The Need for Qur'anic Psychological Decolonisation

And so we've seen that there was a sort of a mastery of of violence and brutality by, taking the essence of what made Europe the forefather of the dark ages and and and then their children in The United States took that inheritance and reinvested it back to pay it forward many times over through its own version of greed, white supremacy, and psychopathic violence. So we see the heights of that actualizing the, you know, quote, unquote, modern world, but I'd like to ask you to expand upon the factors from those components that actually kind of lean and lend itself to the colonized mindset. So we're not them, but we're we're of them. What would you say are the components from the past and in the present that lends itself to the colonized mindsets of of of Muslims?

I mean, there's no way to ignore the the the actual history of colonialism in the Muslim world. You know, generation upon generation of Muslims grew up, in colonized societies. And as for, western Muslims, the Muslims in the West, who are the majority of those would be immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants. So they grew up in colonizer society, whether it's in Europe or in The United States. They're in a weird position because they they're they're they're in a colonizer society, but they're the children of colonized people.

And they're immersed in the West in that, you can say, globally dominant so called culture. So Western Muslims and again, I'm I'm sort of working off of the assumption that when we talk about Western Muslims, we're talking about generally Arab African and Asian Muslims who immigrated to the West, even if they're first or second generation or whatever, because that's that is the majority of Muslims who were there. So they are they're coming from colonized cultures living in the colonizer society now. So Western Muslims have a a a very strange combination. This is what I've noticed, and I wasn't really sensitive to it when I was living in the West, which isn't unusual.

They have this strange combination of having that western superiority complex combined with the inferior inferiority complex of colonized Muslims or colonized people generally. And both of those complexes, at least I'm I'm maybe I'm I'm more sensitive to more sensitive to it now because I'm living in the Muslim world. I noticed that both of those complexes tend to get directed against the Muslim world from the West, from Muslims in the West. It gets directed against the Muslim world, and to some extent, against Islam itself, and that they they have a this is why you see some very often you see them wanting to make Islam compatible with the West, they want to sort of westernize Islam, and they in in my opinion, they tend to look down on the Muslim world, and look down on Muslims in the Muslim world, and they they they accept the idea that Islam needs to change somehow or needs to reform somehow, or that there is a they they it it becomes very important to them to prove that Islam can be so on so so called modern. They wanna prove that it that the, criticisms by the West of Islam, which is that they generally take one or another form of saying that Islam is not compatible with modernity, and they they wanna prove that it is compatible with modernity.

So they've already accepted the framework, they've already accepted the the terminology, they've already accepted all of the presumptive conceptual frameworks of the West, and then they apply it to Islam. So there there's a there's a problem that they end up looking at Islam almost the same way that what we would call Islamophobes look at Islam. And you as I said, you can't you can't divorce that from the history that brought it about. You know? You can't when when when we're talking about people who are the the children or grandchildren or what have you of Muslims who are coming from colonized countries, they're impacted by their parents' assumptions and their parents' desire to assimilate or their own desire to assimilate if they're, you know, if they have themselves if they're recent immigrants, one of the key strategies that the colonizers used when they came to the Muslim world or in in into any part of the world that they went to, they they understood that that that you couldn't colonize people, couldn't dominate people, you couldn't subjugate people exclusively through violence, exclusively through physical or military power, and not even exclusively through economic power.

You had to colonize their minds. You had to psychologically dominate them. And for for Muslims, and I think it's probably true for colonized people anywhere in the world, but it's very important for Muslims that one of the things that they tried to do with the Muslims and successfully did to one extent or another was to cut us off from our history, to cut us off from our traditions, to cut us off from our customs, and of course, most importantly, to cut us off from our knowledge of religion, knowledge of Islam. In most of the Muslim countries that were that that are non Arab countries, like in Asia and in and in Africa, they alienated people from the Arabic language so that they could cut them off from the Quran and cut them off from Islamic realm. And of course, they had to do that because they wanted they wanted to remove that that history and that knowledge and that understanding because they wanted to replace it.

