaos, confusion, despair, and desperation in those societies.

More and more people will become alienated from the myths of what is called Western civilization and will recognize that it provides no answers, no solutions, no authentic moral or ethical codes, and no meaning or purpose. And we will inevitably see the continuation and probably the intensification of the trend that already exists in the West, which is of people converting to Islam. In the Muslim world, Indonesia is likely to become a major economic powerhouse within the next few decades with a success story that will rival that of China's meteoric rise but without the fall which China will be experiencing in that same time frame. The economic reach of the Gulf States led by The UAE will increase across the Middle East, Africa and Asia and even into Europe. North Africa led by Morocco will become a major hub for renewable energy upon which the West will start to depend.

The overall standard of living will improve across the Muslim world, and Muslim political and cultural influence will spread and strengthen as a result. As the single largest cohesive demographic group in the global south, likely to reach 3,000,000,000 people by 2050. Muslims are going to be the dominant population, and Islam will be the most influential belief system and culture on the planet in the second half of this millennium. This is an inevitability. Any plans or policies that seek to defy, deny, or delay this are doomed.

Now there is no civilization or culture that is better equipped to challenge Western predatory capital and no people more capable of frustrating the designs of corporate imperialism on the developing world than the Muslims. There are three major religious groups that prevail in the global South, the Muslims, the Catholics, and the Hindus. The Catholics are found obviously in Latin America and Africa, the Hindus primarily in India. The Muslims span from North Africa to the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia with significant pockets in other parts of Africa and even have a presence in Latin America. We will be the default organizing demographic across the Southern Hemisphere.

And I would argue that we should build relations with the Latin American and African Catholic community as they will be the second most organized religious group in the world. Nations of the global South should recognize, and we should encourage and spread that recognition that Muslim unity, far from being divisive and threatening, is the best defense the developing world has against predatory capital and corporate imperialism. See, there is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism. I would argue that there's nothing new about it either. Markets have always existed, and people have always traded and engaged in commercial exchanges.

The problem is that in the West, capitalism is not couched within a broader and deeper moral and ethical sense of social responsibility, accountability, fairness, or any concept of the greater good. In the West, capitalism is a godless pursuit. There is this belief, as I've talked about before, that business is business, and it is a realm of life in which morality and principles are not expected to regulate decision making. This has caused a massive number of the problems that plague the West today. In Islam, there is no realm of life that we compartmentalize away from morality and justice, and a sizable proportion of Islamic jurisprudence relates to the conducting of trade and business in a fair and transparent manner acceptable to Allah.

Most of Southeast Asia converted to Islam specifically as a result of trade and doing business with the Muslims. If the Muslims become a cohesive united economic power, this is the best possible antidote to the ruthless economic system operated by the West, and it would be the best chance for countries in the developing world to prosper, grow, escape poverty and subjugation, and achieve economic security and stability. To this end, I will repeat what I've said before. The Muslim private sector needs to concentrate on developing partnerships and connections across the global South. Decouple as much as possible from the markets and economic system of the global North, and create trade and investment corridors between Asia and Africa, The Middle East and Latin America, and regional trade agreements between, say, example, the OAU and ASEAN with preferential terms that favor participating nations.

Muslim countries, Muslim companies, or Muslim organizations would be the ideal brokers between developing countries and western businesses seeking their natural resources and raw materials because rather than allowing those huge multinational corporations to swoop down with their collective economic power to plunder a country's natural wealth, the Muslims would have a religious interest in ensuring that the most advantageous deals will be made in compliance with Islamic principles of fairness, sustainability, and social responsibility. While in Islam, we recognize the inevitability of class differences, we also uphold the honor, dignity, and fundamental rights of all people and their equality before Allah. Wealth does not entitle a person to oppress anyone nor to evade accountability. Now are there unscrupulous Muslim business people? Of course, there are.

But until now, we have all been operating in the dog eat dog world of western neoliberal capitalism. There's been no viable alternative for over a century. But now the West is hollowing out its civilization, burning away the bulk of what once made it a culturally influential force and concentrating its power into the intellectually, ideologically, and morally vapid single-minded institutions of private capital, corporations. They are whittling their civilizational purpose down to the bone of ruthless profit making. And corporations are simply no match for Islamic civilization, particularly not when we are prosperous.

As a people, we are proud of our deen, proud of our identity as Muslims. In secular terms, you would say that we are ideologically driven, not simply driven by material self interest. And we are also, truth be told, committed to the spread of Islam and the establishment of justice, which, yes, does put us in competition with the West. And this again makes us the best global community for building an alternative power structure to counterbalance and resist the hegemony of Western private sector power. The global South should understand that Muslim strength is a protection against Western corporate imperialism and that no other community is capable of achieving that strength nor is any other community as likely to exercise that strength as fairly as the Muslims.

