Qur'anic Psychological Decolonisation | Episode 6

With regards to the ways that, Western thinking has sometimes, maybe crept into our own thinking and our own understanding of, specifically, of religion. We should talk about certain concepts in Islam that can often be misunderstood or approached incorrectly because we look at them from a Western intellectual framework. Take for example, the concept of the Muslim being the best ummah ever raised among mankind. I think there's a well, there can be some confusion about this, and this is because of the confusion of Westerners about morality. They set up morality as a zero sum game, and I think that that's because they want to believe that it's not really possible and it's not really practical to be moral.

Because if it is not possible and it's not practical to be moral, then you're more or less exonerated or excused from not even trying. They set up their archetype of pure morality. Again, going back to Jordan Peterson for example. They set up the embodiment of morality, the ideal moral role model as the Christian conception of a deified Jesus, which of course is unobtainable because you tell yourself that he's God or he's the son of God. Well, obviously, you can't be as moral as God.

You can't be as sinless and as perfect as God or son of God or what have you. So you've already given yourself the excuse to fail because you fixed morality at an inhuman level of perfection. Never mind whether or not this version of morality even makes any actual moral sense, which it doesn't, but the point is you have attributed what you deem to be the model of moral rectitude as a divine being. An unreachable standard which you have predetermined to be unreachable precisely by deifying it. The deification of Jesus essentially was just an expression of Western Kufars skepticism about morality itself, and their deep suspicion, if not their conviction that morality is not something that belongs in the realm of the real world and real world behavior.

So for example, you have Jordan Peterson again saying that the Christian Jesus is a better role model than prophet Muhammad even though the Christian Jesus is a role model that no one actually follows, that no one actually can follow. Because, you know, Peterson himself would say that that the example of Jesus is a suicidal the Christian Jesus is a suicidal self destructive manifestation of of toxic agreeableness. Nevertheless, they believe that the moral role model that they do not and cannot follow is somehow superior to the moral role model that billions of Muslims do follow and have followed for over a thousand years. What they object to actually is the idea that morality can be practical, that morality can be practiced in less than perfect conditions, that moral behavior has grades to it, that there are nuances in real world human morality whereby a a decision or an action can be more moral than another or less moral than another, that good and evil do not always constitute absolutes but exist by degrees. They don't want to think this way because they do not really want morality to enter into their calculations, only practicality.

So they don't want to consider the degrees of better and worse. They wanna pretend that there's only good and bad, and that good is always essentially only achievable by a perfect divine being. Therefore, the whole quandary of of of morality is irrelevant to human beings. We can only ever really be bad. And in fact, believing this amazingly is exactly how they think they can be saved.

They literally believe that they will achieve salvation only by believing that it is impossible to be a moral human being, and to believe that their deified Jesus is the only one who is capable of being a moral person or a moral being precisely because he was not actually human. Their whole concept of salvation is based on the idea that human beings cannot actually be moral, and that the only, truly moral human being wasn't actually a human being at all but actually God. So for them, salvation is based upon believing that they can't be good. And basically as long as you know and believe that you can't be good, well that's good enough. That's why you also find them being sort of passively aggressively, passive aggressively contemptuous of anyone who is trying to be virtuous, you know, goody two shoes, holier than thou, self righteous, sanctimonious, and so on.

They have all these derisive derogatory terms that they they use against anyone who's trying to be good. They see them as delusional, as fake, as phony. And if any tiny error or flaw in that person gets exposed, well, they'll crucify them as a hypocrite because they do not fundamentally believe in human morality, in human goodness. They deeply believe that human beings and that human nature is corrupt, and that anyone who's trying to be good is either lying to themselves or lying to everyone else. So when a person does sin or does make a mistake or yields to temptation or what have you, they'll act like this is that person's true self coming out.

That's the real you. They believe that righteousness is always a mask, and that that mask will always inevitably slip off at some point, and then they'll revel in it when it does. There's nothing that they like more than when someone who presents themselves as good and moral and decent and so on, when that person gets exposed as otherwise, or anyway, as otherwise than their twisted framework of what morality is supposed to be. To them, morality is always a con. It's always a pretense.

It's always a put on. It's always a performance. And this is especially the case when a person's morality is connected to religion in any way. They only have a degree of tolerance or acceptance for morality when it is disconnected from religion. And I think this is because that removes the obligation of morality from a person's choices.

