Qur'anic Psychological Decolonisation | Episode 5

So I've discussed at length what I believe to be the core character and the core nature of the Western psyche and its origins, and how this is has impacted their view of the world, their view of life, their view of religion, and of themselves, and of others, and how it has guided or misguided their conduct. But now we have to start talking about some of the ways that their thinking, their paradigms, their approach to life, their dunya centric mentality has negatively influenced our own mindsets. And in my opinion, one of the most important and most damaging ways that that has occurred is how it has influenced our thinking and our understanding about religion. In many ways, we have started to look at religion the same way that they look at religion. So let me just restate how they look at it.

To the West, even the when they were so called Christians, even before the prevalence of blatant atheism, because again Christianity is essentially atheistic. It's atheistic with a thin veneer of deism laid on top. But even before that, 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. Believe me.

There was nothing particularly distinct, about the morality that their religion taught them because again it was vague. And as long as you were a quote unquote good person, that's all that was important. The only thing that was ever specific in their religion was anything that had to do with obligations towards the church, the system of power at that time. But once that system of power was transferred to secular authorities, then religion just became, you know, about generally being a good person, trying to have nice qualities and so on. 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. We have adopted to a great degree this concept of religion, that religion is just a kind of moral philosophy that's supposed to make us nice people, peaceful, you know, kind, charitable people and so forth. To have, you know, good qualities.

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 kuffar who will go to Jahannam. They won't accept that because you have reduced religion. You have nothing but a sort of self help, feel good, character building manual. So if someone is nice or good or what have you, then you think they deserve Jannah. You think they deserve Jannah if you think of religion in that way.

Because the West has an atheistic approach to religion and always has. Precisely for the reasons that I've talked about in the last several sessions. 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. You know, a relationship with what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of their nature. This idea of trying to be virtuous, essentially in a in a humanistic way. You know, be your best self and all that.

That's why this is so popular in the West, this phrase. 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, of 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 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, essentially. It's all all at its core self worship, nefs worship.

And of course, all of this reduces religion. It belittles religion, and it removes from religion any deeper meaning or consequence. It's a complete denial of what religion actually is. 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.

Now, the Muslims, we have not reached that level. But as I said, there are some of their misunderstandings that have perceptively crept into our psyche, like this idea that religion exists solely for the purpose of making us good people, meaning it's strictly a dunya related matter. Improving your character, improving your morals, and so on. All of this is included in religion, but it's not the pinnacle or the ultimate purpose of religion. No.

This is basic. 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. And this is symptomatic of their obsession with this worldly life, this exclusive focus on the dunya, 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. I mean, for them, religion is basically something that is pertaining only to this life.

Because again, in their minds, this life is all there is, even for religious people, so called. Now obviously for Muslims, alhamdulillah, the akhirah 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 and 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. So to a certain extent, 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. 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. We weren't created for each other.

Creation does not exist for the sake of creation. This life is is is between parentheses in a longer sentence. 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 we can actually start looking at religion in the same way that they do, and that's what's dangerous. And another aspect of that is when we fail to appreciate the depth, and the profundity and the importance of religion, of Islam.

Because yes, we start to think of it as just another sort of moral narrative. Again, like a self help book. If you think about it this way, then you will inevitably demean the importance of study and the importance of knowledge. And you know, we see this in many of our countries, especially in the countries that were specifically colonized by the West, like 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, there can almost be an attitude of, you know, Well, if they can't excel professionally and academically, then at least they can excel in dean. And I mean, you can imagine 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 develop in the society that basically anyone can speak about religion.

Anyone can give fatawah. Anyone can interpret the Quran. Anyone can tell you what Islam says or doesn't say and so forth. Because you've already basically equated the religion to the same self help feel good moral narrative, like nothing more than a, you know, a positive affirmation Instagram quote. 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. Because it doesn't necessarily have value in their conception and their approach to life. It doesn't have a materialistic value to them. And that's how they steal from us the very wealth that we need to secure our liberation. So you see the permeation of simplistic thinking about the deen, about Islam.

You see extremism prevailing, either extreme in terms of rigidity or in terms of laxity. Either overly harsh or overly lenient. And you see vast ignorance about the history of this ummah. You know what? When when I was in school in The US, we learned about all the empires, right, throughout history.

From the Romans to the Greeks to the British, even the czars of Russia. But we never learned about the longest empire in history. We never learned about the Muslims. And to a great extent, this is even the case in the Muslim world. Our people are uneducated about our own past, about our own history, except that they maybe have, you know, heard some simplistic comic book style stories about some heroes from our past.

And they may have some very rudimentary sort of almost childlike concept of the Khilafa. As I've said, we have devalued knowledge, Islamic knowledge. The average rank and file Muslim has no appreciation for how complex fiqh is or it's to had, or about how we have one thousand four hundred years of dynamic, brilliant, indispensable jurisprudence that addressed every intricacy in life that you can imagine. Mean, there 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. These are people who vanished from history, but their minds were radiant. And the only people who know about them are people who have immersed themselves in classical study. You know, generally people who can speak Arabic or speak Turkish, read an read old Turkish script in the Arabic language, or Persian, or even in Malay. Some absolutely stunning, breathtakingly brilliant minds in the in the in the field of jurisprudence, and in the field of theology, spiritual understanding, insights and observations from 400 ago, five hundred years ago, seven hundred years ago that surpass in their logic, in their reason, in their rationality, and in their insight, Anything that you could find written by any westerner ever since the enlightenment.

Actually understanding Islam, properly valuing and respecting Islamic knowledge is the launch pad for excelling in other fields of knowledge. When you think that this deen is, I don't know, about feeling, you know, or just being good or nice or whatever. When you think that, for example, recitation or superficial reading of the Quran is just an exercise that you do to self soothe or something, You know, or when you when you think that learning the Sira or reading the Sira is just like reading fables or what have you, 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. Religion, and there is only one religion, and that's Islam. There only ever has been one religion. It articulates to us the nature of existence, past, present, and future.

It contextualizes life itself. 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. So, yes, when you take on any aspect of the western psyche into your own psyche, all you're doing is dimming the light. And you can dim that light so much until eventually, not only you don't see the world properly, but at a certain point, if you keep going along that path, eventually, you won't even be able to see yourself anymore.