The Symptoms | The Greater Jihad Ep.9

And like I said, you have to be vigilant. You have to be very vigilant in recognizing this and guarding yourself against this and guarding yourself guarding yourself against the symptoms of this. The symptoms, I think, fall roughly into two different sort of categories, and the two categories are related. The first category is what you can call the corruption of reality within their own minds internally, the epistemic symptoms of their condition. And then the second cluster of symptoms represents a sort of destabilization campaign that is connected to the internal state.

These are the sort of relational or social symptoms that they have. And then we would need to talk about the exposure to all of this, and how being exposed to all of this result in that condition then being transmitted to you or being transmitted to someone else because it can be contagious, that's the whole point of it. So the first thing that you'll notice about someone whose wrongdoing has thoroughly metastasized is that they have become deeply alienated from the truth. They become deeply alienated from the truth. This is what I talked about earlier.

This resistance to ever honestly naming what they're doing, to ever identifying it accurately. They'll be evasive. Right? They'll deflect. So this is gonna manifest in any interaction as dishonesty, as denial, as obfuscation, as, misdirection, as deflection, and as outright deceit.

I mean, honesty is, you know, honesty and connection to the truth is one of the first things to go, if not the first things to go. Because like I said, we're talking about a covering that has formed over the heart, like what Rasulullah told us, mark by mark this forms. It forms wrong action by wrong action, sin by sin. And if you repent, then the mark will dissolve. But if you persist, then it spreads until it has sealed your heart.

Allah mentioned this in Surat Al Mutafafin when he said that over their hearts is a seal for what they used to earn. And a heart that has been covered, a heart that has been sealed, obviously, cannot perceive reality properly anymore. It is literally impaired. It's literally impaired. It's like a lens that's been smeared or been covered.

So everything it can see, if it can see anything, it sees it in a very distorted way. You see how this is almost mathematical? This leads to that leads to that and causes such and such. You see? The condition and its symptoms and how the infection manifests and how that develops.

Just like if we're talking about physically, if an organ is damaged, if if this organ is damaged or if these nerves are severed, then we can see see that there's gonna be these cascading effects. The person who suffers from this is not gonna be able to do this or that or the other now because of what happened to them. This is how their body is gonna break down and so forth. But instead of talking about a physical body, what we're talking about here is character. What the what the impact is upon your character.

There are certain lifestyles. There are certain types of conduct. There are certain actions that do make you incapable of being honest even if you are not deliberately consciously lying. So when we say that this person is dishonest because of their lifestyle, we're not saying that so much as a value judgment as we're saying it as a diagnostic reality about their condition. You understand?

They cannot accurately perceive or represent the truth even of their own situation. Or or maybe more precisely, they they at some level at some level, they can perceive their own situation, which is precisely why they work so hard to bury the truth. They don't want anything to ever be known. This this is their denial, their denial is not ignorance, and their obfuscation is not confusion. You understand?

Their deceit is not a mistake. It's an effort to keep reality from being named because, naming it accurately would constitute the beginning of correction. You understand? And they have, as we already talked about, they have already functionally chosen not to be corrected. You understand?

So it's just like a virus that doesn't wanna be expelled from its host. It defends itself. It wants to keep living. It wants to keep being a parasite on you. Al Ghazali said about that they represent themselves to the Muslims, that they believe in Allah, they believe in the angels, they believe in the books, they believe in the messages and so forth.

But that's this is how they represent themselves to the Muslims. But their inner reality gives it the lie. Okay? This is major nifaq. But it's the texture of this hypocrisy, and it's the way that this hypocrisy operates, which is it amounts to a war on accurate representation.

You understand? Because when a hypocrite says Muhammad obviously, this is a true statement. But the is being dishonest when he says it. Just like when the Kufar talk about human rights or they talk about morality and so forth, much of what they say is actually true. But they are being dishonest when they say it.

When you point to the reality, they'll deny it. When you try to name the thing, they will dispute the name, they will dispute the definition, they'll dispute the judgment, they'll redefine, they'll reframe, they'll equivocate, they'll misdirect. And we've also been told about this in the Quran in Surat Al Baqarah, when Allah was speaking about those in whose hearts is a disease and when you say to them, do not cause corruption on the earth, they say, we are just peacemakers. We're only peacemakers. We're only reformers.

