Analysis, Bearing Witness & The View from Judgement Day | Shahid Bolsen

Analysis? Well, you know, I really struggle generally for myself. I've struggled to try to systematize that because I don't myself follow any defined process, any defined formula. It just takes place internally in my head. But that's obviously useless to anyone who's trying to work on their own analytical skills, which is something we're trying to help people do.

So I've tried and we've tried to try to sort of break down the process that takes place in my head, in my mind, to create things like the RPI, the the relative power index, the formula for gauging relative impact on the Muslim world, the strategic probability index, the the relative impact on the Muslim world with with regards to any event or any policy that takes place. Just to try to provide those analytical tools that reflect the internal process of analysis that runs in my mind. Because, you know, for me, first of all, I'm 54 years old, and I've been following politics and world affairs and current events and so forth ever since I was a teenager. So, obviously, there's a a pretty significant data bank in my head that already just processes patterns, makes connections, and that just sort of happens automatically. You know?

There's sort of an analytical process or analytical processes that just run-in the background in my mind all the time just as a byproduct of being alive, just as a byproduct of experiencing things. And, again, like I say, as a byproduct of having followed politics and world affairs and current events and so forth, you know, for basically forty years. So, like, when I do analysis, I'm not trying to sound smart. That is irrelevant to me, or I'm not trying to impress anyone. I'm trying to be useful.

That's all. That means that I'm trying to predict what people will do, why they're going to do it, and what the world is gonna look like after they do do it. Because that's all we're talking about. Politics is human relations. We're talking about people.

People, you you you can misunderstand that. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a nation or you're talking about an institution. You're talking about people. That's all you're talking about and human characteristics. You're talking about human motivators, human drivers, human priorities.

That's all we're talking about when it comes to politics. So if you can understand people accurately, then I think you should be able to understand politics. You just have to begin at least by you know, for one thing, you you have to make sure that you're not gonna let yourself get hypnotized by the headlines and hypnotized by the rhetoric and all the moral theater that takes place. And you can't take at face value any of the stories that people wanna tell themselves about themselves. This is true on the micro level, the individual level, on the personal level, as well as on the macro level, or the national or international level.

But the first thing that you need to know about me with regards to my personal approach to politics or analysis, you have to understand my vantage point. I analyze as if I'm already dead, as if I'm standing on the day of judgment looking back down through the timeline of history, the the timeline of the dunya, the totality of the timeline of the dunya. You look at the rise and fall of nations as if they're already written because they are. I'm not trying to be esoteric or or, you know, deep or something. It's just that this stance helps you strip the ego out of your work, out of your analytical work.

It forces you to stop, rooting for this or that outcome and start measuring realities, power, incentives, constraints, you know, consequences, and so forth. You know? So when I say analyze from the day of judgment, from judgment day, I'm describing a stance of detachment, detachment from the stakes, from having any stake or any investment in it. Because in the dunya, everyone is invested. Even the people who are claiming that they're neutral, they're invested in their career, in their pride, in their ego, in their fear, in their reputation, their ideology, their audience.

And these types of incentives are always gonna bend your perception and your interpretation. They won't necessarily make you always lie outright, but, you'll be selective about what you notice, about what you acknowledge, about what you ignore, and so forth, and how you interpret things. The judgment day stance is a mental relocation. You're not living inside the noise of this moment, of this era that we're living in, but you're looking at this moment that we're living in as one tile in a mosaic that you know already how it ends. It ends with accounting before Allah.

So you stop trying to be liked. You stop trying to be safe. You stop trying to win debates. You just wanna be correct. You wanna be correct and responsible.

You're not only asking what will happen. You're asking what is being done and what the predictable outcome is going to be. From a post dunya stance, propaganda, for example, and rationales, it's just like a fog. You acknowledge that that fog exists, but you still have to navigate through the landmarks. You have to locate the landmarks to navigate through your way through that fog, the incentives, the institutional behavior, and so forth, relatable human drivers that you can identify.