And without erasing it from people's minds, there's no way that you could ever replace it because of because of the power of Islam and the truth of Islam. They needed to they needed to erase it in order to replace it because it can't compete with it. So they had to try to cut us off from our knowledge of Islam in terms of a genuine knowledge of Islam and Islam not just being a sort of a tradition and a sort of a a shallow identity or superficial identity. And you know know, you Allah tells us repeatedly to to learn from history. He tell he tells us repeatedly in the Quran to learn the stories of the people of the past, and that includes the good and the bad of history, not just the stories.

I mean, when when we talk about it, usually, we talk about the stories of the of the of a of a that was destroyed so that we can learn the lesson from that. But but we're every time we're reading the stories of the prophets and the and the and the of the past, that's also learning from our history, from the history of the believers so that we can we can understand where we stand in the continuum of history, where we as believers stand in the continuum of history along with the believers who followed the prophets before. That there's a continuum of history of belief. There's a continuum of believers throughout history. And when you when you alienate us from from our knowledge of that history, then we don't know where we stand.

You know? We get disconnected from all of that. All we would learn about is their history, the colonizers' history. We would learn about their history, we would learn about their present, and that being the case, we could only imagine a future that belonged to them. It's it's it's a it's a whole society that's based on the idea that that human beings can understand reality just by explaining reality to each other.

They get to explain to each other what reality is. So it's fundamentally cut off, from actual truth. It's cut off from the source of truth, Allah and Wahi. They've literally turned their backs on the truth, on truth, capital t truth, and they just fabricate conjectures because that's what they want to do. They just want theories upon theories because they don't want they don't actually even want to live in a world where there is truth.

That's that's that's at the core of individualism, if you think about it. The, you know, Western individualism. It's just the sacralization of subjectivity. It's the sacralization of subjectivity. You know, and and now it's it's very clear when you when you see these people in the West now talking when no one no one even talks about truth anymore.

They talk about my truth and your truth. You know, this this individualization of truth and reality as if there isn't a reality, there isn't a truth, you know. So I mean, in terms of understanding how we got here, the the history is fairly clear of colonization and how it works and how it the modus operandi of colonization. And I think that we just have we we have suffered the impact of that, and we're continuing to suffer suffer the impact of that. And trying trying to disentangle ourselves from it is very it's a very complex task.

And then it's as I said, it's exacerbated by the fact that, you know, Muslims who live in the West live in the West, and they were they were raised in the West, and they grew up in the West. And so as as I say, they have a to a certain extent, they have a colonizer mindset themselves while being from historically colonized people.

It's a very astute analysis as Muslims, even as reverts ourselves, to different, completely different tracks in how we got here. We inherit a spiritual tradition. We inherit a spiritual tradition that transcends our ethnic origin, that transcends our nationality, and and transcends, you know, with reversion, reverting back to the fitra and converting from a belief system of of disbelief to capital t truths like you had mentioned. Whenever we find ourselves within the fold of Islam and we become united through these bonds of imman, it it unshackles something within us, and and that is a very unique path and a very unique journey. But as you astutely pointed out from a psycho spiritual and a spiritual sociological design, you do have these first and second generation Muslims who are are the byproduct of grandparents and great grandparents or in some instance their own parents, depending on their age, where they did come from those colonized parts of the world, and they only knew the colonizers' revisionist history, and they only understood that life can exist a certain type of way.

And as as you also astutely pointed out, they then, you know, force that worldview of that sort of pagan mythologicalization of history onto their own Islamic tradition. So now they've severed the the spiritual inheritance and replaced it with a material one when the inheritance of the religion was always meant to transcend something so so fragile. And as you've said, Allah mentions throughout the Quran, like, chapter three verse a 137. This is the way that Allah had dealt with the people who had come before. So so travel to the to the earth and and see the way that Allah dealt with those who denied this supreme reality.