Basically, only trying to make things better. This is obfuscation. This is deflection. This is misdirection. This is deceit as a reflex.

This is the corruption of language itself in service to the corruption of the self. It's the corruption of reality as a symptom of the condition that they have. And this doesn't just, protect the illness, it makes treatment of the illness impossible. Okay. So this is the internal state that they're in.

This inability within yourself to be honest. Now the second cluster of symptoms, like I say, this is the relational and the more social aspect of it, the external aspect of it. And here we're talking about the outward manifestations of that internal dishonesty. That's gonna come out in things like being very argumentative, being manipulative, being, trying to bait you, trying to provoke you, trying to tempt you, trying to misdirect in every interpersonal, interaction. Right?

If the first cluster of symptoms is about how the person relates to the truth, then the second cluster of symptoms is about how the person relates to you or how they relate to other people. But the operating principle is the same, which is destabilization destabilization of the truth. They cannot restore themselves to the fitra. So whether consciously or not, they are trying to bring you down into their modified version of reality. They're trying to degrade your own connection to the truth, your own honesty, your own dignity, your own honor.

They're basically trying to attack your immune system, the thing that has protected you from being in the state that they're in. They're trying to bring you into the state that they're in. So you'll notice that all of these behaviors are not random at all. There's a logic to it. There's absolutely a logic to it.

Like I said, it's almost mathematical. So when they try to argue with you, they're not trying to seek the truth, but they're just trying to exhaust you and to confuse you. They're trying to drag you, into their epistemic chaos, the epistemic chaos that they live in, where nothing is settled and nothing is clear and everything is contestable and there is no, objective morality. They're trying to infect you with their own inability to accept any sort of a clear moral, judgment, any sort of a clear moral verdict. And when they try to manipulate you, then they are distorting the nature of your relationship with them so that they can try to get you to act outside or or rather to act against your own values and against your own interests on the basis of friendship, on the basis of family or acquaintanceship and so forth.

When they try to, bait you, try to provoke you and so forth, try to get a rise out of you, you know what they're doing. They're trying to, find, just any sort of a chance to get you to lose your composure. They're trying to make you lose your composure, trying to make you respond to them with something that is unworthy of you, with a response that is unworthy of you, because that's a victory for them. That's a victory for them. Not because they necessarily feel good about it, though some of them certainly do, but because it is a confirmation to them of something that they need to be confirmed in, which is that you are not actually better than them.

You are not actually healthier than them, which means that they're not as sick as they might think that they are. You understand me? They need to know that your dignity is as easy to compromise as theirs is. They need to know that your character is as brittle as theirs is. You see, everything that they'd say and everything that they do is just to try to validate their own condition.

Understand me. You you never have any discussion with any of these types of people, people who are in this state and have that discussion actually be about the topic being discussed. I know that's gonna sound confusing, but it's never like this, not on their end. You are never discussing if you if you're having a discussion with them about a particular topic, they are not discussing the topic. They are only in a discussion with you for the purpose of validating their own condition every time.

So they're not talking about Gaza. They're not talking about Iran. They're not talking about whatever relationships, marriage, raising children, men, women, feminism, red pill, whatever the case may be. The topic at hand is never what they're actually there for. They're not talking about whatever the topic is, whatever the issue is.

They are exclusively engaged in a contest for validating their own condition, and trying to spread it to you, which is a means of validating their condition. You understand? This is what I mean. There's no such thing as an honest discussion with someone who's in this state. It's absolute it's literally impossible.

You understand? The are described throughout the Quran with this same sort of equality in how they deal with people, probing, testing, always looking for the cracks. Right? And so does the Torbah, Allah describes how they watch the believers. They they sit and wait and watch the believers and wait for some sort of a calamity to befall the Muslims.

Right? They wait for the believers to make a mistake. So then then then they can say, see, they're just like us. They're not so good after all. And Rasulullah himself said that among the clearest signs of the is that when he disputes, he behaves obscenely.

He behaves very, very, very badly, very rudely. When he when he argues, he goes low. He gets nasty because getting low is the point because you're supposed to join him in that. And and and, temptation is related to this. When they try to tempt you with this, and the other, they're also again trying to get you to validate their own choices by making the same choices that they made.