It's not mystical. It's anti self deception grounded in iman. You will answer for your words, So you better make sure that your words are true. Meaning, you're not just saying things for any reason other than because you have concluded that those things are accurate. The statements that you're making are accurate.

That's the only reason why you would say them. This is why I say that I'm bearing witness more than I'm analyzing. That's what we refer to it as. That's a very deliberate word choice because an analyst can very often just be a propagandist, but a witness is under obligation. There's a reason, as I've said before, that the word for witness is the same as the word for martyr in Arabic, Shahid.

Because to be honest, to be a truthful witness, you have to sacrifice yourself in your testimony. You remove yourself completely. You know? You remove what you think. You remove what your opinion is, what you like, what you dislike, what you approve, what you disapprove, what you want, or what you don't want.

All of that is taken out of the picture. You just tell the truth as it is. Because from the stance of the day of judgment, you are already divested from trying to win anything in the dunya. It's already over. It's already over.

Your time is already up. That's the position that you start from. And from that position, there's no reason whatsoever for you to ever try to be anything but honest. You have nothing to gain. And, you know, the term witness obviously carries different connotations.

Several meanings are in are are included in that word. Testimony, a witness giving testimony, implies that you're answerable. You're not just commenting randomly. It implies restraint because a witness can't embellish, and he has to separate what he saw from what he inferred from what he suspects. You have to be very accurate.

And being a witness implies a a degree of moral seriousness. Witnessing is tied to justice. You're present for truth, and you refuse, Insha'Allah, to cooperate with deception even when deception is fashionable and deception is safer, and deception gets rewarded in this dunya. And I think that as a witness, or if you consider yourself as a witness rather than an analyst, then I think that you will tend to care more about real human consequences of what's going on. You know, analysts can get very abstract, but witnessing keeps you grounded in reality.

You know, families, livelihoods, dignity, coercion, dispossession, loss, unfairness. You know? What people are actually going through as a result of this or that action or this or that policy. No narratives, no euphemisms, just the truth. What the actions are and what the cost is of those actions.

This is what's gonna matter on the day of judgment. So you should think about it in that way today. There's no reason why you should look at the world today any differently than you're gonna look at the world when you're standing on the day of judgment. And from this stance, it also improves your probability analysis, in my opinion, because it squeezes out the two major things that always corrupt probability analysis in my opinion, which is your own personal hopes and fears. You take all of that out of it.

See? You have to know that there are multiple layers to analysis if you're taking it seriously. I mean, if you're actually trying to analyze properly and seriously and not just, you know, paraphrase headlines, paraphrase mainstream narratives as if it's analysis. And, yes, I include several narratives as being mainstream narratives even if they are superficially considered to be out of the mainstream. You know what I mean?

Because as I've said, there's there's a sort of a narrative shelf. The mainstream provides us a a a spectrum of acceptable opinions. The narrative shelf, where you can you can choose, you know, whatever option appeals to you, to your particular values, to your particular self image, to however you wanna think about yourself, to to your ideology, and so forth. So for example, there are superficially opposed narratives about Ukraine. You know?

There's one narrative that says that Russia is completely unjustified and one that says that Russia was pushed into it because of NATO expansion or whatever. These are the the sort of the two ends of the narrative spectrum. Both of them are mainstream. But no one says there's no narrative that says that the whole conflict is an engineered proxy war against Europe by The United States, specifically for the purpose of undermining and destabilizing Europe. And that one of the points of the war, the the Ukraine war, was exactly to boost BRICS, to boost devolorization, and to promote multipolarity and so on, strengthen China, strengthen Russia, and strengthen their relationship with each other, you know, and to encourage the global South to build more South South partnerships, South South trade, payment rails, and so forth.

