Knowledge of Islam is liberatory

To the West, even when they were so called Christians, even before the the prevalence of blatant atheism, they viewed religion as basically a philosophical guide of moral conduct, platitudes, that are supposed to sort of provide lessons on morality and so forth. Generally vague, vague ideas, vague platitudes, and usually used for the purpose of consoling those whose exploitation was simultaneously justified by means of the same religion. In other words, religion was both a pretext for oppression and a means of pacifying the oppressed. It was dealt with cynically from the beginning, and it was treated as nothing more than a weapon of domination by the powerful, and a sort of brainwashing placebo for the dominated. The masses used it for comfort, for telling themselves that they were good people and so forth, and that was all that mattered.

And the overwhelming majority of people, both then and now, have no real knowledge of their scripture, the Christians. You could tell them a quote from the Buddha and tell them that it was from the gospels, and they wouldn't know any better. But once that system of power was transferred to secular authorities, then religion just became, you know, about generally being a good person. And for a lot of us, we've started to think the same way about religion today, even about Islam. It's not unusual today to hear Muslims say Islam is in your heart, You know, or even as long as you're a good person, that's the important thing.

That's what matters. That's what Islam is all about, trying to make you a good person. And that's why you can even find Muslims today feeling uncomfortable, or even objecting or rejecting the idea that there are nice kind charitable kufar who will go to Jahannam because you have reduced religion. So nothing but a sort of self help feel good character building manual. Their sole focus is on the dunya.

God to them is just a conceptual symbolic principle. I mean, you can hear Jordan Peterson, for example, who sees God as a sort of archetype of the highest good or what have you. It's purely, conceptual. That makes an individual's relationship to God really just a relationship with themself. This is why in my opinion the West is flooded in fact with self help books and life coaches and so on, because religion to them is just another version of that.

And it doesn't even have exclusivity in terms of being the sole source of guidance for them. I mean, course, as time has worn on, religion for them has become entirely sidelined. Even as a self help tool, it can't compete in the market, the self help market. I mean, you see, you hear how they use the word god, that they the the word god is used in the West interchangeably with profanity, even the name Jesus, literally spoken like a curse word. So clearly, even for those who who don't claim to be atheist, they are atheistic in their thinking actually.

And again, this is because of their approach to religion. Even the so called religious among them adhere essentially to a godless religion. All of this reduces religion. It belittles religion, and it removes from religion any deeper meaning or consequence. Like with everything else in the West, religion is just a narrative to them, and they can ply it as they like.

They can bend it. They can invoke it or discard it to suit their purposes. In the Western conception of religion, it's about your relationship to other people, your interactions, and your behavior towards others. It's all dunya. It's creation to creation into relation, not creation to creator, which essentially takes Allah, takes God out of the equation.

It takes the out of the equation. It takes the before and the after out of the equation. What came before this life and what is to follow this life. It's not part of their calculation because again, in their minds, this life is all there is, even for religious people, so called. Now obviously for Muslims, the looms large in our thinking.

And of course, religion for us constitutes a relationship between creation and creator. In fact, for us, it's fair to say that this is the only relationship we truly believe in. The only relationship that truly exists for a person is his or her relationship to Allah and all their interactions with creation are governed by this relationship. They manifest their relationship to the creator by means of their interactions with his creation. Everything we do to one degree or another is just us communicating with Allah expressing our relationship to Allah in that he determines how we interact.

Creation does not determine how we interact. Allah determines how we interact. And that's with the conscious knowledge that Allah is real, not conceptual. And that the future exists, and a future exists in which we will stand before him and be judged. Where we position the dunya in our thinking differs or should differ from Westerners.

We understand that our souls existed before the creation of this world and before our births into this world. And we understand that our souls will continue to exist for a period of time in the grave, in the and will exist during the period of the day of judgment, and will then exist in the in the hereafter. And between all of these periods of our existence, our time in the dunya is the briefest period. The life of this world is the shortest part of our total existence. And we're only in it for a brief moment just for the purpose of demonstrating our recognition and our servitude to Allah.

The dunya, the meaning of this dunya is contextualized by what came before and what will come after. And if you miss this context, you will never understand the world or your life in it. But when we are inundated and when we are surrounded by people and by messages that convey mentality that there is nothing but this worldly life, some of that type of thinking can seep through into our own perspectives. And you know, we see this in many of our countries, especially in the countries that were specifically colonized by the West, like the like France and The UK and so on. If a student is not doing well in say the sciences, if they're not performing well academically, you know, if their parents have sort of given up the hope that they're gonna become a doctor or a pharmacist or an architect or what have you, then they will the parents will console themselves by directing their their their son or their daughter towards Islamic studies.

As if something like Sharia is somehow a lower tier of knowledge. You can imagine the the the the repercussions of this approach. If this approach is being taken to Islamic knowledge on a societal level, not only do you end up getting people with subpar intellectual and academic discipline and subpar academic capabilities, those people becoming religious teachers, which then leads to poor educational standards overall in religious studies studies, and it also means lower standards of religious understanding in the society as a result of that. But it also means that it just perpetuates a sort of self fulfilling cycle of overall dismissiveness and marginalization of religious knowledge as relevant, as useful, as vital, as crucial for the society. And then of course, this this belittling of Islamic knowledge, also manifests in that you will now have an attitude developed in the society that basically anyone can speak about religion.

This is taking a very western approach to the religion, and it's absolutely destructive and undermining for us. Because if they can deprive us of our appreciation for our understanding of Islam, deprive us of knowledge by making us belittle knowledge, by making us not value and appreciate knowledge, then they have deprived us of everything, and we will be even more conquered than if our homes were all surrounded by American marines. The most important, the most crucial resource that the colonizers can steal from us is our knowledge of Islam, and that begins by stealing our appreciation for that knowledge. Just like the way they make people in the so called developing world think that their minerals and their spices and their rare earths and and and so forth are of no value. They make us think that Islamic knowledge has no value.

And that's how they steal from us the very wealth that we need to secure our liberation. Our people are uneducated about our own past, about our own history. I mean, are scholars from our history whose names have been forgotten, but whose minds surpassed every famous western thinker that you've ever heard of. I mean, literally, there were judges in Fukaha in little provinces in the Muslim lands who worked out legal theories and arguments that would make William Blackstone or Oliver Wendell Holmes look like toddlers. And these were the lesser minds of our ummah.

Wallahi, you are being severely deprived of treasures that can enrich your life and your understanding of reality, and which can empower your mind in every other field of study that you might pursue. Because religion is not what the West thinks it is. It is existence explained to us by the creator of existence, which gives us a holistic comprehension, not a compartmentalized comprehension, and it enables us to see the connections and the interrelations and the patterns that intersect throughout reality. It clarifies for us our role in the world, what and why we are, who made us, and who we belong to, and to whom we will be returned. Understanding Islam and not understanding Islam is literally like the difference between daylight and pitch darkness.

And when you reduce Islam to what the West reduces their so called religion to or their so called spirituality to, then you are reducing daylight to a 15 watt light bulb. All you're doing is dimming the light. If you keep going along that path, eventually you won't even be able to see yourself anymore.