The Victorious Narrative & Unity | Lessons from Nuruddin Zengi

People must be able to imagine victory in order to endure what is necessary to achieve victory. I'll say that again. People must be able to realistically imagine victory in order for them to be willing to endure everything that they must endure and everything that they must do in order to achieve that victory. They they have to be able to taste the possibility of liberation in reality, and Notre Dame cultivated that possibility in their imaginations. He made future liberation feel like an actually approaching reality, not a fantasy, not I have a dream.

You know, he treated it as a project that had steps, a realistic project that just had steps. Steps one, two, three, four, five that we have to do. Not a dream that you just fantasize about, not empty hope. This is how you shift the public mood from despair and complacency to discipline. Because discipline is what you need.

Discipline is what you need. Not hope. Discipline. Not not empty hope and not utopianism. So he didn't allow the public to drown in a sense of helplessness or hopelessness or complacency.

And he offered them a framework. This is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. You know? This is how we will get there.

And this is must this is what you must be ready to sacrifice in order to get there. That's leadership. Now you can translate all of this, into a kind of a power logic that you can use anywhere. If you understand what what Notre Dame was doing, then you can apply this anywhere. You can apply this understanding to history, to modern politics, to community building, to activism, and so forth, even in your own personal life.

You see what I'm saying? Because power isn't just about force. Power is the, capacity to produce outcomes in your own environment. Produce outcomes in your environment. We are absolutely flooded as Muslims.

We are absolutely flooded with narratives. On a on an unprecedented scale, we are subjected to a torrent, you know, an inundation of negative narratives that we are not controlling. Narratives that we are not controlling, but we are participating in. Narratives that fragment us and divide us and weaken us. And we're subjected to narratives that convince people that we're powerless.

That convince people that the Muslims are powerless, that we're weak, that we're the Khalas, the the Ummah is already destroyed. You know, we're subjected to narratives that convince us that our leaders are all evil, that our leaders are all hypocrites, that our evils our leaders are all evil hypocrites just as bad or or or worse than the leaders in the West. And that our own people are are also, you know, barely functioning as Muslims, barely have any imam and what have you. And the the the narratives out of the West that make you ashamed or defensive about Islam rather than proud of it. If your community consumes its interpretation of reality from hostile sources, from your enemies, then your be your community is gonna behave, in a hostile manner to themselves.

And this is exactly what we see. You are corrupting your own, the the the narrative of your own people, of your own, ummah, of the of the Muslims. You're corrupting a narrative, and you are fighting against a victorious narrative that will bring us to, liberation. You're actively fighting against that when you're not participating in it and when you are participating in and when you are conveying narratives that are framed by, our enemies. So if if you're if you're you're makers of meaning, if the people who are crafting frameworks, the people who are crafting narratives or or not even crafting, but just conveying, if they're captured by utter nonsense, then the whole society is gonna be captured by nonsense.

The whole community is gonna be captured by nonsense. You have to fight the the the normalization of your own, defeat, your own irrelevance, your own, the the ability to be dismissed. And and and frankly, you have to fight against deserving to be dismissed because of your lack of seriousness. This is one of the most poisonous things in the modern Muslim world. Everything that Notre Dame was doing with regards to narrative and and PR and so forth, this falls under what we call epistemological sovereignty.

He was taking back control over narrative frameworks, over understanding, over how things are defined. And this is what we try to do at Middle Nation. You have to you have to fight against the story that you are being told and and and you have to rely upon your own sources of knowledge. You have to, fight this psychological surrender to their narrative. That's where shared a how can I say this?

In order for you to have a shared victory at any point in the future, you have to first have a shared expectation that it's possible, like I said earlier. You have to have a shared expectation that victory is possible, and then that shared victory can become a shared reality. Well, this requires practical unity, not as a slogan, not as rhetoric, not as well we all have to love each other and and whatnot. You have to be unified even if you don't love each other. Like I say, it's not just a slogan, it it it means in practice, it means standing together like one single solitary structure shoulder to shoulder like Allah told us with the Muslims from all over the world no matter where they come from, stand with the Muslims, the people and the leaders whether you like them or you dislike them personally.

It means holding your tongue sometimes. You know? It means confronting the critics of our people from among our enemies rather than conceding to those critics. You understand? And it means not speaking badly about your own people and not letting your own people be spoken badly about.

You shouldn't allow this.