Again and again, these ayats come in the Quran for us to go and look and see what happened to all those people who came before that that had that spiritual denial, kufra, essentially, suppression of that that grand reality. And when you said that, you made me think of of two things, if I may add, with with your permission. The first is one of I mean, it's the prototypical case study in the Koran of what a spiritually colonized mindset inevitably looks like. Mhmm. And, you know, being an African American in The United States who converted to Islam and whose family tradition comes from that to being mixed with Native Americans and African Americans and seeing the generational trauma from both sides, I think often about the parallels Allah had, you know, essentially sealed in revelation for all time in the example of Bani Israel.

Mhmm. Four hundred years they were enslaved. Four hundred years they were under the tyranny of Fiddah A'am. And, of course, like, you know, your video, you talk about coming out of the house of Fiddah A'am. Musa was able to break away from that through revelation and and sought to also bring that to his people through revelation, through Islam.

And, of course, Fani'am pushed back against that, and, of course, the Egyptians of that time pushed back against that. But what one of the things that gets undersold in that story is that many Israel pushed back against that. That's, you know, in a lot of ways, the forty years, the the scholars of Tafsir and the scholars of history say that it took Musa to get Dawah to call Fir'am to let them go. It was one side that conversation with Firaham, but one side that conversation with these people who for four hundred years had only ever known this. Mhmm.

And you can see the height in their only knowing that worldview in the story of Ahl Bakram, the story of the people of the cow in Surah Al Bukr chapter two verse 67. After they've been freed, they were tested with killing a cow. And and the person who just reads this, you know, I remember as a as a Muslim early on when when I first converted in that that at this point, it feels like a lifetime ago, but have been able to memorize Quran and study knowledge and formally and very, gracious and generous scholars. May Allah bless and preserve them all. I mean, they you read that you start you open the Quran like you open any other book early on and you see the opening, Fatiha, and then you see Batra.

And what is it like, how? What is that? You know? And but it's a story that starts at the sixty seventh chapter and it's a very short story compared to the the size of this mountain of of a surah. Right?

And it's a story that really highlights that colonized mindset that Bani Israel had. It's a story that really highlights that whenever they were committed by Allah, kill the cow. They pushed back against that. And when you're reading it, you're like, why don't they just kill the cow? Well, historically, cows were sacred in Egypt.

And historically, the Egyptians from their paganistic belief systems, they honored and they venerated cows and bulls. And so the children of Israel had inherited that perception that cows are sacred. So they didn't wanna just do it, and that's why they were so and that's also why later on, whenever they were tested again, when Musa was receiving revelation, the first thing they turned back to was worshiping cows. Right. And so that you thought the twentieth chapter of the Quran.

So you could see how if we don't kill our proverbial cows, then the past is going to inevitably haunt our present, and and and it will get in the way of us actualizing our our spiritual identity. So that's the first thought that I had. And the second is Allah tells us in in chapter 14 verse number one. Allah had revealed this book, the Quran, in order to take people, humanity, from darkness into light, with their fashioner, cherisher, and sustainer's permission, to the path of the unconquerable in mighty power and the absolutely praiseworthy. So from Islam's inception, with the advent of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, seventh century CE, Islam literally came in the heart of historically what we call the dark angels.

It was a light in the middle of darkness. And Allah in the Quran, from start to finish, the word is is in the Quran about 23 times. Or or it's never singular. It's always Plural.

Yeah.

Darknesses. And but it's always translated as darkness as if it's one, but darkness this darkness is is multifaceted. It's multilayered. It's manifold.

And there's many forms.