And, basically, to initiate the process of partitioning the world into spheres of influence because America is receding into just being a regional hegemon and no longer a global superpower. That's not one of the acceptable mainstream narratives. And see, if you're gonna go if if you're not gonna go all the way down the layers and and you're just gonna do superficial analysis, which is basically, as I say, just paraphrasing the mainstream narratives that are available, then you're just adding to the noise. You're adding to the noise, and you're helping to warp understanding of the people even more. So you have to be very careful about this because you could very easily just become part of the live propagation system.

Now most analysis, in my opinion, it fails at the starting line. You know, it trips at the starting line because the terms that are being discussed in any particular discussion or any discourse are already completely submerged in narratives and submerged in propaganda. So the first thing that I need to do is to define the terms like a lawyer. What exactly are we talking about? Are we talking about a decision?

Are we talking about an event? Are we talking about a policy shift? Are we talking about a collapse? Are we talking about a deal? Are we talking about an agreement?

Who are the actors? Are we talking about states or firms or blocks or institutions or factions? You know? You need a clear criteria. If you can't define it, then you can't assign any sort of probability and make any sort of an analysis.

It's just an ideological discussion at that point. And, personally, I'm not interested in that sort of a discussion at all. So strip the story down to what actually happened. Before interpretation, you need to have a clear chain of events. You need to know with with no adjectives, no moral framing, no opinions, no ideology.

Who did what? Where did they do it? When did they do it? And what's verified? Now this is harder than it sounds because our minds always wanna jump to meaning.

They always wanna jump to interpretation, but you have to resist that impulse. Then you have to identify the real interest of each actor. Once you've identified who the actors are, identify what their interests are. Not what they say, not what they say their interests are, not what their supporters imagine their interests are, not what the media claims their interests are. I'm looking for survival incentives, you know, regime stability, leadership security, economic incentives, revenue, actual revenue, trade, inflation, access to capital, continuity of trade, and so forth.

You're looking for strategic incentives, deterrence, containment, prestige, alliance management, and so on. You're looking for incentives connected to internal politics, their factions, their institutions, their the constraints that that they have under domestic pressure, and so forth. And then you rank all of those interests because everyone might have all sorts of goals. They might have all sorts of priorities and incentives, but some of the goals, only some, are nonnegotiable. And the nonnegotiable goals are the ones that are almost never ideological.

So all the so called red lines that the media might talk about are not red lines at all. They're drawn in chalk. Those are just bargaining positions. Next, you wanna map the constraints. You and you map the capabilities of the actors.

People confuse ambition with ability all the time. So you have to separate these two things out. Capability means, can they actually do this thing that they want to do? Constraint means, what makes it potentially too costly or impossible for them to do? And then look at their their their dependencies.

What do they need from others in order to pull off this thing that they wanna do? What's their exposure to retaliation? What can the other side do back against them? See, this is where most people's hot takes lay down to die because you mistake the announcement of action for action itself, and you assume that resources are there that don't actually exist, or you overlook real existing constraints or real existing impediments that that actor might be under. Never assume that anyone, never assume that any state or any player at all, any actor on the global stage, never assume that they have the capability to walk their own talk.

Because very often, they talk precisely to avoid having to back it up. You understand? It's posturing. And it's usually just a call to try to begin negotiations. Then you have to look at whatever their plausible options are.

What are their plausible moves? You know? Actors usually have a very small menu of options. They can escalate. They can freeze.

They can deescalate. They can outsource. They can delay. They can take a symbolic action just for domestic optics. They can trade something to try to buy time and so on.

So you try to write out that menu. Before you ever try to predict anything, you have to try to keep yourself honest about this, about what's actually on the table, what can and cannot actually reasonably happen. Then you also have to consider, obviously, the time and the sequencing of what's going on. Are there any deadlines? You know?

Is there elections, Fiscal cycles? Seasonal factors even. Agreement expiry dates. Sometimes even whether you're talk you you could even be talking about whether or not patents will expire or be up for renewal or something, but that could have an effect on it. What can be delayed inexpensively?

