Epistemological Sovereignty

And I think that this is actually sort of the the next level or the next phase in psychological decolonization, you know, in in the like, since the, say, the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties in the in the sort of decolonization movement, there's been a a focus on our own societies and basically trying to correct in our own minds the lies that they have told us about us and and trying to redefine ourselves and trying to get back attuned to our own civilization, whether that's Muslims or anyone else in the global South, any other colonized people. But I think that we need to move beyond that to where now we're questioning their own narrative about themselves and the way that they have defined their history and the stories that they have told themselves about their history. We have to look at it through our lens, look at them and their history through our lens, which is the only correct and appropriate lens, the only accurate lens through which to actually look at them. And they are the ones who have told us that they have a segmented history of pre enlightenment, enlightenment, post enlightenment, you know, secular church, so on.

This is their story about themselves, but we have to look at their history according to our analytical lens, through our analytical lens of our of our own belief system, our own civilizational lens, rather than just believing their narrative about themselves because they don't do anything but lie. They've lied to they've lied to us about us, and they've lied to us about them. And we've dealt with their lies about us, you know, through the previous sort of decolonization movement, and it's time for us to start dealing with the lies that they have told us about themselves. And this is why I've said, you know, time and time and time again that you don't you you don't really see any difference in the behavior, in the character, in the thinking of Europeans from the time when they believed in witches and witchcraft and spirits and and all of this supernatural stuff. You don't see a difference in their behavior, in their approach, in their character, in their conduct between then and now.

Even though now they don't believe in any of those things, but they're still following the same the same type of misguidance that they were following all the way back then. They just think that they're smarter now because they don't believe in the supernatural aspect of it. But they're still upon the same misguidance that they've always been on, and it all stems from their rejection of revelation. The new supernatural is technology. That's the new supernatural that the West believes in.

Like, now instead of believing in spirits that guide you and that that are that are all knowing and all seeing, you have algorithms and AI where you believe that the algorithm is always right. The algorithm knows you better and you know yourself. The algorithm knows you better than your parents know you or your friends know you or your siblings know you better than you know yourself. The algorithm knows everything about you. And AI can predict everything and AI knows everything.

This is the new supernatural. This is the new, you know, they moved from, you know, from the belief in the supernatural to then the so called enlightenment where they were believing all in their own intellect. And then sort of the post enlightenment where they put just sort of humanism and a kind of very subjective, very very nex driven that really in a way almost takes the intellect out of it, in fact, where it's your feelings are the most important thing. It's a very squishy sort of moralism individualized to where you have, you know, my truth and your truth and so forth. And then it has now progressed, for lack of a better word, into almost taking people out of it to where now you've you've returned to this other sense of of a nonhuman source of guidance, which is like the algorithms and the AI and so forth and technology.

So they're just on a loop. You know, their whole society, their whole so called civilization is on a is on a continuous loop of of of always trying to do do get their guidance from everywhere except from Allah. I mean, if you if you if you put the language in just if you just slightly change the language of an Elon Musk I mean, I know maybe if I even mention his name, we're gonna get the the space will get banned. But with him talking about trying to convince people, and people are taking it like he's a prophet, saying that we're gonna terraform Mars, and we're all gonna move to Mars. This is cult leader talk.

This is the talk of some sort of a cult leader. No one would believe that. You're talking complete insanity. This is this is like judgment day. The judgment is coming.

The mothership is coming, and it's gonna take us all away. This is cult leader talk. But you all take it like it's absolute truth. This man knows what he's talking about. It's almost like he's divinely guided because we imagine that he's some sort of a genius when he's just a con man.

Just like any cult leader, he's just a con man. But you take it like it's absolute truth because of, quote, unquote, science. Because now you treat science the way that you used to treat religion because your religion back in the day never was real religion in the first place. It was it was for you a mechanism of control, a tool of control, a method of domination, and hierarchical reinforcement. That's the way it always was, and that's the way it it always is gonna be with you.

You're always gonna come up with something, whether it's gonna be Christianity, the the Catholic church, or it's going to be secularism, or it's gonna be now technocratic sort of religious quasi religious philosophy, or, you know, this belief in in your in your oligarchs that are now dictating to you or decreeing for you some sort of a new doctrine. Like I say, like, you're gonna move like, everyone is gonna move to Mars. Like, that's even a thing that can happen. But you but you take it the same way that you took it before in Europe when they told you that the only way that you could escape the hellfire is by giving your money to the church. It's it's the same con game that's been run on you for centuries because because this is your mindset.

Because like like I said, you are continuously and like like brother Karim said, the nature of the human being is to be an abd. We are slaves, we are servants, and we are worshippers. So if you're not worshiping Allah, you're worshiping somebody. If you're not worshiping the creator, then you are worshiping someone or something in creation, whether it's a human being or a jinn, a shaitan, you're gonna be you're at you're you're gonna end up being guided by something or even if it's your own nefs, even if it's your own self, even if it's your own ego and your own desires and so forth. So this this as long as you're continuously looking for guidance from any source other than the source of guidance, which is Allah, you're going to be astray.