Now again, the rise of the Ummah as an economic, political, and cultural power is, I believe, inevitable. The question is simply whether or not other nations will adopt policies and stances that seek to delay, defy, or deny this inevitability, or whether they will recognize it and begin to cooperate and collaborate with us. Cooperation and collaboration are strategies we should pursue, initially through private sector partnerships as well as through civil society networking to build a spirit of solidarity. I believe that in much of Africa and Latin America, there already exists considerable anti western, anti corporate sentiment, and, of course, a proud history of anti imperialist and anti colonialist activism and thought, which we can tap into. There's already a sense in the global South of confrontation and resistance to western hegemony, and the ethos of the non aligned movement still resonates.

Business and trade partnerships can and should draw upon this deep current of suspicion and animosity towards western multinational corporations, particularly in light of the Ukraine war and the campaign of economic isolation against Russia, which is almost universally viewed in the global South as an American power grab and as a conflict that The US is using to try to coerce loyalty and obedience. There is a growing recognition that the international order is changing and that the developing world is in the crosshairs of western corporate imperialists. So encouraging private sector solidarity as an explicitly political strategy would surely not fall upon deaf ears. For at least the last twenty years, but actually much longer, Muslims have been preoccupied with trying to prove ourselves to be trustworthy western allies, and we have largely neglected our rightful role as the leading voice of the oppressed. The non aligned movement was launched in Bandung, Indonesia, and the Muslims represent the strongest, most cohesive, and most historically relevant population of the global South.

But we have been truant in our duty, and we have been kept too busy with our own catastrophes and challenges and misguidedly attempting to placate and be accepted by the West because we thought it was necessary for our survival. Unfortunately, we have lost some standing in the global South as a result. Many of our leaders are seen as western lackeys, some rightly so. But the Muslims as a nation cannot be done without, and we are the key to the rise of the developing world. Without the Muslims, the global South is too fractured, too divided, too weak, and too contentious to withstand the onslaught of exploitative Western corporate power.

We should develop collaborative relationships with companies and NGOs from Caracas to Casablanca, from Buenos Aires to Bandung, from Dodoma to Dubai, establishing an active Muslim presence in business, cultural exchange, academic conferences, invest in networking, and grassroots activism to build trust, camaraderie, interconnectedness, and shared purpose. Earlier, I mentioned the possibility of Muslim economies positioning themselves as broker nations and talked about, for example, Malaysia buying cocoa from Ghana after Ghana halted exports to Switzerland, saying that Malaysia could import the raw cocoa and then re export that to Switzerland because the Swiss still want the chocolate. Some people criticized that idea as apparently undermining Ghana's objective of denying its raw cocoa to Switzerland, but Ghana's intention behind the export ban was not punitive. It isn't about denying Switzerland cocoa. It's about fair trade and Ghana building up its own chocolate industry.

Look, a deal struck between Ghana and Malaysia would not have to replicate the deal formally in place with Switzerland. A deal with Malaysia could include Malaysian investment in developing refining and production facilities in Ghana, for instance, or perhaps an agreement for Malaysia to purchase chocolate produced in Ghana alongside raw cocoa. The point of such a hypothetical deal would be to benefit two economies in the global south who would then dictate terms to western economies. That was just a brainstorming exercise aimed at finding ways to increase the circulation of goods and services and profits between countries in the developing world while restricting the direct influence and coercion of western corporations on smaller vulnerable economies. What if, for instance, trade corridors could be created which designated particular ports as the only authorized exporters that could ship goods to Europe, making those countries a sort of gatekeeper for trade with a particular region of the global South.

Meaning, if say Germany wanted to buy materials from Nigeria, they would have to reach an agreement with, for instance, The UAE or Egypt. Germany would pay Egypt or The UAE to purchase the materials from Nigeria including a gatekeeper fee for Egypt or UAE, and the materials would be shipped first to Egypt or The Emirates and then on to Germany, thus creating a buffer between western companies and vulnerable economies in the global South and spreading the financial benefits of trade while maintaining free trade zones between developing countries. Yes. That would complicate trade with the West, but that's the point, creating a basically hemispheric protectionist trade barrier. Don't think that something like this is impossible.

It's time for the countries of the global South to assert themselves and control over their economic destinies. We can do this through solidarity and cooperation, and Muslims should lead the way.