"the Muslims must unite!"

You know, there are some statements that make my brain short circuit. I can't process them. There are always these super banal remarks that just by how generic and how simplistic they are, they deny the complexity of reality. And just as inevitably, they are treated as and presented as self evident truisms, which just demonstrates the contemptible laziness of good intentions when good intentions are not accompanied by any actual intellectual work. And maybe the king of all of these types of exasperating vapid statements is the statement the needs to unite.

I can't describe how much I loathe this statement. There's too many layers to my loathing of this statement. I barely know where to begin. First of all, I suppose I detest what this statement implies, and it implies many things. One of those things is that it implies that any sort of effort that Muslims might get involved in is ultimately futile because after all there's no unity.

Nothing is gonna work unless and until the Muslims are united, whatever that means. And another maybe more obvious implication of this statement is that it implies that currently the Muslims have an insufficient sentiment of brotherhood between them, and this is demonstrably false and offensive. There is no religious group that so reliably cares about everyone else within the group than the Muslims on a micro level and on a macro level. So this implication is defamation in my view, and I despise it. But of course also, and here's sort of the main thing, what on earth do you even mean by unity?

The term is so vague as to be meaningless. I think this is a completely useless objective. No. I don't think that the Muslims need to be united or anyway not more united than they already are. I don't think that lack of unity is the core challenge that Muslims are facing right now.

Now I do think that we need to stop indulging in divisiveness. Now that may sound like the same thing, but it's not. As a matter of fact, saying that the ummah needs to be united is very oftentimes itself a divisive statement and a divisive sentiment. Because again, you are imposing an implied assumption of disunity. And most of the time, the statement the ummah needs to unite is usually followed by some version of the Muslims need to unite upon the correct aqidah, or the Muslims need to unite by returning to Quran and Sunnah, which of course actually translates to, I believe that all 2,000,000,000 Muslims in the world should agree with my opinion about various minutiae of Islam about which there is no actual need for unanimous agreement, insisting that Muslims must unite in their opinion regarding trivial and permissibly divergent issues is practically speaking the same thing as being actively divisive.

Look, if you believe in the five pillars of Islam and the six pillars of iman and you are eligible for janazah when you die, you're my brother, you're my sister, and I'm with you, period. And everything else is just family squabbles that do not fragment the family in any way whatsoever unless you let them. Now on a practical level, again, I loathe this statement because what does it even mean in a practical sense? The Muslims are spread across every corner of the globe and every individual Muslim population have their own challenges and have their own legitimate and pressing needs that they understand better than any other section of the ummah. So not only can each subset of the ummah not be expected to subordinate their issues to some other subset of the ummah for the sake of unity and who is to decide which subsets needs and issues are the priority here.

But also unity is not even always the most useful thing for addressing problems within a population. They may be better served by a diversity of opinion, a diversity of approaches by multiple parties with a variety of ideas. I mean not to mention the fact that there is no unifying global strategy for the ummah to pursue a nonexistent unanimously agreed upon objective. Not only is there no universal goal and no strategy for achieving it, there can't be. But what you can have is Muslims uniting under the principle of seeking positive improvements in their societies because that's what you do have.

Of course, we have that. Everyone wants that. But this will inevitably necessarily be pursued in multiple ways with differing theories, differing priorities, different agendas because that's the only way it ever can be done, and that's perfectly fine. This is not a problem. And if what you mean by unity is for this dynamic to not exist, then you are advocating a vision that is entirely unhelpful.

And if what you actually mean by saying that the Muslims must unite, if what you actually mean is, oh, the Muslims need a single unifying to govern all the Muslims everywhere, if that's what you mean, then you're even less interested in doing anything realistic, practical, or useful to benefit the ummah than I thought. And I have yet to meet anyone who claims to be advancing the idea of the Hilafa who has ever improved the lives of the Muslims. But I've seen plenty of those people who advocate that idea, who have made the lives of Muslims substantially worse. Most of the people who say things like the Muslims must unite, they're not serious people. They're not people who have any place in political discussion or in engaging in the real world socioeconomic and geopolitical realities that the Muslims are facing.

There are people who have some degree of feeling around these issues, but not enough feeling to motivate them to learn, to analyze, to strategize, to organize, or to genuinely participate in trying to help address the various issues and situations that Muslims face around the world. So do me a favor. If you ever feel inclined to comment, well, you know, brother, the Muslims need to unite. Instead, just say Allah keep scrolling.