Sabotaging effectiveness: destruction through distraction

I think I've said before or implied anyway, I don't really I'm not particularly interested in much of what gets discussed and debated among Muslims online. I think a good portion of what people talk about and argue about are issues that are only appropriately dealt with by scholars and only really relevant to scholars. But nonscholars are doing all the talking because let's face it, almost none of us on social media are actually educationally qualified or have the knowledge of actual scholars. I mean, the disrespect that we have or that we show to authentic Islamic knowledge is a different topic altogether. But there's no reason why we should treat Islamic studies, Islamic knowledge as being somehow less complex or or easier to attain than secular studies like law or medicine or physics.

I mean, you wouldn't go to someone who calls himself a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist for an expert opinion if all he ever did was just search on Google and browse the Internet for information. But that's what most of us do, and we call ourselves or we act like we're scholars. I mean, think about it. The most prestigious area of law in The United States is constitutional law, and the standard is incredibly high to become a constitutional lawyer. Well, the American constitution has only been around for less than two hundred and fifty years, and it only pertains to one country.

So what about a faqih? You know, what about expertise in Islamic law? That's been around and developing for six times longer with at least four different schools of jurisprudence, and it's practiced or followed and pertains to over 50 countries. But somehow we treat fit as if it's easier to learn and easier to become an expert in than becoming a constitutional lawyer. In my opinion, we have Muslims arguing today about things and criticizing one another and criticizing other Muslims about things that no rank and file Muslim even knew about two hundred years ago.

And they didn't know about it because they didn't need to know about it. The actual knowledge that's for a Muslim to know is not that knowledge which only became widely accessible to the ummah with the dawn of the Internet. The basic fundamental knowledge of Islam, the that's all they needed. And whoever wanted to be a student of greater knowledge, then they proved their commitment to knowledge because it took effort to obtain that knowledge. Only serious committed people gained access to the complexities of the Islamic disciplines.

And once they gained that access, they knew what to do with it. They do they knew what to do with their knowledge precisely because they were serious and committed people. But today, unserious people have access to that knowledge and they deal with it unseriously. But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to say that I'm not particularly interested in a lot of the religious discussion between Muslims on the Internet.

It's not relevant to me, and frankly, I don't think it's relevant to you or to most of us. I mean, I have nothing to do with it if you're Ashari or if you're Atri. I have nothing to do with it if you think that the is or you think it's fine. I really don't care. In terms of I see this as a personal issue between you and Allah, and I'm not gonna ask anyone about it.

I'm not gonna ask you about it, and I'm not gonna feel obliged to answer you if you ask me about it. As far as I'm concerned, if you are from if you are eligible for janazah when you die, you know, if you are able to answer the three questions that you will be asked in the then we're good. And for me, is a broad category and includes plenty of opinions and disputes and disagreements that are permissible and don't expel you from the category of Now you may have some opinions that I think are faulty, and I may have some that you think are faulty. And we're both gonna find out who was right and who was wrong, or if we were both right or if we were both wrong on your And most likely, the opinions that you have today and your views today and what you think today is not gonna be what you think ten years from now, assuming that between now and then, you continue learning about the deen. Now I'm saying all of this for a reason.

Because in my opinion, taking any other approach besides the approach of solidarity and brotherhood is obstructive to doing anything useful. It distracts and diverts and makes you lose your focus. It keeps you busy in things for which there is no practical value or benefit for yourself or for anyone else. Now I can already see people angrily typing comments in the comment section saying, oh, Shahid thinks that Islamic knowledge incorrect don't matter. And this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Using religious justifications just to be combative and adversarial and dishonestly misrepresenting what another Muslim might say just to make yourself look righteous. Just trying to start a fight that will make me then have to prove that I do value Islamic knowledge and and correct until you're satisfied. This is just a way of derailing brotherhood and derailing useful pursuits. It's a way of derailing a conversation or a discussion or any communication of ideas. Did you know that the CIA published a manual all the way back in 1944 called the simple sabotage field manual?

And it has a whole section in there about doing exactly this kind of thing. There are parts of that manual, tactics that they recommended that so resemble Muslim social media to a t, it's uncanny. The tactics include, haggling over minutia, demanding very precise and complicated language, and detailed explanations of very simple things, unimportant things, bringing up settled issues, agreed upon issues just so you can reopen debates, and then pretend to not understand and ask for clarifications on obvious issues. You know? Spreading rumors, ostracizing certain people, prolonging discussions on matters that have no practical relevance whatsoever, on and on.