You understand? They want you to bend a rule. They want you to overlook something. They want you to participate in something that you shouldn't participate in. Because by participating in it, you are endorsing it.

And your endorsement is the thing that they need. Not from you specifically necessarily, but from, the moral framework that you represent because you should represent a moral framework. So this is the means of transmission that I'm talking about because the condition is not just present in the host. Just like just like when you talk about a virus or an infection, it's reaching towards you always. It's always reaching towards you.

And this is what I mean when I say that we need to study this the same way that a that a virologist studies a pathogen because a pathogen doesn't just exist in the host. It has a biological imperative to replicate. It has a biological imperative to spread, to find new hosts, and so does that moral condition. So for instance, when you validate, their dishonesty by accepting some distorted account of something, some lie, some narrative that you know is not true, you play along with some redefinition of something or you let their obfuscation stand about something, their deflection stand about something, you've been infected now. You've been infected.

You've made yourself complicit in their war against reality. You understand? Now you're participating in that. Doesn't matter whether you intended to or not. The outcome is the same.

The outcome is the same. You have now allowed for their corrupted account of something to go unchallenged, which means that you have functionally endorsed it, like I say. So this is one of the ways that it can be transferred to you, how you can get infected yourself. When you get drawn into their arguments, when you get drawn into arguments on their terms, you accept the frame that they set up, the framework, the parameters that they set up. When you start trying to debate them from within their own framework, when you do that, you've already lost.

You've already lost because their goal, understand, their goal is never to arrive at the truth. That's not what they're doing. Their goal is to make truth seem inaccessible because that's how it is to them. They want everything to be murky because that's how it is to them. They wanna try to wear you down until you're too exhausted to insist on clarity because that's how they are.

And if you're arguing with them long enough in their framework, you're gonna start to feel, despite yourself, uncertain. You might even start to entertain positions that you never would have entertained otherwise if you hadn't gotten into that argument or or that debate. This is infection. It's gotten to you now. You understand?

And when they when you allow them to provoke you, if you lose your temper, you respond in kind to ad hominem attacks or what have you, you let yourself get dragged into undignified conduct, this is this is a direct transmission of the infection. Because Rasulullah told us that the strong man is not the one who wrestles others to the ground, the strong man is the one who can control himself in the moment of anger in the moment of anger. And the moment you lose that control, you have handed them something. You've handed them, you've demonstrated to them that your fitra, that your composure, that your dignity, that your character can be bypassed. It can be hacked.

You understand? You have behaved in a way that is unworthy of your own baseline. You have in that moment deviated from your own fitra, not because you committed some heinous act, not because you you you did some unspeakable sin, but because you allowed someone else's sickness to change your conduct. That's transmission. That's transmission of the infection, transmission of the condition.

This is why the Muslim stance towards these symptoms, towards these conditions must not be reactive. It cannot be emotional. It can't be you can't allow yourself or you can't put yourself in a position where you have to improvise in the heat of the moment. No. You have to know in advance what you're dealing with.

You have to know in advance what you're dealing with. You have to have already identified the pathogen before it reaches you. You understand me? So when the denial comes in a conversation, you're not surprised. When the propagation comes in a conversation or an interaction, you're not caught off guard.

You're not caught off guard. Or when the manipulation comes, you can see it for exactly what it is. Vigilance as I said. You need a great deal of vigilance and that means that you need to be informed about these conditions. And this is entirely consistent with what Islam, requires of us in terms of our engagement with the world.

The believer is supposed to navigate this life in a state of wakefulness, alertness, not paranoia, not hostility, but clarity. Clarity, you can say. You have to know what you're dealing with, and you have to name things correctly. And you can't let someone else, their confusion dictate your reality or their distortion become your distortion. Okay?

So now we've been speaking about the individual. The person the individual person whose wrongdoing has metastasized or deepened or what have you or spread. The person whose condition is beyond our capacity to cure because that's that's why I'm talking about it like this because we're talking about people that we cannot help and that therefore we need to help ourselves against or or protect ourselves from. So I'm not talking about just the normal believer who stumbles. I'm talking about someone who has gone down that path, quite far, to where they cannot be corrected by naseeha, by reminders and so forth.