What gets harder if it gets postponed? Who benefits from waiting? Because the truth is a lot of power is actually just patience. You can ask China about that. A lot of power is just patience.

And if you wanna know if such and such a thing is gonna happen, so dissect it like that. For x to make such and such happen, usually, these things must be true. X wants it enough. X can do it. They have the capability.

The costs are acceptable. Retaliation is manageable. The timing is favorable. Their internal politics will allow it, and the alternative options look worse. Right?

All of these things should be true. Each condition gets assessed separately, and then you recombine. This reduces the chances of being seduced by one dramatic detail. Again, especially for the West, probability is more likely when the benefits are concrete and the benefits are near term. Costs are delayed or exportable, they like that.

Reputational punishment is weak, they like their image. Adversary response options are limited. They they don't like anyone who can fight back. And domestic audiences would welcome the move. It would be it would make you popular.

These are all important things in the West. But as especially for the West, but it's generally true, probability falls when the costs are gonna hit you immediately. When when there there would there might be some punishment from your allies or from your enemies. And if there's other substitute moves that you could do instead. Always try to distinguish between what is announced by any particular party from what is actually done, especially with someone like Trump.

You know? Many announcements that they make of things that they say they're gonna do, these are just messaging operations. So always ask, is this action performative, or is this action substantive? Does it create irreversible facts on the ground? Does it require real spending?

Does it require real risk? Real institutional coordination? Real probability hinges on real commitment. If there's no real commitment, then you can forget about it. And, of course, your assessment has to be adaptable to new information.

New evidence matters, but it will matter differently depending on what it is. You understand? Hard signals like deployment, like contracts, like legal changes, budget allocations, logistics being put in place. These types of substantive measures obviously increase the probability. They don't make a they don't guarantee it, but it increases the probability.

But soft signals like speeches and leaks and anonymous quotes and sources say this and sources say that, these matter considerably less. And noise across social media, you know, partisan commentary, pundits and so forth, moral panic, This usually signals that nothing substantive is actually going to take place. That's usually what that means. All that is is is theater and messaging. So when you see a huge storm online, it usually means nothing's gonna happen.

Now, personally, I don't really think in numbers or percentages when you're talking about probabilities, but you can say roughly something that would be a low probability if it's from, like, zero to 30%. Medium is 30% to 70%. High is 70 to a 100%. Like I said, bear in mind that this can change. This can always change.

So you need to think about what would need to happen in order to make that probability change. You would make it more or less probable to happen. You know? If x happens, that means they've crossed the point of no return, for example. If y fails to happen by date z, then the probability is dead.

If actor b responds in this way, then actor a's options become even more narrow. You know, for myself, personally, once I see that something has crossed the Rubicon, it's gone past the point of no return, I personally feel perfectly comfortable turning my attention elsewhere and just let the ball bounce down the stairs. I already know where it's going. I don't need to keep watching those those events, follow that timeline anymore. Something really strange would have to happen, for example, to reverse the trajectory that we've seen.

I mean, it would have to be so strange. It would be like the equivalent of something happening that breaks the laws of physics. And the weight that you assign to information should be determined by its closeness to reality. Always keep yourself grounded. This is what I'm saying.

Look for official documents. Look for budgets. Look for laws. Look for treaties. Look for trade flows.

Look for pricing and financing conditions, sanctions mechanisms, and so forth, realities of logistics and infrastructure, real things, not talk, established institutional behavioral patterns, for example, historical precedents that have where you can identify similar incentives that took place in the past. Now you can take direct statements as an evidence or as a as a a strengthener of probability, but only when those statements are somehow aligned with costs that have already been paid. And you should treat all media narratives as data about audience management, not as truth. This is this tells you what they want people to follow, what they want people to believe, what position they want the general public opinion to be. And, obviously, we're basically talking about understanding bargaining chips, the bargaining chips that any player has.