From, you know, the Justinian plague in the in the May because of the refusal to clean their cells, you know, properly to the disgusting funeral system to the inception of that paywall of learning long before the one the the paywall of learning that we know today, that dark ages ran from fourth century CE to eleventh century CE. And in the hearts of that seventh century CE is when the poor animals are built as a light to remove those layers of darknesses. And within a hundred and fifty years of the advent of Islam comes the first university, comes the influence of Arabic scholarship to the point where we see the influence of that in the West to this day with the fact that when people reach the heights of academic achievement, they wear doves and kufis with flattened caps, the mortar board that the Muslims used to use to put the Quran on top of it to show that the heights of all knowledge is the word of God as was pointed out by pointed out by John Goody in his 2003 work Islam in Europe and the influence of Islam on Europeans to that which inevitably laid the groundwork for their so called renaissance age, where they stopped finally burning witches for for trying to make people healthy and imprisoning thinkers like Galileo Galilee for just looking up at the sky and looking at what Allah told people to do in the Quran the entire time.

So now, you know, from that past to this present, we live in an era where the dulamat, it it looks different, but it is just as multilayered, just as just as manifold, just as multifaceted as it was before, but the same light that took men and women in the desert out of layers of darkness into that light should be the forerunners of every science that we benefit from today and created the level of genius that we cannot even replicate today from the and the and the way that their minds work, the the preservers of this knowledge. You know, our darkness is a different strand today, but it is the byproduct of the darknesses that came before. You know, doctor Vivek Murphy, the The United States surgeon general, last spring, he announced a loneliness epidemic. Loneliness epidemic. He you know, look it up.

He has an 80 plus page research paper to talk about the epidemic of loneliness in The United States. Can you imagine people in the Muslim world, people in the global South talking about feeling lonely? The way that The United States has reached a point where it's an epidemic. Fifty percent of all Americans, as per his research, feel lonely in the social media age with high class operant conditioning ruining the self image and attention span of everyone who thinks that they are thinking, the rampant hypocrisy of the inherited eugenic ethics of the old white men who lived and died and fathered the bastard thoughts of the ontology, ethical egoism, more relativism to Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Edward Renee's propaganda machine. So that light of the Quran, that it can still peel away those layers today, which which actually leads me to my next question, Imam.

I can see our chat is is also engaging as well. We will have a moment, inshallah, where where we will put it back in the hands of our attendees. But I just wanna do a a quick follow-up question from Ramana, if you if you don't mind, inshallah. The components of that secularization and and hedonism on a on a macro scale being a part of what allows for the sort of colonized mindset in the world that we live in today despite all of our advancements in modernity is ethnically ethically, economically, and explicitly complicit to the genocide that we see happening. And we ask Allah to remove that from our beloved brothers and sisters sooner than soon, faster than fast with ease upon ease Allah.

On a macro scale, that secular, hedonistic, colonized mindset has allowed for people to be desensitized to the point where we find ourselves here today. But then on a micro scale, we can see that individuals are sedated. They're pacified. They're entitled. They're largely unlearned in society, and they're content with the whole of the law being do without wilt or Liber al Belligus, as Alastair Crowley mentioned in his teaching of teachings of the lemma in his book of the law written in nineteen o four, which was inherited by every movie industry, every music industry in the West, and they perpetuated it from nineteen o four to to 2014 and YOLO and, you know, you only live once in this type of mindset that that people are content with today.

So we see a world that has celebrated the suffering of the connection between the creation and the creation. So I want to ask you, Usavana, from your perspective, what would you say are those key components that reinforce secularization and hedonism? And and what examples would you give for those macro societal elements and those micro individual elements that cause so many to kinda double down on rejecting spirituality, Double down on rejecting the divine as an answer to the things that we see in our life and and life's problems and and in society's problems.

Well, you know, you don't really you don't you don't actually find as much as they wanna talk about it, you don't actually find them rejecting spirituality. They reject very specifically. They they they reject they reject any rules being dictated to them by Allah by their creator. But do you find that that I can't remember what the what the the stat was, but there's a very high percentage of atheists who are incredibly superstitious and who are and who believe in things like the horoscopes and zodiac and ghosts and whatever whatever what what have you and aliens and everything. They believe in all sorts of strange, you know, psychic powers and whatnot, tarot cards and what have you, Ouija boards, everything.

