"Make ready all you can of power..."

Alaikum. Is Shaheed Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation. Let's brainstorm a little bit. It's a basic truism that if you want to achieve some sort of social or political change in the society, you either need to have a lot of money or a lot of people.

Now I'm not sure which one is more difficult to attain, either massive wealth or mass mobilization of the grassroots. But either way, if you're not able to achieve either one of those two things, that's when you start to see groups that want social change or political change turning to radicalism and violence. And almost every historical instance of this is a disaster. But let's try to think about a third way. And considering the power dynamics at play in the world today, this may be our best strategy.

Can we start to focus on developing Muslim professionals and entrepreneurs at the grassroots level to build companies, to build businesses, and to grow capital with the express intention of creating Muslim private sector coalitions of power to advance the well-being of the ummah. Because of my stance on not monetizing my channel, you may have gotten the impression that I am somehow anti profit making. I'm not. I just don't really like the revenue earning options on YouTube. I don't want the money for views aspect to influence the type of content that I produce or for it to even be suspected to influence the content I produce.

I don't generally like affiliate marketing. I don't think that the type of content I produce should have to be purchased. Rather, I would like to see the ideas on this channel spread freely as widely as possible, and I absolutely detest and do not respect begging for donations. Now if I had a channel that I felt had some sort of market function or that utilized my professional skill set or was otherwise purely commercial in nature, I wouldn't hesitate to treat it as a business. I fully believe that Muslims should pursue as high an income as possible, but they should do that for the same reasons that the Salaf did it.

Not for the purpose of competing with one another in amassing surplus wealth and living a luxurious lifestyle, but for the purpose of competing with one another in utilizing that wealth and distributing it for the benefit of the Muslims. When the means of domination in the world today are disproportionately economic, an argument can certainly be made that the ayah in which Allah exhorts the Muslims to make ready all we can of power against our opponents. Today, that means capital and private sector power. And I'm not talking about companies just donating to Islamic causes or charities. I'm talking about Muslim companies that grow market share, that create jobs and dominate industrial sectors, that invest in research and development, improve infrastructure, and contribute to the health, independence, and sovereignty of Muslim economies.

Entrepreneurs who don't have the intention of growing their startup company into a multimillion dollar corporation just so that they could sell it to Google or Microsoft or some other huge multinational, but who intend to keep and use the economic influence they have built to improve the lives of the Muslims, to literally be in business because the more economically powerful Muslims we have, the more economically powerful Muslim entities we have, the more we can advance and uplift our ummah, and the more we can resist the neo imperialism of the global crusaders of capital. Now we're always talking about our leaders in the Muslim world, usually negatively, usually pessimistically. And when we say leaders, we mean heads of state. And most of us feel that they are corrupt. Most of us feel that they are subservient to the West, and most of us feel that they are traitors to the ummah.

Now I think that's a bit harsh, but that's the way a lot of us feel. But this attitude in perspective is disempowering and is disempowering in a very self indulgent way. Because when you have convinced yourself that you're powerless, you absolve yourself of any responsibility to try to make things better. But as I have talked about many times on this channel, the real leaders today are not heads of state. They're heads of corporations.

They're chairmans of the board. They're shareholders. They're business owners. These are the ones who wield much of the control over the conditions of our daily lives. Wages, prices, property values, overall cost of living, they are the ones who carry out trade between countries, thereby creating or dissolving alliances.

They deliver technology to our societies. They build infrastructure. They provide energy, and they are the vehicles through which most of us earn our incomes. We spend most of our waking hours at jobs under their supervision following their rules. So it seems to me that we need to start not only treating them as political entities and political players, but we need to also start developing seriously our own private sector institutions of power from startup to success who have a solidarity mindset, a non aligned mindset, and a mindset loyal to this ummah, and executives and business owners who have a view of money that is more in line with the way the Salaf viewed wealth.

So if our governments are corrupt and disloyal to the Muslims, well, we live in an era of parallel structures of authority. We live in an era of unprecedented private sector power. So I believe that a key focus of any activism for social or political change should be to enter business, build companies, grow capital, form partnerships, cultivate business leaders who care about the ummah, who care about the well-being of the Muslims and the independence of our countries. To that end, we could form international networking groups for Muslim entrepreneurs. We can organize, for example, an Africa Asia business conference or Middle East Africa or Middle East Asia.

We could establish associations for Muslim professionals, Muslim IT professionals, Muslim engineers, Muslim importers and exporters, Muslim PR professionals, and so on and so on, as well as establishing business alliances across the global South more generally, all with the intention of raising the standard of living for Muslims in every Muslim country, enriching our economies, and gaining leverage against the global crusaders of capital as well as against any detrimental elements that may exist within our own countries. Imagine if we could nourish and support a few 100 or even a few dozen Muslim entrepreneurs from any given country, and from that, we could produce four or five or even one Muslim Tesla or Muslim Amazon or Apple or Facebook, a company that is cultivated by and for Muslims with a solidarity mindset and a perspective on wealth guided by the way of the Salaf Asari. Wallahi, this would achieve more positive change for our Ummah than any revolution or uprising. It would help more people than any relief organization or charity drive, and it would bring more power to this ummah than an army.