Reply to an Indoctrinated Western Supremacist

I got this comment a few days ago on my video about the colonized liberal mind in the Muslim world, and I wanted to respond to it because I think it beautifully exemplifies the bone deep indoctrination and intellectual bankruptcy in the non Muslim West that completely cripples their capacity to understand themselves or us. So bear with me. I'm gonna read the actual comment first, and then I will respond to individual points. Liberalism is an imperialist ideology, certainly, but so is Islam. Both assert what human nature at its essence is really all about.

So who is right? Well, we can look to the earthly power wielded by the forces of liberalism and Islam for an initial answer. The fellow here making this video, me, is making two contradictory assertions. One, that the West is powerful, and two, that liberalism has wrought havoc in the West itself. What you see as chaos, we in the West see as the characteristic creative destruction of the most dynamic civilization in the history of the world.

The colonized mind is not something that first appeared in human history with the age of European exploration and colonialism. It has been a standard feature of all pre modern empires including the Islamic. It is a key part of how civilization spreads. The basic problem that Islam has is that from its very inception, its civilizational self identity was bound up with its temporal success in conquering lands for the god. Unlike Christianity, Islam has no narratives of spiritual triumph which transcends our mundane situation even in the face of total defeat in this temporal world.

Hence, it cannot adapt to a world in which it does not have the material power to express its instinctively held dominance and superiority. Unlike the West, it has no resources for self critique. Because of that, Islam has grave trouble adapting to a changing world. Rather than adapt, it rails against outsiders who have more persuasive ideas as colonizers. Where do I begin?

I mean, first off, liberalism is not the ideological export product of Western imperialism. Western imperialism has not spread democracy, liberty, freedom, or any of the other values and principles that they claim to believe in. They have aggressively undermined those values everywhere they have gone. If there is democracy, for example, in Latin America, it has only been achieved by bloody struggle against Western imperialism. If there's democracy in Africa, it's only been achieved by bloody struggle against Western imperialism.

And the same goes for Asia, and we've just lived through the Western backed overthrow of democracy in Egypt. And we had Algeria before that, and we had Iran before that. The western empire is not spreading liberalism. They are crushing liberty, freedom, democracy everywhere they go. They are spreading neoliberalism, not liberalism.

And these two ideologies couldn't be more different. And they're not spreading it by discourse and dialogue and the so called marketplace of ideas. They're spreading it through force and violence on a scale unparalleled in human history, both quantitatively and qualitatively. They're spreading it through military invasion, occupation, and intimidation, and through economic sabotage, bullying, and debt slavery. The Muslim world and the entire global South see it.

They know it. They experience it. They are suffering from it. Nobody is fooled by the propaganda. The colonized minds I was referring to are those in the Muslim world and the global South who worship the West because of its power, and they want to align themselves with it, ingratiate themselves to it, and be accepted by it.

And again, this is just like the sycophantic collaborators who cooperated and colluded with the colonizers of the past. The West is not teaching the world, certainly not the Muslim world, about the value of individual liberty or the sacredness of the individual or about the rule of law or any of the other principles that are associated with liberalism. We have to fight the West in order to establish these principles in our societies, and these are principles that we understood centuries before the enlightenment. You must have had your head buried in the amber waves of grain If you actually imagine that the West invented or discovered the concept of individual rights and civil liberties and freedom, it's absolutely a historical and ignorant. And no, Islam is not an imperialist ideology.

Islam is a religion which literally prohibits in its scripture compulsion and coercion. So then he says, we can look at the earthly power wielded by the forces of liberalism and Islam for an initial answer about who's right, Islam or the West. Well, I hate to tell you, but what you are calling liberalism has no earthly power. The people in the West are allowed to do as they please. They're allowed to fornicate.

They're allowed to drink. They're allowed to commit. They're allowed to play games about what gender is. They're allowed to indulge in absolute moral relativism precisely because they are inconsequential to those in power. Your only role in the society is to contribute to corporate profits, to be a consumer and to be a worker.

That's all. Therefore, anything else you wanna do with your life doesn't matter to anyone who matters. What you're calling liberalism is a euphemism for the complete irrelevance of the morality, the decency, or the refinement of the population because you don't matter. If your immorality and your indecency is profitable, it's approved. Nobody cares about you being a good person because you don't have any power.

And then he says, the fellow making this video is making two contradictory assertions that the West is powerful, number one. And two, that liberalism has wrought havoc in the West itself. Well, there's no contradiction here whatsoever. The power of the West has not been achieved by virtue or by the superiority of their ideas. It has been achieved through brutal savage violence, both military and economic.