So they believe in all sorts of things in the in the and they and they and and even even you see how how they talk these the these the transgender types who say, you know, I feel like a woman in a man's body or I feel like a man in a woman's body means my soul. I feel that I have the soul of a woman. So now you're believing in souls. So you you you you still incorporate the language of religion, you still incorporate the language of spirituality and and spiritual concepts, but you just don't want there to be any rules. You want it to be as I said, everything is subjective.

You you have sacralized individual subjectivity. So it's no wonder you're lonely. You know, it's no wonder. You you you've sacralized the individual, which is just doing nothing but make making sure that you can never get along with anybody, that you can't even get along with each other because you're and and each person now, because there's because there's the the reality of the power dynamics of society, some subjectivities are more influential than others, but you'll still have your own, and you still as an individual you're still going to hold on to your own, but then you're just like a pinball machine bouncing from one subjectivity to another in the society that's influential while still trying to hold on to your own, and there's no universal, There's no standard. There's no uniform version of reality.

There's no uniform truth. As I said, there's no truth with a capital t. It's everyone's their own individual truth. But your own individual truth in in terms of its power and in terms of your ability to rely upon it and to hold on to it depends upon your own standing in society. Because this is this is where you get into what's the real core of the problem, which is slavery to the creation instead of slavery to the creator.

So when it's and and this is this is the whole point. This is this goes back again to what they had to do with colonization. They had to make us they had to cut us off from our understanding of religion so that essentially, so that they could cut us off from Allah so that they could replace Allah with themselves. The colonizers could replace Allah to explain reality to us, to explain where we belong, in society, what the world means, what it's for, what's the purpose of life, what's our role in society, meaning what's our role, vis a vis the authorities, vis a vis the officials, a vis the colonizers, our slavery position towards them, our enslavement, our servitude to the colonizers. So when you when you when you are in slavery to the creator, obviously, this is empowering.

This is empowering for you because no one can tell you what to do except Allah is is been been mentioned many times, is a revolutionary statement that no one has authority over any individual except Allah and that in and that's from the king to the peasant. Everyone has to obey Allah. When you're in slavery, obviously, when you're in slavery to the to the creation, to anyone among creation, this is profoundly disempowering. So it it it leaves you completely lost. Like I said, you're battered in in in the West.

If you're just a normal average person, you're not a you're not a mover and shaker, you know, you're not someone who who decides what the narrative is. You're someone who is who is subjected to the popular narrative, whatever the popular narrative may be for whatever, basically monetary reason that that narrative is popular, is made popular, is is forced, upon the population, the fabrication or manufacture of the consent or the manufacture of the popularity of a position is almost exclusively and always for monetary reasons. And you are subjected to that, like I said, like a like a a ball in a pinball machine. You're just battered from one subjectivity to another, one version of reality to another, one version of reality and one version of morality that that that is determined for you while you're telling yourself what an individual you are. But you don't actually you you you don't actually get to decide even what you believe in.

And in that anarchy, in that chaos of a society, so called, the only thing that that an individual has left is to service their own desires and their own whims, and that's their only source of relief. That's their only source of gratification because because they they they they have been again cut off from any understanding of actually what's the purpose of life, what's the purpose of their life, and what the truth is. They have adopted again as as I've talked about in all of the I think I've pretty much talked about it in all of the Toranic psychological decolonization videos so far. When I talk about the origins of the West's particular brand of kufr with regards especially to their violence, and their it it manifests so much in materialism and the competition for material resources. And that that is essentially exclusively the primary function of life to acquire and accumulate material resources.

