Shahid Bolsen | The Enlightenment Lie (Part 3/3)

Like I said, there's the the the constant repetition as a method for truth creation. And so it's an endless onslaught. And it can become difficult to to uphold reality, to uphold your own proper frameworks without being completely overwhelmed, by the flood of their dishonesty. And you might, even, involuntarily make the mistake of falling into legitimizing their frameworks, their false version of reality. So you have to be constantly vigilant.

That's what I mean. It's exhausting. It's absolutely exhausting. Like, look at it. You can track the the progression of a typical interaction or debate or what have you with a western non Muslim.

First, they'll begin with the official myth about the West, you know. Western civilization, the enlightenment that brought reason and rationality and and science to the world and it they toppled the tyranny of the church and what have you. Right? They established the scientific method and so on. They they they brought the world out of the dark ages and they delivered unprecedented advancements in philosophy, science, equality, fairness, human rights, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

This is their opening gambit. The primary school comic book version of the West, the fairy tale. I mean, at this point, I think that they that they only do this, they only start with this just to test you. Because no one on earth can even in the West, no one on earth can possibly believe any of that in 2026. But they'll test you with it.

You know? They'll test you. Are you gonna cater to me or not? Are you gonna validate this fairy tale so that then, I can know that you are a mentally colonized, slave minded pushover, and then we can have a nice friendly conversation where I get everything my way? But then, if you insist on any degree of reality and point out that everything that they just said about their civilization, so called, is about a 180 degrees from the actual historical record.

You know? Like, if you tell them that the scientific method was not a Western invention, the scientific method was pioneered by Muslims, which is why, like I've said, before, you have mass Masajid, you have aqueducts, and so forth, that are still standing today centuries after they were built. We were developing architecture. We were developing engineering. We were developing chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and so forth when the West was in the dark ages, in their dark the West was in the dark ages.

The world wasn't the world wasn't in the dark ages just because you were. Muslim scholars like Ibn al Haytham, for example, developed the empirical method empirical methodology seven hundred years before Francis Bacon. The entire Western so called scientific revolution was built on translations of Arabic texts. Let's be serious. At least at least let's be a little bit honest.

And the matter of what reason and rationality, this was We were dealing with that in the Muslim world eight hundred years before your enlightenment so called. Your so called enlightenment and the role of reason in life, in culture, in law. We sorted all that out before the West even began thinking about these issues, before you even heard these words. You understand me? The Islamic intellectual tradition from Al Ghazali to Ibn Rushd to Al Kindi, We developed sophisticated frameworks for reconciling reason and revelation.

Sophisticated frameworks for empirical observation and logical deduction. Frameworks that are still more sophisticated than what you can comprehend even today. That's the truth. The West didn't invent, rational thought. They discovered rational thought in Muslim libraries and then they plastered their name on it.

And you stole what you never understood and you still don't understand. I need to be very clear about that. Because what I'm not doing here, I'm not going to, do the old colonized mind version of decolonization where we say, yes, the West is enlightened, the West is great, and we were just like the West before the West was as it is now. Right? We were like you before you were like you.

No. That's not what we're saying. You took from us what you never understood and so you never applied it properly because you didn't come up with it yourself. So even reason and rationality, you've gotten wrong. You've gotten it wrong.

Empiricism, you've gotten it wrong. Individual rights, you've gotten wrong. You're like someone who tried to write a a a book report when you just read the cliff notes. So you're never gonna be, as good as someone who read the book. You're like you're like someone who thinks that googling makes them an expert in something.

See, you never changed in this characteristic. You were like that then and you're like that now. You plagiarized, you didn't learn. There's a difference. And your societies and your history demonstrate that you never learned.

That they demonstrate it better than anything. That you just plagiarized, you just stole, you never learned. I mean, at the history. Look at what followed the enlightenment. Not the fairy tale that you tell, but the actual documented reality of what the enlightenment ushered in.