And, also, we're talking about what you can call the grand strategy or the grand agenda, say, of any given actor. And a bargaining chip isn't necessarily something that you own or something that you possess, but it is something that you can control one way or another. Something that you can grant or that you can withhold, and something that the other side can't can't replace easily. Meaning, is the bargaining chip in question actually yours to use? Can you even do anything with it?

Can you sell or cut or delay or accelerate or restrict or license or deny or reroute or subsidize or sanction? Do you have any of those kind of chips? Because a chip, like I said, is not necessarily something that you possess, but it's something it might be something that they possess, but you can impact. You understand? So, for example, you might have the power to deny them a chip that they have.

You might be able to nullify a a bargaining chip that they have. But if they can quickly replace it, then it's not a chip for you after all. Just causing slight inconvenience to your enemy is not leverage. If it doesn't force trade offs, then it's as good as useless. You know?

If I activate this asset, if I use this bargaining chip, how important is that gonna be? What's the magnitude of that? If I move this chip in some way, how much does it raise their costs or lower their benefits? Again, minor inconvenience level, or is it gonna cause real friction, strategic disruption for them? Does it does it even rise to the level of posing an existential threat potentially?

And, obviously, a chip is completely worthless if you can't pull the trigger. It's as good as not having a chip. You know? A threat that you can't execute is just theater, and it actually just broadcasts your weakness. If you say you're gonna do thus and so, and you don't have the power to do thus and so, you're only drawing attention to the fact that you can't do it.

It's just posturing. Posturing is something that you that that someone does when they don't hold any significant bargaining chips. You're doing that instead of of of using the chips that you have because you don't have any. So you just posture. And this is increasingly becoming the case with The United States Of America and with the West generally.

It's not that they don't have any chips. They do. But they have very few chips that are actually usable anymore for all of the reasons that I just mentioned. Because the key dimension to, bargaining chips that that gives the bargaining chips their value is the asymmetry of it. You know?

A chip is strongest when it hurts them, your enemy, but hurts you very little to use. It hurts them a lot, but it hurts you very little to use. If it hurts you more, then it's not a chip, obviously. It's self harm. So the practical score is the pain to them divided by the pain to you.

Now you can categorize all of these these types of bargaining chips that any nation or any actor might have into categories like money, money balance bank balance sheet, market access, critical inputs, infrastructure and corridors, so forth, security capacity, legal and regulatory power, what do they have, recognition and legitimacy, what power do they have, Narrative and reputational tools, how much do they control that technology and know how and so forth, time and sequencing. That stops your analysis from being emotional. You're forced to say exactly what the levers are and what exactly changes if those levers are pulled for both sides. But you're not done yet. Like I said, some chips are actually liabilities.

Some bargaining chips are actually liabilities. You think you have leverage, but the other side actually wants you to use that bargaining chip because it justifies retaliation against you or isolation of you. You wanna flag those bargaining chips that actually trigger blowback, chips that force escalation that you can't sustain, chips that damage your credibility more than their credibility, or or bargaining chips that actually harm your own base. Those are traps. They try to trick you into using them.

And then, like I said, you have to put all of this together into the context of any given player's, like I said, grand agenda. A grand agenda is like the long term direction that stays consistent with those actors across all the, you know, changing administrations, changing slogans, changing headlines, and so on. Changing changing trends is what the player is building, not what they're reacting to. To identify what that is, you don't look at their speeches, you look at their resource flows, where their money is going, where their money, their technology, their people, their contracts, where all of that is headed, where it's all directed. You know?

Budgets and investment patterns will reveal their intent. Long term infrastructure, long term architecture, this matters enormously. Ports, rails, pipelines, payment systems, as I say, legal regimes and standards, rules on data. These are agenda in physical form. You know?

If someone is building architecture, whether it's whether it's literal architecture or technological architecture, digital architecture, legal architecture, and so forth, that's them building tomorrow's bargaining position. That's them building their bargaining chips of the future. So look for pattern consistency. If you see the same behavior in five or six countries, that's not a mistake. That's a doctrine that you're looking at.