And whatever means you use to achieve that, those are by definition good, and by definition right. And that that's actually the only truth, is that whatever enables you to accumulate material resources, then that is a true thing and a good thing and a right thing and a moral thing. And the the only the only wrong or immoral or thing basically is to be poor. This is on this is this ends up being both on a micro level and on a macro level. I don't really make a difference because the the the society on a large scale, like, say, we we were talking earlier, you and I, about the the the system in the West, the the the economic system and the ruling system in the West is like a plutocracy, means rule by the rich.

But the truth is that they never had anything else in the West. This isn't something new in America or in Europe or wherever else. The truth is they never had anything else but rule by the rich. The situation in the West hasn't deteriorated. You know, it hasn't gone down.

It's not that it's not that they once had some other form of government or some other form of rule. It's always been ruled by the rich. They haven't devolved. They just never evolved. When you were talking about the dark ages, they point to that period as the dark ages so that they can pretend that they're not in it anymore.

They they designate a certain period in their history as being the dark ages so that they can imply that they're not in it anymore. That now now they're in the, as they say, the enlightened period. But I don't see any evidence of that. You know, the the the West is a plutocracy. It's ruled by the rich, and that's not actually something that's unique.

It's not particularly unique, to the West that there is ruled by the rich. It's not it's not that as I said, it's not that they had a so called democratic system or rule by the, you know, of foreign by the people and so on. And then it has now devolved because of what I what what I talk about, the owners and controllers of global financialized capital and so on. It hasn't devolved. It hasn't deteriorated.

The only thing that has deteriorated, is the facade, of democracy, the charade of democracy, because that's all it ever was. You know, when I talk about the owners and controllers of global financialized capital, I talk about in the in the context of because the the reality is that there never there never was any other ruling system in the West, but there's also never really been any other ruling system anywhere ever in any country, in any society, even in the Muslim world. The rich have disproportionate power. They always have and they always will. There's no way around that.

But the unique thing about the West is that they pretend otherwise, and they mislead their own people into believing that this isn't, the ruling system in their countries, that the rich that rule by the rich is not the system that they have. They pretend and they mislead their people into believing that. But rule by the rich in and of itself isn't a bad thing or a corrupt system as long as you have some sort of regulation and responsibility that is imposed and enforced, upon whoever is making decisions in the society. But in order to do that you have to actually acknowledge that that is your system. You have to acknowledge the reality of the disproportionate power that the wealthy have.

You have to recognize and acknowledge that this is the reality of your society. And when you pretend that that ruling system is somehow that that that that the ruling system in your society is somehow separate or or or partitioned off from the richest and most influential people in your society, and you pretend that you have a democratic system of foreign by the people. Well, that's just a smokescreen. It's just a smokescreen, which ensures that the rich and the powerful will not ever be regulated and will not ever be held responsible for anything because officially they aren't your rulers. So you get to instead, you get to hold some bureaucrat accountable, some elected paid politician, you know, who who come as I've said, he he comes from the private sector, and the the the means of punishment against him or the method of punishment against him is to just send him right back to the private sector, which is who he who he worked for in the first place.

But for for Muslims, we don't we don't do it this way. We don't think this way. We don't operate this way. We understand how power works. And we've understand from the beginning that the that the wealthy do have more power than the rest of us.

So there's no charade. There's no, pretense in our thinking. But the overall ruling system in Muslim society still remains Islam. The ruling system in Muslim society, I'll say it again, remains Islam, regardless of what government system we may have and regardless of the fact that the upper class do have disproportionate power. They're still Muslims.

