Qur'anic Psychological Decolonisation | Episode 4

So the overriding mindset in the West, is one of materialism. I've discussed how I think that this, how this mentality developed over the centuries, and the internal spiritual foundation of it, meaning the harsh conditions in primordial Europe, and how the people there responded to those harsh conditions with both bitterness and desperation, ultimately by reliance upon and glorification of violence as the most effective way to obtain material resources and to improve their conditions. They interpreted, in my opinion, their lack of natural resources as somehow a kind of a prejudice by Allah against them that they had been, they thought, more or less abandoned by God in this cold inhospitable terrain of ancient Europe. And thus, they learned to fend for themselves. Because also remember, unless we're talking about, you know, a level of subsistence that is literally inadequate for survival, anything less than some bread to eat, some water to drink, and enough garments to protect you from the elements, unless you're talking about something like that, a level of deprivation like that, generally speaking, any sense of deprivation, that feeling that you are being deprived, the other side of that coin, or the actual driving sentiment behind that feeling of deprivation, is a feeling of entitlement.

And that feeling of entitlement can then inflate into a sense of superiority, and as we all know, that's what happened with the West. This state of deprivation that they were in or they perceived themselves to be in, amplified the importance of material resources for them, and they became all important. And their spiritual needs, their normal human desire for some sort of a relationship with the transcendent, because they were pagans, that was more or less relegated to various forms of jinn worship, I e, She'athin, whom they would look to as gods and crafted rituals around, you know, worship of nature and so forth. You know, they assigned natural phenomenon to this or that so called deity, which is just a jinn. Religious rituals were framed, you know, around the seasons.

They worshiped animals and so forth, on and on. So obviously, they took a path that only compounded, their immersion in the dunya, and their entire so called civilization developed from this particular bent, in their worldview and their concept of life. I would argue that with this beginning, atheism was was always going to be an inevitability in the West because basically their whole so called civilization originated from the belief, as Allah said about the Kufar's belief in the Quran, he said that they think that there's nothing beyond this worldly life. We live and we die, and time is the only thing that destroys us. That's the thinking of Kufar.

Well, there's nowhere for that to go but atheism. And you can take this ayah and find it reflected in everything about Western so called civilization. Everything that that developed from it, everything that they have achieved, and every idea that they ever took on from capitalism to Marxism, from so called empiricism to even their version of Christianity. All of it reflects an absolute and exclusive belief in dunya. Yes.

Even Christianity. I mean, literally, you turned Allah into a physical human being walking on the earth, And you took real world actions out of the equation of salvation, thereby foundationally separating religion and worship from actual life in this world. You know, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, meaning even with your Christianity, you're still allowed to do whatever it is you think you have to do to get by in the dunya regardless. And again, inevitably, in my opinion, this became the separation of church and state. It was a natural progression, because you never thought religion should interfere with worldly affairs in the first place.

You never thought it should interfere with how you actually live your life. I mean, this is what was principally behind the grievances against the church and its authority in the first place. They themselves, the church, were using religion for power and for controlling the dunya and for accumulating wealth. They even used religion for worldly purposes. And at the core, at the center of all of that, at the core of everything, was the obsession with dunya and an exclusive belief in the dunya, and a denial of the akhirah, denial of the ghayv, and finally, and again I believe inevitably, denial of the existence of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.

And then, of course, as we know, of course, they they utilized religion, utilized Christianity as a propaganda cover and a manipulation tactic for colonization. A brainwashing tool to facilitate exploitation, dunya obsessed, dunya focused, dunya driven policies of exploitation and oppression in the the global South. So religion was only ever a flimsy veneer laid on top of a worldly materialistic wealth and resource obsessed mentality and and and approach to life. Now part of our process of psychological decolonization requires again the objective dismantling of the myths of western supremacy. The myth that their mentality and their approach to the world is somehow superior to ours.

Well, as they say, you will know a tree by its fruits. So whether it's the pagan period or the camouflaged atheism of the pre enlightenment Christian period or the modern openly godless period of the West, the fruits are stunningly bitter and evil. This mentality has been behind colonization, chattel slavery, the feudal system, countless wars, and created societies with unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a miniscule fraction of the population. Wealth disparity is unprecedented. There's vicious class warfare, disease, mental and emotional illness, depression, suicide, medically supervised murder, the Holocaust, dozens of genocides, the development of weaponry that can destroy the entire planet within minutes, And in fact, whole economies centered on the development of these types of technologies.