And look at whatever they refuse to trade. You know? Everyone will trade something, but what they will not trade, that reveals what they're building, and it reveals where they're going. So say, what are the top three, nonnegotiables? You know?

The under no circumstances items that they will never trade, then you can connect that to their what their major aims are going to be with regards to those nonnegotiables. Then you look at whatever their sacrificial layer is, the things that they will routinely trade away. And then you have that list, and then you assign weights to that. Like, say, five, for example, equals existential identity, civilizational project survival. Four is strategic architecture, long term dominance.

Three is their major economic interest. Two is political convenience or political expediency. And one is maybe public narrative symbolism and so forth. If a claimed priority if a claimed priority keeps getting traded away, then it's not a priority at all. This is the part that most people miss.

A bargaining chip has no fixed value. Its value is completely conditional on what the other side is trying to accomplish. It's all relative. If the grand agenda of any particular, actor is regional integration, for example, then corridors and standards, legal standards become high value chips. If their grand agenda is, just regime survival, then so called legitimacy, security cooperation, economic stabilization, and so forth, those become their top ships, they'll never try to trade those away.

If their grand agenda is derisking, then technology dependence and supply chain choke points, those become their most important chips, and they will do everything possible to never have to trade that away. If their grand agenda is the dollar system, the maintenance of the dollar system, then payments, payment systems, the reserve system, sanctions, compliance, swift access, those become their main chips, they don't wanna see anyone trade those away. They don't wanna they they will never trade it away, and they wanna force everyone else to keep them as well. So when you read their grand agenda correctly, then their behavior becomes more predictable, and you'll be less fooled by propaganda and less fooled by rhetoric. Contradictions disappear because you stop treating their slogans as their actual goals.

You can then forecast more accurately what they'll be willing to sacrifice under pressure. You can see which deals are actually real and which deals are just, stalling tactics. This is where the middle nation frameworks come in. This is where the analytical tools come in. These aren't just formulas.

These are structured ways of seeing reality, really. Like I say, the relative power index measures actual power, actual power, not rhetoric, not aspirations, not just words. We look at the decision authority, like I've said. Can they actually make decisions and enforce those decisions? Do they have control of inputs, resources, energy, labor, trade, hardware, and so on?

Do they have narrative control, media dominance, cultural influence, real cultural influence, cyber capabilities? Do they have immunity to retaliation? Can they act without being punished? Do they have adaptability? Can they pivot when the circumstances change?

Then you subtract the nullifiers of any of those things, their liabilities, their direct dependence, their import reliance, their debt exposure, their critical infrastructure dependency and so forth. And then their perceived vulnerability, international doubt about them, narrative inconsistency. You look at their economic volatility, their debt, their inflation, their polarization within the society, which which causes instability and volatility. The RPI tells you who actually has power versus who you assume has power based on their rhetoric or based on the false belief that their historical power has not changed, that that's somehow static, and a lot of people think that. But the truth is someone could be weak yesterday but strong today, and someone who was strong yesterday could be weak today, and that's exactly the era that we're living in right now.

So you can never presume the presence of power in any actor just because they had it at one time. You can't presume it. You have to scrutinize it. And, crucially, the Islamic moral judgment and victory alignment for Islam analysis aspect of the analysis. And this last part is key.

We're not pretending to be neutral observers. We're looking at whether something aligns with the inevitable victory of Islam or not because that's the only metric that actually matters in the long term. Because the truth of the matter is that the victory of Islam is a certainty. It's not an opinion. And then we have the bargaining chip ledger, which breaks down leverage in negotiations, everything that we've been talking about.

What each party can grant, what they can withhold, what they can accelerate, what they can delay, and so forth. What's tradable versus what's protected versus what's constrained? Who has nonreplaceable chips, bargaining chips? What are their vulnerabilities? We quantify the power in relationships.