The upper class in the Muslim world are still Muslims and they can be held to account to one to to one degree or another within the society, and that there there can be regulations and responsibilities of one form or another imposed upon them by the society simply in terms of the respect and the honor that they have or do not have in the society in terms of what the society, bestows upon them and how they see them. That's a strong element in the Muslim world to have the respect of your peers, to have the respect of the society, to have legitimacy and credibility within the society, and their power is based on their legitimacy and their credibility with the people. That's a real thing. So in that way, it's even more democratic than the so called democratic systems that they have in the West because the the the actual credibility of the the what you can call the elite in the Muslim world, whether they whether it's people who have a title like Sultan or not, or Emir or so on. The credit your credibility is bestowed upon you by the population, and it's based on your behavior, and it's based on your interactions with the community, it's based on your either service to the community or your otherwise positive interactions with the community, your displays of concern and care for the community, for example, giving charity, building schools, building masajid, building clinics, building hospitals and so on.

This is the basis of the legitimacy of the people who have power or who are elite in I I can't say all of the Muslim world, but across the Muslim world. And that's certainly more democratic. But there's no one who in the Muslim world pretends that these people aren't the movers and shakers in the society, and that actually it's these people that we vote for. But in the West, they've got this in their mind that there's this separation somehow of the most wealthy, the most elite, the richest and most powerful and influential people that somehow they have nothing to do with policy. It's just the people that we vote for.

It's this delusion that they have. They never left the dark ages. They've been in the dark ages. They're still in the dark ages, and the only way that they could ever get out of the dark ages is by accepting Islam.

Yeah. There's an unfortunate an unfortunate redefining of of what associationism, divine associationism is in our time, specifically by colonized Muslims who have sort of reduced the components of shirk to what they understand the religious institutions that are antithetical to Islam are, but it doesn't stop with just the separation of church and state. The Shaddock doesn't only exist in the church and not in state. And you can see that through the rule of the West, is plutocracy through corporatocracy. So you have these these corporate powers, these entities, and and it's been spoken about.

So now I'm becoming even more well known, you know, Vanguard and Black Rock And State Streets and these these massive power brokers, essentially, the shakers and movers of the society that then trickle down to everything that we own and utilize that then inevitably dictates rule. But because it's not seen as a religion, although it is the religion of money, it is the religion of power, it is, as you also pointed out, these people have essentially put themselves in a position where they want to be seen in an authoritative state the way that only Allah can be seen. Hence, the revolutionary statements of You can't be that for yourself. You can't do that to yourself. And even earlier when you talked about this this individualization of truth, this notion that if we just talk enough, eventually we'll figure out the truth, like Minnow Square.

Like, just use the Socratic method and just kind of babble at each other where we will lower the ceiling of knowledge to the floor of what we get, and then we will make that the new ceiling. This is a form of shirk. But again, we've as an ummah, by inheriting that colonized mindset to separation of church and state. So if it's church, it's shirk. But if it's states, then it's something else.

While when you compare that to and again, it's not the entire Muslim world, but you will see in the Muslim world that while it does not look like democracy, our our delusion of democracy, right, which is it's not democracy, which is why our world looks the way that it does. In The United States, crime is everywhere. Every eight seconds, a woman is sexually assaulted. As an African American, I'm three times more likely to be shot and killed if I'm pulled over by a cop for speeding or for any any traffic violation. I have a three times more likely chance of being killed by a police officer a house of authority with that.

Just because of my skin color, not for any other reason. What type of democracy is that? My people make up 13% of the society. Why is it that I have a and and even though we only make up a little over a tenth of the society, why is it that the likelihood likelihood of me being in prison, me being homeless, me being a felony, me having all these disadvantages is multiplied if this is something that's supposed to be for the people and if the ruling class has the best interest in mind? Now does racism not exist elsewhere?

No. But we can't we can't, you know, say, yeah. But in the Muslim world, get locked up. But but but in the Muslim world, no. No.

No. No. It's like, well, you can't take your jaded perspective sitting in a society that's so so corrupted at every level of rule and every level of social service and not and did not see well, in the Muslim world, crime does not exist like this. And you cannot say crime doesn't exist like this because people are suppressed and oppressed.

Mhmm.