And yes, again, what you call liberalism, which is actually just the complete indifference of power to the lives of the population. Yes, this has wrought havoc on the societies, and this havoc is profitable. And it helps to consolidate the power of those who possess power because the population remains marginalized, distracted, and confused, and entertained, and engaged in futile activities. And then he says, what you see as chaos, we in the West see as the characteristic creative destruction of the most dynamic civilization in the history of the world. This is a meaningless sentence that could only be uttered by someone whose entire education has been enforced cognitive dissonance through propaganda, the likes of which Stalin could have only dreamt of.

And he says the colonized mind is not something that first appeared in human history with the age of European exploration and colonialism. It has been a standard of a standard feature for all pre modern empires including the Islamic. It is a key part of how civilizations spread. Yes. A key part of how imperialism has spread has been through the collaboration of weak minded quizlings who worship power, and who will collaborate with colonizers against the best interests of their own nations.

That's true. But I'm not sure how this point gets your argument over the hill. Then he says, the basic problem that Islam has is that from its very inception, its civilizational self identity was bound up with its temporal success in conquering lands for the god. This is the tired old Islamophobic trope that Islam spread by the sword, has been debunked so many times that I don't really see the need to repeat those arguments here. But as you can see, this person is so indoctrinated, so propagandized, that they are incapable of critically, objectively understanding their own society.

They have been spoon fed a version of the West, which they have accepted hook line and sinker, full, fully swallowed the propaganda. So it's not surprising that they would feel entitled to speak about Islam and the history of Islam without ever having even taken a cursory glance at the Sira. Suffice it to say, what this person is alleging as being the source of Muslim identity is actually the exact opposite of how Muslims ever defined themselves. He says, unlike Christianity, Islam has no narrative of spiritual triumph which transcends our mundane situation even in the face of total defeat in the temporal world. Just for your own sake, the the the person who wrote this comment, just for your own sake, you have to understand how laughable that comment is to every Muslim who hears it.

We know that there will be prophets, who will come on the last day on who will have no followers whatsoever, and that will not diminish in their reward in any way. Because success in the dunya has nothing to do with how we in Islam measure success. I mean, Muslims throughout history have been renowned for our indifference to the life of this world and our circumstances in it. We've been renowned for our total focus on the Akhira, on the hereafter. This person is not talking about Islam in any shape or form.

I don't know what ideology they are talking about, but it certainly is closer much much closer to Western imperialism and obsession with the dunya, which is what we see in the West. This has no relation whatsoever to Islamic ideology, Islamic theology, Islamic aqidah, Islamic way of thinking. This has nothing to do with Muslims. I don't know who you're talking about, but it certainly isn't Muslims. And you clearly know nothing about Muslims or Islam.

Anyone who adopts the type of view that you're talking about is severely criticized in the Muslim community. Then he says, hence, it it being Islam cannot adapt to a world in which it does not have the material power to express its instinctively held dominance and superiority? Well, a world in which the Muslims do not have power is a world in which injustice, greed, oppression, moral degeneracy, materialism, and perversion run rampant and unchecked. And, yes, we cannot adapt to that. And that's not because we have an instinct for dominance.

It's because we have an instinct to repel evil. And then he says, unlike the West, Islam has no resources for self critique. Because of that, Islam has grave trouble adapting to a changing world rather than adapting to it, and it rails against outsiders who have more persuasive ideas as colonizers. Obviously, this person has no access to nor interest in discourse within the Muslim world in order for him to be able to judge to what extent we are self critical. This person knows nothing about or how Islamic scholarship is constantly adapting to the changes in the modern world.

This is just the old ignorant argument that Islam needs a reformation like Christianity and Judaism. This argument is made by people who do not understand how Islam works, how sharia works, how the how fit works. This kind this type of argument is made by people who cannot fathom the dynamism of Islamic jurisprudence and how it is constantly updating, continuously updating nonstop to keep the Sharia relevant in people's lives and responsive to the changing needs in their lives. These people are so buried in their own cultural tunnel that they can't imagine that any religion operates differently from the way theirs has operated in the past and now. As for railing against outsiders who have more persuasive ideas, I'll just repeat here that their ideas are not persuasive.

They're not new, and they're largely not even coherent. The West is not persuasive because of its ideas. The West is persuasive because it is powerful, barbaric, and cruel. It's only the weakest and most feeble minded amongst us, the most uneducated about Islam, who follow their ideas and adopt their ideas and actually think that their ideas are useful. And those who choose to do that will follow the West into its inevitable oblivion.