The so called enlightenment was supposed to usher in a new, wonderful beautiful era of rationality, reason, justice, brotherhood, equality and so forth. But what actually followed when the enlightenment came about, white supremacy, colonization, predatory capitalism, literally hundreds of millions of deaths, the PR and propaganda industries, disinformation, misinformation, control of information, an unprecedented concentration of wealth, concentration of power in fewer and fewer and fewer hands, even worse than it was when you had monarchies and the and the papacy, worse than when you had your your kings and your landlords. The worst income disparity the world has ever seen. The enlightenment didn't end tyranny, it perfected tyranny. That's the truth.

It didn't liberate humanity. You created the perfect ideological justification for the most brutal period of exploitation in human history. That's your so called age of reason. Your so called age of reason was simultaneously in that same age, the age of the Transatlantic slave trade when it was at its peak, the the genocide of the indigenous people of America, all of The Americas, the colonization of Africa, of Asia, of The Americas, the opium wars against China, the Belgian Congo atrocities with over 10,000,000 killed, the systematic destruction of countless civilizations, all your rational thinkers, your enlightenment thinkers, the same ones who wrote about liberty and equality. They also wrote treatises justifying racial hierarchy, justifying colonial domination.

Yes, you produce technology, sure, but technology, that was driven by the war industry, by by slaughterhouse mining in subjugated countries, by brutal resource extraction in the in the in the global South. Not to mention the ability to annihilate all human life on this planet. That's your enlightened self. That's when you're enlightened. That's what you do.

It just means savagery two point o. Every major technological advancement that you ever did was weaponized. Every scientific breakthrough was immediately applied to domination and destruction, immediately. The atomic bomb, chemical warfare, industrial scale genocide, these are the fruits of western rationality. Your rationality is indistinguishable from criminal insanity.

That's a fact. So when you bring all this up, then they'll shift tactics. Then suddenly the great uniqueness of the West is abandoned. And then they start to say, well, you know, every civilization was violent. All colonized.

They all dominated. They all subjugated people. The Muslims were imperialists. Right? They conquered lands.

The Muslims conquered lands. The Muslims practiced slavery. So what are you talking about? Africans sold Africans into slavery. You can't call us out for things that everyone was doing, everyone was guilty of doing.

That's not fair. But great achievements were made by the West. This is what they'll say. Even if some wrong things were done. And, you know, we always tried to be better.

We always tried to do better. We improved. We learned. We're the ones that abolished slavery. Remember?

So notice what they do. Look at what look at how they do. This is reliable. They go from we are perfect, we are wonderful, we are the pinnacle of civilizational evolution. We were bringing the light of goodness to the world.

All things good and wonderful. They go from that to, okay, we did bad things but everyone also also did those same bad things. So we're not unique in our evil, but we are totally unique. We're still unique in our good. So this exposes to you right away that you're not dealing with an honest good faith actor.

You're dealing with someone whose sole priority, whose exclusive priority is self validation and exoneration. They don't care what's true. They don't care what's factual. They don't care what's honest. They are exclusively driven, driven by western supremacy maintenance.

And they will resort to any lie. They will resort to any obfuscation or mischaracterization or distortion that serves their purposes. And they'll do that all while claiming their great enlightenment values, know, facts, rationality, truth, fairness and so on. They will just shamelessly lie and shamelessly misrepresent reality while at the exact same time pretending to be purely logical and objective. SubhanAllah.

And they feel no contradiction in that. They feel no contradiction whatsoever. So okay. No. In fact, when they say that, you have it very much the wrong way around.

Because the truth is that whatever good you did, that was not unique whatsoever. In fact, it was literally copied from what better civilizations did. So there's nothing unique about you, whatever good you might have done. What you were truly unique in was in the bad, in the violence, in the domination, in the pillage, in the conquest, in the carnage. That's where you were very, very unique.