It doesn't it doesn't matter which which it figure you put as your object of worship, whether it's the church or whether it's money or whether it's your own desires or whether it's businessman, oligarch, so called technological geniuses or what have you. All of it is misguidance, and it's all gonna you're just gonna continue to be on that same loop that you've been on now for millennia. Well, you know, it's funny because, you know, what they always say, what what western secularists or atheists or agnostics or whatever, what they always say about religion is that religion is just a tool for control. Like, you don't have tools for control in your society. You imagine that your society is free.

You have, like, just in America, what, eighteen, nineteen, 20 different intelligence organizations controlling your society. You have, like I said, the algorithms controlling what you watch, what you see, what you want, what you think is the right opinion. They control your news. They control your whole news feed. You have mass surveillance, mass collection of data on you.

You have more laws in your country, in America, than they have anywhere else in the world. And then you're gonna say religion is a tool of control? I mean, come on. This is this is absolutely absurd. They they're they're programming you to say these things.

Now maybe in your experience, like I've talked about before, maybe in your experience in the West and with so called Christianity, they used it as a tool because you're people who are obsessed with control. They used it as a tool of control, they used the church as a tool of control because you're people who are obsessed with control, with controlling others and with with maintaining a very strict rigid hierarchy system in your society and and keeping the the population down, keeping the population under domination. This is your obsession. So, obviously, anything and everything that comes along, you're gonna use it for that purpose. That doesn't mean that religion is for that purpose.

We didn't have in the in the Khilafa time, in the in the Muslim empire time, we didn't have 20 different intelligence organizations controlling the society. Religion actual religion, not the the man made mutations of religion, like Christianity, for example. But in Islam, it's a tool of self control. It's self regulating. It's it's called morality.

It's called principles. It's called ethics that the person uses to regulate their own behavior. So we didn't need 20 different intelligence organizations to control the population. We didn't need mass propaganda, mass surveillance, mass data collection, and so forth because people regulated their own behavior. But in your societies, because of the absence of religion, you need all sorts of mechanisms to try to keep people behaving the way you want them to behave.

It's it's it's absolutely absurd when they talk about religion being a tool of control. You know, the the term soothsayer, everyone sort of thinks it's a very medieval term, and, well, we're past that now except for some very strange, you know, new age people who go to, I don't know, horoscopes or crystals or whatever. But, no, everybody there there's there's all sorts of soothsayers now. They just don't call themselves that. They're they're called analysts, you know, or forecasters or or what have you, whether it's whether they're talking about the stock market or they're talking about geopolitics or they're talking about, you know, which way an election is probably going to go and so forth.

These are all people who are who are sort of purporting to tell the the future, who think that they can predict what's going to happen and and and pretend that they have inside information. And you you've noticed if you're if you're a certain age and you've been following news for any period of time, you'll notice that there is a huge spike in the number of anonymous sources that are cited by so called analysts that no one ever wants to say who their sources are, and it's reported as fact. Well, I mean, may as well treat the anonymous source as Shaitan, really. If if someone can't if someone can't identify who their source is, then then it it's just what's what's right in their ear. These are the you know, because we know that, obviously, it's not only the the the old soothsayers who used to communicate with Shaytan.

Shaytan is whispering to you all the time, to everybody, all the time. And some people, it it may be just be that they're that that the whispering that they're getting has to do with what they think is they're being told what's gonna happen next. What's gonna happen in geopolitics, what's gonna happen with the stock market, what's gonna happen with this business or that business, their share price, or what have you, or this election or that election. And it's it's comes down to the same thing as with the soothsayer in that they they might get, you know, one one thing right and 99 things wrong. And you'll notice also with these analysts, with these geopolitical analysts, these political analysts and so forth, most of them have absolutely horrific track records in their in in what they can predict and how they say things are gonna go.

Most of the time, if you really look at at their their track record of predictions, they're wrong 99% of the time, and they're never called to account for it. They should all lose their jobs. And then you have people who are who are there there are some some specific people that I have in mind who like to talk about exchanges and communication between leaders that happened behind closed doors, that happened over the telephone, or that happened in a in a closed secret confidential conference room. And they'll tell you what this one said and that one said and this one said back and this was the reply and so forth as if they were there. And no one even calls them to account for that saying, well, were you in the room?

Do you know that this is what was said? And, of course, if if they are ever asked about it, they'll say, well, you know, insiders told me. Even though you're talking about maybe an actual phone call between two people, there is no insider. It's a it's a a b conversation, and you're not in it, and there's no one there to hear it. But but you have people who will convey it like they know.