If an irreligious person does something moral, then they think that this is more genuine. It's more genuine if it's done for arbitrary personal reasons than if it's done out of belief in God. It's done by someone who is not telling himself or herself that God expects them to be moral. And if this moral decision is essentially one a off, it's an exception to their otherwise immoral or amoral behavior, their amoral approach to the world, then that's tolerable because it upholds the basic fundamental belief that human beings are incapable of adhering to any sort of consistent morality. And when an immoral person or an amoral person chooses to do something that is moral, then they're not committing the intolerable offense of thinking that they are good or that they can be good.

They're just making a decision. So yes, they have a very zero sum mentality when it comes to morality. And the point of that is to basically deny or to preclude from possibility that people can actually be moral. They are supremely interested in poking holes in anyone's morality, in anyone's goodness, and proving that it's actually bad because it's not perfect. And if they're not able to poke any holes in someone's morality, then they'll just take a relativist approach and say basically, good and evil do not exist at all.

There is no truth. There is no falsehood. There's no right and there's no wrong. And again, all of this is primarily for the purpose of removing any obligation from people to even try to be good people, to even try to be moral. Because they have this conflation of good or moral with perfect, they conflate these things.

And since no one can be perfect, and therefore no one can ever truly be moral or good. This is a very convenient mentality to have. It's obviously a satanic mentality and it's a very very western mentality. So okay, you should never understand the the ayah that I was talking about through this lens. The ayah that declares the Muslims to be the best ummah ever raised among mankind because that's not how we ever understood it.

That's not how the Muslims ever understood this ayah. The best here doesn't mean perfect. It means the best relative to all others, better than all others, and that's what the Muslims are, and that is factually undeniable, historically undeniable. Compare and contrast our ummah with any other nation, any other group of people, any other grouping of human beings, and the Muslims are unquestionably better. The ayah itself tells us why.

We enjoin good and forbid evil, and we do. Allah didn't say that we are the best because we're sinless. He didn't say we're best because we never make any mistakes or because we don't have any flaws or because we don't do wrong sometimes. No. We enjoin good and we forbid evil, and we do that more than anyone else on earth, and we do that more than anyone else in the history of mankind.

We do it so much we're known for it. That's why everyone in the world who's non Muslim thinks that we are so strict and so rigid. Even the negative depictions that they have of us are basically derived from their recognition and their discomfort about how much we enjoin good and forbid evil. So the best here means as compared to everyone else. They want to pretend and maybe they want to make us believe that it's supposed to mean perfect, And they think that anything that falls short of being perfect, they think that it's all the same.

All imperfections, are the same. There are no degrees to it. There's no levels. No differences of severity or seriousness. So they'll say something like, oh, the Muslims did this and that and the other.

They fought wars. They took over lands. They had slavery and what have you. Everyone is all the same. We all did the same things.

We all are are just as bad as each other. No one is better than anyone else. Well, this is a fallacy. Yes. We fought wars, but not like you did.

Yes. We took over lands, but not like you did. And the effect wasn't like the effect that yours, taking over lands had. And no, by no stretch of the imagination was slavery in the Muslim world in any way remotely like the chattel slavery in the vicious racist subjugation of you people. There's no comparison.

I mean, okay, you can say slavery is slavery, but no, it isn't. That's not a serious statement. That's not a serious mentality. War is war. No, it isn't.

You're not serious if you think that way. I mean, is like, Zionist propaganda, the same way that they pretend, that Hamas is like the IDF or that Assam rockets fired into an empty plot of land inside of Israel is the same thing as Israelis obliterating entire city blocks and committing genocide against the whole population. Now, there's no equivalence here. You're lying if you pretend that there's any equivalence whatsoever. There isn't even equivalence between the Israelis attacking the Iranian embassy in Syria and killing people, and the Iranians conducting a a retaliatory strike, a precision strike against a military base in Israel with no casualties.

There's no equivalence there. Those actions are not the same. And just because you you you use the same word for those two actions doesn't make them the same act in terms of character, in terms of severity, or in terms of morality. It's like the difference between aggression and defense. Whatever is done in defense is not the same morally as the aggression that you are defending against.

But that would be complete moral lunacy if you think like that. No. There are grades and there are degrees. Just like say the Al Al Kitab are better than Musharqeen, and the Musharqeen are better than the atheists, and the Muslims are better than the lot of them. Just like how the Muslims wanted the Romans to defeat the Persians because they were at Al Kitab at that time, and the Persians, were fire worshippers and Mushriqin.

There are ranks and there are levels. Some things are better and some things are worse. Actions can be better or worse. People can be better or worse. Someone who steals is better than a serial killer.