You were so unique about that. No one in history has ever matched you in that. That's the truth. Where other conquerors had body counts in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, you have them in the tens if not the hundreds of millions and slaughtered in a fraction of the time. Islam spread.

Yes. Islam spread. The release the religion spread, the belief system spread all the way from the Maghreb to the Malay Archipelago, from Timbuktu to China, to Bosnia. Absolutely. Yes.

We're not gonna deny that Islam spread and that phenomenon bears no resemblance whatsoever to western imperialism or colonization. Listen to me very clearly. Every land that came into the fold of Islam became richer by that, became stronger by that, became more literate, more developed, more diverse, more prosperous. Tell me where did that ever happen In any of the lands that you invaded and that you colonized by force. Tell me.

Everywhere that you went, you subjugated. Everywhere that you went, you destroyed. You looted. You pillaged. You sabotaged.

Everywhere that you went, you de developed. You impoverished. You massacred and you starved. It is the pinnacle of dishonesty to compare what you did to the expansion of Islam. Wallahi.

That's like saying that there's no difference between lighting a lantern and setting a village on fire. Well, we both lit stuff. That's your dishonesty. And yes, of course, everyone practiced slavery, we all know that. But applying that same word to what was practiced all around the world and throughout history, using that same word for what you did is to completely distort the reality.

Listen, slavery, until you came along, until the West got involved in this, was basically a transitory class status. Usually because, you know, some sort of a penal sentence or prisoner of war scenario or debt, it was circumstantial. And in Islam, as everyone knows or anyone knows who has bothered to research it, in Islam, people who were in that situation were guaranteed legal rights, The right to work or to buy their way out of that situation. They could own property. They could earn money.

They could marry. They could they had upward mobility. They could be in the government. You understand? They could even be richer and even be more important and more influential than the ones that you would call their masters, than the ones that you would call their owners.

In Islam, the religion explicitly states that the people who are in slavery are your brothers and sisters and you're not even allowed to call them which is slave in Arabic. The prophet said we can't call a slave there. You have to provide for them, you have to clothe them as you clothe yourself, you have to feed them as you feed yourself. And if they get abused, they can make a legal case against you in court. Yes.

Muslims practice slavery and thank God for that because Islam provided rights and protections and dignity to anyone who was in that situation. Yes. Muslims were involved in the preexisting Sub Saharan slave trade as so was everyone else because it was a trade that existed and a trade that had existed for ages. Yes. Africans sold Africans as slaves because that was a trade that existed and there was nothing inhumane about it or cruel about it or evil about that.

The same way that you sell a debt today. Right? The same way that you will transfer a contract from one party to another party. The same way that I work for you today, you sell your company and now I work for somebody else who owns that company. Now I become his employee.

That's how it was when normal people engaged in this trade. And that's what Africans thought that they were doing when they sold slaves to you people because no one could have known what you would do. No one could have known what you would be like because no one else was like that. That's a fact. No one else thought that men and women in slavery were subhuman.

No one else thought that they were animals. No one else thought that they were objects with no rights and no dignity and no humanity. No one else was like that. You are the only ones who were like that. That's a historical fact.

So they assumed that you were normal. No one racialized it. It was circumstantial, not racial. No one else concocted a a pseudo scientific quasi religious justification for designating an entire population of human beings as nonhuman, designating them as destined for permanent servitude, as beasts of burden, that they're beasts of burden by nature because they look different from you. Wallahi, literally no one was ever that twisted and that sadistic.

No. If what we had, if if what Muslims had and what everyone else had, if that was slavery, then I don't know what to call what you had. And if if what you had and what you did, that if that was slavery, then I don't know what to call what everyone else had and what everyone else did. Because what you did and what everyone else did are sure not the same. And it's it's it's completely dishonest to even call them by the same word.

That completely distorts any understanding of what was practiced by everyone else before you got involved. By everyone else in the world for centuries and centuries, all across the world, across cultures, because what you did has now become the only definition. Even though what you did was monstrously different from anything that anyone else practiced. So okay, after you shoot all of this down in an exchange or an interaction with a a western non muslim, they'll change tactics again because now they're desperate. So now they'll collapse.