That's the main thing that we're trying to do. No country exists in a vacuum. Every situation has to be understood within the context of the imperial system, the floating imperial system of private corporate power. Regional hegemons versus global powers, dollar dominance versus dedollarization, the transition from Western unipolarity to multipolarity, BRICS, China, the global South, the awakening of the global South. This is about understanding that America is a regional hegemon now, not global.

If you don't understand that, you're gonna misread everything that's going on in the world. The usable power of America is very narrow now because its raw power is subordinate to the owners and controllers of global financialized capital and to their interests. And their interests, the a national OCGFC, their interests no longer align with historical nationalistic interests. Now you take all of that data and you process it through the Islamic interpretive knowledge that we have. You know, what do we know from Quran and Sunnah about how all of this ends?

Try to identify what role Shaytan is playing in this situation because that's a real factor. And how does this all align with in the public interest? What does and tell us about the proper responses? Right? We know that the is not gonna be destroyed.

That's not going to happen. Climate change is not going to end the world before the last day. We know that the saved sect, which is Ahasunawil Jamarah, will remain and will ultimately triumph in this world. Now this knowledge allows us to properly weigh threats and to not waste energy on apocalyptic anxieties that contradict with what we've been told is gonna happen. You know, when the prophet said that the nations of the world will feast on our ummah because we would develop a love for the dunya and a hatred for death.

Okay. He didn't say that because he said that we had apostatized. No. He said weakness, fear, and vulnerability, and insecurity would would overcome us. But that's not kufr.

That's not disbelief, and those are not irreversible states. Rasulullah was talking about a period of our history that we would experience, something that we would go through. He wasn't talking about our ultimate destiny as a nation. That's just something that we'll go through. Real analysis, real bearing witness requires patience because you're looking for outcomes that you might not live to see, most likely will not.

But we are a continuous ummah, and we should work for the results that will benefit our ummah whether we personally will ever live to see it or not. Our grandchildren and our great grandchildren are gonna inshaAllah live in a world where, for example, China and Russia are gonna end up being fractured and irrelevant. Europe is gonna be impoverished, and it'll be consumed by war. And it's gonna be hard for our grandchildren or our great grandchildren to imagine that those countries ever had any dominance whatsoever. But whether or not our grandchildren or our great grandchildren live in a world where the Muslims enjoy ascendance, that's gonna be traced back to our generation and to whether or not we transformed our own attitudes about the West and about ourselves.

And this requires a degree of detachment. Your preferences don't matter, only reality matters. Honesty even when the truth is unpopular with your own audience and having the courage to tell people what they don't wanna hear. If you can't channel your emotions into doing research, into critically following events carefully, scrutinizing, if you can't, educate yourself about reality, then you don't actually even care enough to be useful. Your anger and your heartbreak are just narcissistic exercises to make everything about you, everything about your feelings.

You know? If the only way that you can get through the day without lying is being silent, then be silent. I'm telling you. Because an uninformed opinion is nothing but a lie. You know?

In the West, they've got my truth. They've got your truth. They've got his truth and her truth and everyone's truth. It's a personalized, curated, lived experience truth. That doesn't free anybody.

That's the opposite of freedom. We have an objective standard in Islam. We have an objective standard. And when you apply that objective standard, you literally take yourself and your opinions out of the equation. No euphemism, no spin, no narrative, no nothing.

Just measurement against a fixed reality. That's how we do. This is why, like I've said before, defending Islam is actually the only way to be objective in your analysis or in anything else. It's the only way to be unbiased because being unbiased and being objective is part of being a Muslim. Being an impartial witness, telling the truth, being honest, calling things what they are.

This is all part of Islam. So when you defend Islam and when you take an Islamic stance, you are in fact defending objectivity and you are defending fairness itself. It's the opposite of subjectivity. That's the opposite of subjectivity. Because as I say, we have a fixed standard.

Not a person by person follow your heart. There's your truth, his truth, my truth, her truth, everybody's truth, everybody's personalized, you know, curated, lived experience truth. No. We don't do that. We don't play like that.