And either this is just their imagination or this is like a soothsayer who's pretending to get some sort of revelation to tell you what's going on behind closed doors that you have no way of knowing. And then again, like I say, just like with a soothsayer, they'll tell you 99 lies and one thing that's true. And somehow that one true thing that's it's like the it's like the the saying about a a broken clock being right twice a day. Somehow that saves their careers. With with what we do at Middle Nation, our basis for analysis is Quran and Sunnah.

Our basis for analysis, the framework through which we analyze the world is from a framework of revelation. That's that's our basis. And we've been more accurate than than most analysts in terms of how things are going and how things have gone, sometimes quite far in advance. And that's because, in my opinion, that's because we're using Quran and Sunnah as the as the framework for the way we analyze the world. We we as I've talked about many times, we know what Allah said about the future of Islam and the the future victory of Islam, And so we analyze current events from a perspective of a future historian looking back on how these events contributed to or obstructed the progress towards that inevitable end, that inevitable future.

So we're dealing with future history, and we analyze it that way. And that way, we can we can better analyze, in my opinion, the way the world is going because we know where the world is going, so we can we can see which steps are moving us towards that future and which steps are moving us away from that future. That's our framework for understanding. Whereas these other people, I don't know what their framework is for understanding or what their framework is for analyzing, and that's probably why they're mostly wrong. Yeah.

You know, it's it's as you were talking well, actually, before you were talking, I I thought of this, and now it's you you you brought up Musailama, who if anyone doesn't know, he was a false prophet who a man who claimed to be a prophet at the time of And he he he sort of explained inadvertently his motives why he was doing what he was doing, and it's the same motive for the false prophets today, secular prophets, as you said, it's the it's the right way to put it. When he he sent a letter to Rasulullah and said, let's divide the world between us. You can have half and I'll have half. Meaning, his dunya motivated. He's motivated for power and acquisition in the dunya.

And this is the same motivation for these people today. You'll see these these these so called analysts who are actually nothing but propagandists for what they want to be. They're not making an actual objective analysis. They are propagandists, ideologues, telling you the way they want things to be, the way they want things to turn out, and trying to convince you that that's an inevitability. Because they are driven by like like, I've talked about before, like, Jeffrey Sachs, for example.

He's getting a lot of respect as an analyst and so forth. Well, that man has has only ever been driven by dunya desires from day one until now in service to the owners and controllers of global financialized capital for money, for influence, for prestige. They're only looking for increasing their status in the dunya. That's their motivation. Whereas if you are a Muslim and you are detached from the dunya and you're thinking about you're thinking about your meeting with Allah and telling the truth and trying to do good in this world for the sake of your and you're detached from the dunya, even according to their own understanding about what what objectivity is, well, then you have to be detached, don't you?

You have to be detached from the thing that you're analyzing. Well, the only ones who can be detached from their analysis of the dunya is people who are detached from the dunya. That's the only way that you can do it. If you are involved and deeply interested in your status in this world, your status in the dunya, well, you're never gonna be objective. You'll you'll always have a bias.

You'll always have preferences. You'll always have a a certain way that you want things to go. Your motivation is tainted because you have an interest. You have a a a divided interest in the analysis that you're putting forward because you wanna get something out of it. Whereas if you don't care one way or the other, if people like what you say or they don't like what you say, if they approve or they disapprove, it doesn't matter to you because you're just looking at your and you're detached from the world.

So that that allows you to be objective. And this is again why, as as everyone here has said, their their motivation of rejecting the prophetic guidance, their their motivation for rejecting the revelation is the same reason of because I want at least half the world for me. I'm willing to allow you to have half the world. And, of course, we know that the response of to Musailima was that the whole world and everything in it belongs to Allah, and he gives it to whoever he chooses. This is someone who is detached from the world and who understand who would who understands properly who is the owner of the world and the controller of events.

And so all we are trying to do, if your objective in analyzing events, is to actually look at what Allah's plan is for the world and then trying to analyze and understand it piece by piece how it's all coming together. And I think, again, this is this is part of psychological decolonization, at least for us, for for for Muslims, is to have is to sort of reclaim a kind of epistemological sovereignty where where our sources of knowledge, our source of knowledge is affirmed, and we don't just accept their narrative about themselves and accept their frameworks that they have said are the superior frameworks for understanding the world and interpreting reality because they're simply not. They are on misguidance and their own society And the way that they have managed their society is ample evidence with that. So we have to recognize ourselves, reaffirm for ourselves that revelation, that the Quran and the sunnah are the absolutely supreme and nonnegotiable sources of knowledge that judge all other frameworks, not vice versa. We don't use their frameworks for judging our frameworks or for judging our source of knowledge.

Rather, we use our source of knowledge for judging their frameworks, and then we can start to get somewhere. But we have to reclaim that and not and not feel any any hint of inferiority or embarrassment about interpreting reality and understanding reality and analyzing reality through the lens of Quran and Sunnah.