Now the idea of this manual, was to sabotage effectiveness, not through destruction, but through distraction and through, undermining cooperation in order to weaken a regime that the CIA wanted to see toppled. And I see this happening all the time in Muslim discussions, particularly online. I mean, a conversation can't proceed in a straight line from start to finish except that it always gets interrupted and redirected into a series of tangents. You know what I'm talking about. You can't start talking about anything almost, except that someone is going to veer the conversation off topic to start talking about, I don't know, the or the end times, or how we should we should actually start start using gold and silver coins again, or we need the or we need to educate everyone on aqidah.

And by educate, what they actually mean is to enforce their own particular understanding of aqidah, on and on. And maybe the original topic was completely unrelated to any of these tangents, but the original topic gets completely lost in a cacophony of people's pet issues that are usually just them regurgitating something that they read one time or watched on a YouTube video. And the great irony is that amidst all of these disputes, everyone says the Ummah must unite. But you see this is a tactic, literally a CIA manual tactic for disruption and imposed ineffectiveness. Now I'm not saying that the people who do this kind of thing are actual agents, but they're doing the work of actual agents whether they know it or not.

So it doesn't really matter if it's deliberate treachery or if it's unintentional treachery. It is treachery. And it's treachery because it impedes, any kind of constructive useful work and any kind of effective communication and understanding. It's sabotage. That's what they called it.

I mean, who knows all of the places that the CIA put this into practice? We know that they did it in Europe, and we know that they did it in Latin America. There's no reason to believe that they didn't do it in the Muslim world. And wherever they did it, it had an impact. It had an impact on the culture, on the intellectual culture.

It normalized incompetent disagreeableness. It normalized pedantry and inefficiency and poor development of thoughts and communication of ideas. It's sabotage. Look at Europe right now. That intellectually broken culture has reached the highest levels of government, and it permeates mainstream media, which then normalizes it even further.

And I think we're affected by that. I think we have been subjected to that, and it has had a deteriorative impact on our own intellectual culture and our own intellectual habits. You know, people keep telling me that I should do debates and that I should go on other people's podcasts and so on. And this is usually on the basis of wanting me to have someone give me some pushback on what I'm saying. They want an argument.

And then whoever wins the argument, that's who they will decide to believe or who to agree with or who to listen to. But that's not the basis for judging the value of someone's ideas. Online debates aren't debates in the traditional sense, and interviews aren't interviews in the traditional sense most of the time. I mean, the most common debate tactic that I've seen online is changing the subject, and the most common interview technique is interrupting the guest and introducing tangents into the conversation and making sure that they never get the chance to complete a thought. But the general audience thinks all of this is normal.

Well, it's not normal. It's sabotage. It's people throwing talking points at each other. It's a fireworks display. It's not genuine discourse.

It obstructs genuine discourse. And I think that's the point. So again, I'm not interested in these sorts of things, these types of discussions and these types of topics. And I try as much as possible to maintain the focus of my content, is promoting the economic sovereignty, political independence, and psychological decolonization of the Muslims, which is why I have said before and I will keep saying, I am not a Dai. I'm just a rank and file Muslim, and I stand with every other rank and file Muslim.

Because if I'll stand for you, for your Janaza when you die, then I'll stand with you while you're alive. But I won't stand for anyone who's busy trying to divide the Muslims, discourage the Muslims, or to undermine the Muslims pursuing practical useful efforts or whoever wants to engage in pointless diversionary arguments. Whether that's with me or in the comment section on my channels or in the telegram discussion or on any other platform that I'm on. This is part of decolonizing our minds, returning to a more concentrated, disciplined, and thorough Islamic approach to discourse and intellectual exchange, taking an approach that neutralizes, the sort of sabotage that the CIA practiced and perfected. I mean, they came up with that in order to topple powers that they wanted to subjugate.

So they recognized that coherence, effective communication, and practical efficiency are the keys to power itself. So everything that they told their agents to do, we have to try to identify it whenever we see it and stop it before it spreads. And, of course, that includes not doing any of those things ourselves.