They'll collapse into one or another argument that's like, well, if the West is so bad, why are you using our technology? If the West is so bad, why does everyone wanna come to the West? Why does everyone wanna come to America if we're if we're so bad? Or if they're really falling apart, they might just lash out. You know?

Oh, I suppose Muslims are perfect. Right? You are you saying Muslims are perfect? Or they'll just say, oh, you just hate the West. Right?

Or else they'll they'll they'll they'll they might just recede. They'll recede into their shell and just spit venom. Oh, Islam hates women. At least we're free. Why are your country so poor then?

Oh, did you forget about the Sunni Shiite conflict? I guess you must support ISIS. You must support Hamas or some other, you know, blathering. Maybe they just melt into platitudes. You know, they'll just fully surrender.

Platitudes and means, well, you know, things are bad everywhere, power corrupts and so forth. Or the last line of defense, because remember, that's all they're ever doing is defending. The last line of defense is self exoneration and self validation on an individual basis where they distance themselves now from everything that you just talked about, everything that you just pointed out about history. And they'll say, well, you know, we're just regular people. We're just regular average people.

We didn't do any of those things. We didn't approve of any of those things. So, we're not to blame. So you see what I'm talking about. At the core of everything with them, at the core of everything is existential validation.

So when all of their myths and all of their fairy tale fairy tales about who and what they are as westerners, when all of that gets dismantled, when the claims of supremacy get completely obliterated, when they have to actually face that the only unique thing about their so called civilization is how atrocious it has been, well then they'll plead ignorance. They'll plead ignorance and innocence and powerlessness. It's absolutely uncanny. It happens every time. So then all you're left with is unaccountability, apathy, no regret, no remorse, no repentance, and only, some form of self validation through absolutely implausible denial of culpability.

I mean, you can actually hear all of that about your history and your first reflex is, it's still about you. It's still about your self image, self worth, your, your reputation. Do you understand? That's your reaction to all of the the the atrocious history. Now do you see why dishonesty is such a civilizational imperative for them?

Because there is nothing at the center. There's nothing at the core but emptiness at the foundation. I mean, that's why I say we cannot really, beneficially engage with them. Not because, again, not because we are opposed to dialogue with them. Not because we're opposed.

It's not because we fear their ideas or their questions, but because they don't come for dialogue. They come for civilizational validation through our invalidation and our subjugation. They make every interaction into a battlefield. They do that. Every conversation with them is an attempted ambush.

Every question is a trap. Every statement is a misdirection. And behind it all is that same, as I say, that same desperate existential panic. The terror that their entire civilizational self image is a lie, and it is a lie. And they have a right to fear recognizing that.

Because once the mythology all collapses, what remains? What's left? What's left when you strip away all the lies about your enlightenment bringing reason to the world? What's left when you acknowledge the fact or the the reality that your so called scientific revolution was built on stolen knowledge from Muslim libraries? Do you think we're their number one enemies?

Why why do you think that they hate us more than anyone else? Because they stole from us more than anyone else. Because they're an impostor, trying to imitate us. They're they're they're the talented mister Ripley. What's left when you have to admit that your so called age of reason was, like I said, simultaneously the age of the most brutal, genocidal, enslaving colonization period of human history.

The fact is that you are the beneficiaries of geography and gunpowder and the uncivilized will to pillage. You had access to resources through theft and through murder. You built wealth on slavery and colonization and extraction of other people's resources. You created technology exclusively for the purpose of domination and destruction. And you wrapped all of that in the language of civilization and progress and human rights and enlightenment and so forth.

This is the reality when all of the myths are collapsed. This is what you can't face. And this is the this is the mirror that you try to shatter anytime someone tries to lift it up to your face. So, yeah, we we we will continue to look at your materials and you can look at our materials. You can engage with our material if you want in your own spaces, like I said, on your own time if you choose.