Even if they're both criminals, they're not the same. It's an incredibly dangerous way to look at things when you look at morality this way. And this is not the way that we as Muslims have ever looked at it. See, Shaitan wants you to believe and wants you to feel that there's no point in trying to do something moral if it's not going to result in perfect outcomes, in perfectly moral outcomes. This is basically how he can encourage you to not care about trying to be good or trying to be moral by confusing you with this conflation of morality with perfection, and by making you believe that all imperfections are all equally bad and equally immoral.

No. So the Kufar, the Western Kufar, they'll pretend that their colonization, their imperialism was no different and is no different than anyone else. And they'll say that what the Muslims did is the same as what the West did and is doing because, you know, our empire expanded and their empire expanded, same saying. This is dishonest. And they're just trying to, deny how uniquely and distinctly violent, cruel, barbaric and evil their actions were and are.

And they do this all the time, like saying for example that there's no difference between whether if China or Russia have a dominant influence over Africa or if the West does. Everyone's the same. Power always operates the same way with the same viciousness and the same inhumanity except no. No. It doesn't.

They're trying to minimize and excuse their savagery, trying to evade responsibility for it by saying everyone does it, but everyone does not do it. And most certainly, the Muslims did not do it, do not do it, and have not done it. But in fact, no one has done it. No one has done it, not like the West. And this is how they respond, to legitimate criticisms over their actions, not by defending those actions, but by using this same type of argument.

They say, you're no better. You've done wrong things too. Well, that's not an argument. And it's especially not an argument when the wrong things, that they're pointing to in someone else pale in comparison to the wrong things that they've done. But this is what I'm talking about.

This idea that anything and everything short of perfection is equal, that all wrongs are identically bad. And this is the type of argument, this is the type of thinking that they will try to put in your head when you think about the ayah about the Muslims being the best ummah. They may they may point out or they might try to make you look for examples where the Muslims have maybe committed wrongs, maybe fallen short, they may have abused their power or what have you. And that mentality of false equivalence might make you doubt that this ayah is true, or it might make you think that that ayah was only true at the time of the prophet but that Muslims today do not qualify for that characterization as the best. But know, that ayah applies to the Muslims then and now and forever.

The appearance of flaws and imperfections, the existence of mistakes, or even the existence of crimes in our history or in our present does not invalidate the reality that we were, are, and always will be the best ummah raised among mankind. And that's partly because of how good we are, yes. And it's partly because of how much better we are by comparison to others. It's a statement as much about others as it is about us. I mean, how can you compare really an ummah that enjoins good and forbids evil to a people who don't even believe that good and evil exist?

SubhanAllah, is on our tongues continuously as Muslims in our greetings before we eat, after we eat, when we suffer a setback, when we suffer a calamity, and when things go well, always, no matter what, the Muslims make remembrance of Allah easily more than any other people on earth. We enjoin good so much that we even annoy each other with it. And even when we do wrong, the Muslims never pretend that it isn't wrong. We don't try to make the haram halal. When we do something haram, we admit it and we make toba for it.

We make istighfar. We don't try to do all sorts of mental and moral gymnastics to make it seem like it's not wrong. There's nobody like us. There's nobody like the Muslims. Wallahi.

And let me say something here about superiority with regards to the superiority of this ummah. Again, first of all, it just means superior or better than what is otherwise available. It doesn't mean perfect and it doesn't mean without flaws, it just means more perfect and with fewer flaws than everyone else. And yes, that is a fact about this ummah. But also very importantly, the superiority of the Muslim ummah is not exclusionary.

It's not based on any immutable characteristics like race or color or what have you. It's based on belief. It's based on values. It's based on understanding, and it's based on practice. Meaning, it is open to anyone.

Anyone can become a Muslim and become part of this superior ummah, and that's exactly what we want. That's exactly what we teach and what we invite people to do. We're not about trying to lord it over anyone that we're better. We're trying to bring you in. We're trying to lift you up.

We're trying to make you better. That's what makes us more happy than anything. And that too is from the superior qualities of this ummah. We don't wanna impose our supremacy on anyone. We want everyone to join us in it, to improve themselves.

That's why I'm telling you, if we accept even a little bit that our ummah is not the best ummah, then that would mean concealing goodness and misleading people. It would mean letting people believe that a wrong way of thinking, a wrong way of being is somehow the same as the right way of living. Well, you can't help people that way. You can't elevate people that way. If you're acting like above and below are the same thing, that up and down are the same thing, that better and worse are the same thing, then that's the same as telling people that their improvement and their advancement don't matter because you don't want to tell them how to be better.

That's an incredibly callous way of dealing with people. That's abandoning them to confusion and darkness. No. You have to identify what is better. You have to distinguish.

You have to affirm what is better from what is worse. And part of doing that is yes, affirming that the Muslims are indeed the best ummah ever raised among mankind.