There is an objective standard. There's an objective standard of measurement. Like I said, there's no euphemisms. There's no spin. There's no narrative.

And you literally take yourself and your opinions out of the equation. That's the only way that you can do analysis. And that's why the word for witness, like I said, the word for witness and the word for martyr are the same. Like I said, you sacrifice yourself, you sacrifice your ego, you sacrifice your preferences, your loyalties, your need to be liked, your need to be approved of in your testimony. You just tell the truth as it is, and you have nothing to fear by telling the truth, especially if you have the mentality and the mindset where you think of yourself as being dead already and standing on the day of judgment looking back on this life.

Look. As someone who spent years under an execution order, on death row, where literally tomorrow is not assumed by anyone, well, there's a particular kind of training that happens, whether you ask for it or not. You know? Your attachments loosen. Status and social theater lose their appeal, lose their importance.

When you know that they could take you out back to the firing squad on any given day, where you start asking what's real instead of what's just performance, and you can tell the difference. And the ability of the world to intimidate you shrinks. The system's threats rely on your belief that it can take everything. And if you've already stared at the ultimate threat of losing everything, then any lesser pressure becomes easily manageable. So, yes, that experience can make a person especially suited to be a witness and to take that stance from the day of judgment because it creates a familiarity with the truth that everyone else keeps forgetting.

You're temporary, and you will be questioned. And when you stay aware of the nearness of death, when you lose the motivation, really, to just spout off about things that you have no knowledge of or which are of no real significance, things that aren't even important. There's no reason to even talk about them. So when you wanna enter this state of mind deliberately before analyzing, check your intention. Know that you're accountable for what you're gonna say.

Separate and distinguish facts from inferences and facts from speculation. Check your ego. What's the outcome that you're hoping for and why, and then put that aside. That's the witness posture. Clean testimony.

Humility and uncertainty. If there's anything that you don't know for sure, then you don't say it. But be firm about what's clear and have a detachment from having any need to win. You're not echo chambering what your audience wants to hear. You're not framing engagement through rage bait.

You're not repeating Western narratives in different words. You're not making predictions based on your own personal hopes and your own personal fears and wants and desires. You're not treating analysis as just content. And you're not trying to divide the ummah just to try to score points with Westerners or with other small minded people or to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the audience, in the social media audience. You know?

Most people become influencers by being a mirror of a very specific demographic and then just repeating what they what the what those people already think. You just repeat it back to them, whatever they already think. You repeat it back to them. And it doesn't matter if it's true. It doesn't matter if it's right.

It doesn't matter if it's correct because it gets you the views and gets you the likes and gets you the shares. And people fall for it every time. They think that these people are truth tellers because they're just echoing back to them whatever they wanna hear, whatever they already believe. So you think that they're telling the truth, but they're making fools of you. You treat them like heroes, and they're making fools of you.

But telling your audience what they what you know that they don't wanna hear, that's not a sound strategy for building a social media platform. That's the opposite of how you make a make a career as a social media influencer. But it's how you become useful. It's how you bear witness. It's how you stand on the plateau of judgment day and report about what you see and what you've seen.

And whether the people in the trenches of the dunya want to hear it or not, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, analysis is a moral act. It's refusing to lie to yourself and refusing to lie to others. So the process is really this. You strip away the story.

You measure the incentives and the constraints. You list the plausible moves that they have. You assign likelihood by base rates and by costs. You name the triggers that would change your mind. You speak as if you know that you will answer for your words because you will.

That's analysis. That's bearing witness. That's standing from a position outside the chronology of the dunya and looking back from from a post presence in this world position, because a witness isn't also a participant. He's not invested in the ebb and flow of any particular era, but you're standing upon the objective plateau of judgment day. And if you cannot do that if you can't do that, then you're just gonna be adding to the cacophony that real analysts and real witnesses have to try to tune out.