But we're done pretending that there is any conceivable value or even potential value in direct engagement with those who come only to fight their civilizational insecurity battles on our doorstep. You understand me? We're done wasting our energy on people who cannot conceive of honest discourse. They can't conceive of it because their entire culture is built on dishonesty and relies upon dishonesty. This isn't hatred on our part.

This isn't enmity on my part on our part. It's not really even dismissal. This is simply recognition of reality, and the appropriate response to that Because you cannot have productive dialogue with someone whose sole purpose is to validate themselves through your invalidation. You can't have productive dialogue with people like this. You can't have any sort of honest exchange with someone who sees every interaction as existential warfare and competition.

You can't have mutual understanding with someone who needs your subordination in order for them to feel secure about themselves. And the and the and the fact of the matter is we don't have to do it anymore. We don't have to do it anymore. Like I've said many many times, the global balance of power is shifting. The economic architecture that rules this world is changing.

The intellectual landscape is transforming. And the psychological grip, of western, civilizational mythology is completely, dissolving. People around the world are waking up to the reality that western so called supremacy was always a fiction that was only ever maintained through violence and propaganda and the colonization of people's minds, through manipulation and indoctrination. I'm telling you, the Islamic renaissance isn't coming, it's here. The reawakening of civilizations across the global South is not a future event that we are predicting, it's happening now.

And the decolonization of minds is not a distant hope that we think maybe is gonna happen someday. No. It is the defining project of our time right now. And in this context, we do not need to engage with the West's desperate attempts at civilizational self validation. We don't need to play defense against their accusations, and we don't need to prove ourselves by their metrics, and we don't need to seek approval by their standards.

And we don't need to help them obscure their own hypocrisy. That's not our job. We simply need to know who we are, we need to know what we have, what we have with us, where we came from and where we're going. And with that knowledge secure, then, all of their attacks is just noise in the background. All of their all of their accusations are absurdities.

All of their frameworks are completely irrelevant. So to those people who live in the West and who are genuinely who genuinely wanna learn, who genuinely want to understand, who genuinely want to escape the indoctrination prison of your civilizational programming, the door is open. The door is always open. The material is always available. The frameworks are accessible.

You can study at your own, in your own time, at your own pace, with your own sincere intention Insha Allah. But if you come with daggers hidden in, bouquets. If you come with accusations framed as questions or if you come with arrogance to try to lecture those whose civilizations were flourishing when yours was wallowing in barbarism and is still wallowing in barbarism today, then do not expect engagement. And don't expect us to play along with your theater and your trickery of, you know, making a false inquiry just as a form of civilizational supremacy maintenance. We have real work to do, real work.

The work of rebuilding what you spent centuries trying to destroy. The work of, reclaiming what you spent generations stealing. And the work of trying to revive and to reawaken, what you spent fortunes trying to sedate. And we don't have time. Wallahi, we don't have time for your civilizational therapy sessions disguised as dialogue.

The truth of the matter is that the age of your supremacy is already over. It's already over. It's over not because we defeated you or we conquered you or what have you. You're defeating yourselves quite effectively. And you're defeating yourselves because the foundation of your power was always rotten to begin with, has always been empty.

The pillars of your authority have always been hollow. This is made out of paper mache. And the mythology, about your so called greatness, that was always a lie. It was always nothing but a myth. And no matter how often you repeat it, no matter how violently you try to enforce it, no matter how elaborately you try to decorate it, myths and lies can never, ultimately withstand the truth.

So we're simply here, we're here to witness the collapse with clarity, with, clear eyes, and we'll name what we see with honesty and we're here to try to, help build what comes after with the knowledge and with the frameworks that you tried desperately to destroy over the course of centuries. That's what our work is. That's the only work that we have. And your desperate need for validation, civilizational validation, is simply not our responsibility.