And so we need to be able to identify those symptoms so that we know when a person has reached that state. But okay, everything that I just described, this sort of clinical picture, with dealing with sin and wrongdoing and so forth, and the means of transmission and the symptoms and whatnot, this doesn't only apply to an individual human being. It applies at scale. Yes. It can metastasize in the body politic.

It can metastasize in a culture. It can metastasize in a whole society. And Western so called civilization is exactly this. That's exactly what Western so called civilization is. And when this does happen to a society, when the dishonesty, the denial, the obfuscation, the provocation, the manipulation, and so forth, When all of these are not just the symptoms of a single individual, but you're talking about the operating logic of entire institutions, you're talking about the operating logic of entire media systems, entire cultural frameworks, and so forth, then we're not just dealing with a single sick person, we're dealing with a sick society.

An entire sick society. And the diagnosis and the prognosis and the precautions that we have to, take are on an entirely different order of magnitude. I've said it before that one of the biggest mistakes that we have made as a people, and I think it's a mistake that most global south peoples have made, is to think that the westerners, that the Europeans, and that their ancestors in America are like the rest of us. See, this is like when you sit across the table from someone with metastasized wrongdoing and you think, that your reminders and your is gonna help them. See, you you think that you're dealing with a different type of person than you are.

You deal with them as if the infection in them has not spread and has not completely seized them. And it's very dangerous for you to be in that position and to think that way about them when you're wrong. It's very dangerous for you to think that you are interacting with a person and not with a pathogen when in fact you are interacting with a pathogen and not a person. And for a very long time, this is exactly how our people dealt with the West. Yes.

It is. So we would point out their actions that contradicted, their statements, their proclamations of moral values and whatnot, their actions that, went against that. We would explain to them about their double standards and their inconsistencies and so forth because we thought that they were a people who would self correct if these things were pointed out to them because that's what we would do. We would self correct if if you pointed out our our mistakes or our flaws or our inconsistencies. That's what normal people would do.

That's what any normal people would do. But you're not dealing with the people when you deal with them. I'll say it again. You are not dealing with a people when you're dealing with them. You are dealing with a condition that has seized that people.

Do you understand me? Again, let me be clear that I'm not dehumanizing them. You'll you'll try to play it like that. You'll try to spin it like that, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm saying that they have submerged themselves so far below the surface that they have become unreachable.

So now if you're talking to them, you are just talking to the surface of the pool that they're in. You understand me? You're not talking to them. Your words are not gonna be able to reach them any more than your words from the shoreline will be able to reach someone who's at the bottom of the sea. You understand me?

So you're not talking to them. You're talking to the ocean into which they have sunk. You're talking to the condition. See, because the truth of the matter is that the West is abnormal. The West is abnormal collectively collectively.

Now, again, I don't preclude the possibility, that you can have individuals who go against the grain of that society, who live there, who were raised there, but you're not gonna find anyone who is from that society, who was raised in that society, who is unaffected, or who is uninfected. It's just gonna be a question of degrees. So because we have taken an approach to them, like the Islamic approach whereby we understand that everyone has a good fitra. Right? So we deal with people according to the fitra that we know that they have.

That's how we deal with people generally. That's how we generally deal with each other. And we try to treat people's instances of wrongdoing as lapses. And we try to point those out to them and try to call them back to return to their better nature, to their fitra. But this simply does not work with the West.

No. It does not. This does not work with the West, and you need to recognize this. Just the same way that you need to recognize it when you're interacting with individuals whose condition has metastasized. When you're when you're dealing with individuals who who who their condition has gotten too bad for you to fix.

Fixing them or healing them or rehabilitating them is beyond your capacity, and it's beyond our capacity with regards to the West. Only Allah can guide you. We can only help people who've already been guided by Allah and stumbled. That's who we can help. We can remind them, like I say.

We can give them reminders, we can advise them, we can give them to try to help get them back on track. But if Allah has not guided you, if Allah has not guided your society, your so called civilization, then I'm afraid that there's nothing we can do for you. There is nothing we can do for you. No. The only thing that we can do is try to protect ourselves from you and try to protect others from you.

So we just deal with the symptoms and we take our precautions. We diagnose, we identify the condition that you have because on a civilizational level, the West has an absolutely chronic condition. It's probably a terminal illness. Truth be told, it's probably a terminal illness. It's gonna destroy your society.