While in our society, crime is rampant, wouldn't you say that that is the ultimate form of suppression and oppression when you see crime everywhere, sexual assaults everywhere, confusion everywhere, depression everywhere? It's a testament to shirk as a dynamic components of darkness From the manifesting to the channeling and the rocks and the influences and the music and the movies as their sources of hidaya, of guidance, you know, as their concept of protection, their concept of enlightenment. And and while we find so many of these people to be miserable on the face of the planet, we live in an age where they've essentially worshiped themselves in lieu of worshiping Allah. And it was shared in our chat, the verse from Surat Furqan, and there's a very similar ayah in Surah T. Jafia, the forty fifth chapter of verse number 23.

Have you seen the one who was taken for their ilah, their hawa? Have you seen the one who was taken as their god, their desires? Allah knowing this about them, they were led astray. They were led astray by Allah because of their so they've taken their knowledge and then used all of the things that they shouldn't know should be knowing to know Allah, to know other than Allah. So there's a khatim, there's a seal on their hearing, on their heart, on their sight.

And if a person is in such a state, how can they find guidance? It's it's just virtually impossible. You put yourself in this spiritual negative feedback loop where everything that you know and do is just negatively reinforced by everything that you're knowing and doing while rejecting that greater truth. It's it's such a pure potent it's like spiritual heroin, but sure, on on steroids. And it's and it's it's terrifying in in a lot of ways.

And and we ask Allah to to give us the the success, you know, and seeing that within ourselves. I do have one more question for Isab, but I've I've talked enough and and we've heard a lot from Ysav. So I wanna take a moment with your

I I just wanna say one thing one thing. I'll I'll try to I'll try to be relatively quick about it.

Take your time.

The the the whole the whole the whole supposed separation of church and state that occurred in the West doesn't have the meaning that people ascribe to it. There wasn't there there there all it was was determining who's going to be the boss. That's all. But the the basis upon which decisions were made remained the same. The decisions were made when the church when it was the church that was in charge, and when it was the secularists who were in charge, the the the process by which and the incentives for which and the purpose for which decisions were made was exactly the same, acquisition of material resources.

It was materialistic when the church was was the boss, and it's materialistic when the king is the boss, and it's materialistic when the church was the boss, and it's materialistic when the oligarchs are the boss. There's no change. There's been no evolution. All of these these these, partitions that they put in their historical so called development is fabrication. There is no change.

You haven't changed from from all the way back then until now. And if you wanna talk about what what what they have, you can say it what what they have is a theocracy. It just depends on who they say God is. They say that God is, you know, Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever. That's God because they're that's.

It's it's the one who decides what reality is and what your role in reality is and and they're the ones who can explain reality to you and what the purpose of life is and so on, as I said. And that's exactly the same as what it it doesn't matter to me if you're saying that it's a a church father or it's a businessman. It doesn't make any difference to me. It's someone who's not telling me what God actually said, and who's who's taking for himself the place of God, who's taking for himself or herself the the place of Allah and telling me from his own mind or her own mind the way that they think that life is supposed to be and what my role in what what my role is in life and what my purpose is in life, and that's just coming from their head, and it's for their own interest. And it was the same when it was a when when it was the pope, and it's the same when it's the king, and it's the same when it's the president, and it's the same when it's an oligarch.

It's it's always the same. It's just it's just as I said, when you're when when you go from just like in the ayah, you're taking your your desires, but in this case, you're taking the it's the it's the one who has the most power in society, who their desires become the god of the entire society, that everyone has to follow that. So you're you're actually having a theocratic system because you're taking as the absolute truth, the absolute arbiter of truth, whoever happens to have the most power in your society. That's the basis for it and always was. It was the basis for it, as I said, when they called it the church and when it and now, when they could say it's secular.

There's no separation. It's just a depending it's just depending on, who the boss is, but the but the actual process of ruling is exactly the same.

This is very much a mindset. Yeah. Absolutely. Chapter. Go to pharaoh.