Imagine, a whole economy powered, by improving techniques of violence and slaughter. I mean, did you know that that's why you have an iPhone? That's why there's the Internet. That's why there's GPS systems, mobile phone cameras, computers, Bluetooth, on and on. All of these things, all of these, were developed for military purposes, purposes of warfare.

They've never been, innovative, for the sake of humanity. They were never innovative for the sake of making our lives better, but for the sake of taking our lives better. But to them, in their materialistic mindset, their dunya centric mentality, the fact that these killing technologies have passed into the commercial sector, and everyone gets to enjoy them, so they think that that absolves them of any moral blame, for their passion for murder and pillage and plunder. And like I said before, that's their main defense of their so called civilization when you criticize it. They say we have nice things.

We invented cool useful stuff. So you see the fundamentally inescapable materialistic scale by which they measure the value and worth of their civilization, so called. They genuinely think that if we weigh the iPhone, the smartphone against the vast death and destruction that produced it, they still come out ahead. They think that they're exonerated from the the contribution of misery and bloodshed and carnage that they inflicted on the world in order to achieve, this material contribution. Never mind, that for most of this technology, unspeakable suffering and oppression and exploitation are ongoing requirements of production.

And they're not even trying to innovate ways, to produce these things that would eliminate the immorality from the supply chain, from the value chain. They're not even interested in minimizing the oppression and exploitation. The usefulness of the technology justifies the means in their mind. They think that these, material achievements legitimize them and make them superior. Never mind the human cause, the immorality, the evil through which they achieve those material, accomplishments.

Now contrast that with what typically motivated scientific and technological, innovations in the Muslim world. Is completely different. Our advancements were not based on being more efficient at war and killing. Our advancements were driven by ayat from Quran about reflecting on the signs of Allah in the natural world. They were driven by desire to not only make our people's lives better, but to glorify and celebrate Allah.

Our creativity was based on our worship of our creator and a desire to please him. It wasn't driven by either marshal or commercial motives, but by the desire and the motive of service to Allah and to our and to mankind overall. It's driven by a sense of duty and responsibility to our first of all, and then to our fellow human beings. And told us that seeking knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim, and that the best people are those who are the most beneficial to the people. And Allah said that between the heavens and the earth, there are signs for people who have reason.

Cultivation of intellect and, the advancement of knowledge for the benefit of society is intrinsic in Islam. And this is what motivated our thinkers, that motivated our scientists and inventors and so on. There was no martial or commercial dimension, to their motives. In fact, there are so many things, in Islam that we cannot engage in, because even if they're lucrative, they're immoral. So unlike the West, we forego the profitable in favor of the moral and the ethical, whereas they forego the moral and the ethical in favor of the profitable.

It's completely different. The whole ethos of Islam, the character of Islam is service. We literally think of ourselves as slaves. We serve Allah, serve our families, we serve our communities, we serve our nation, our ummah, and we serve broader humanity. We neither have a sense of deprivation nor entitlement.

We were taught that the best wealth is contentment, not that contentment is found in wealth. We understand and we accept that Allah is the provider of sustenance, and that our provision has been written for us before we even came out of the womb. Not a single crumb of bread, we believe this as Muslims, not a single crumb of bread that has not been written for us will ever reach us. And whatever has not been written for us will never be in our grasp, even if we spend a lifetime trying to get it. And that's not fatalism.

It's contentment, it's gratefulness, and it's satisfaction. You know how they talk about the, the so called, scarcity mindset and the abundance mindset, but we have neither. We have an assured mindset. We have the assurance that our provision, has already been fixed for us. So we never have to compromise, we never have to humiliate ourselves for money, we never have to sell out, we never have to exploit or manipulate or cheat or pillage or subjugate other people just to get material resources.

And we know that it's the same for our children. Allah has written their provision as well. So you don't see Muslims avoiding having children because they're afraid of how much it's gonna cost. Again, unlike the West, where, increasingly, they see children as a burden, not a blessing. They don't want more mouths to feed as they say, because they still in some deep recesses of their brain think that they're still living in some cave in Europe, and that they have to scrounge and struggle and fight for any scrap of food, and they don't wanna share, even with their own offspring.

They think that feeding, their own children means starving themselves. And it doesn't matter if if we're talking literally about thinking that, giving children food is taking food away from themselves, or they think that children are going to somehow deplete their wealth, and crap their lifestyle, and lower their standard of living. That's the way they think about having children. We don't think like that. Children do nothing but enrich your life and your your your quality of life.

And again, look what these contrasting attitudes have wrought for their respective peoples, for them and for us. Demographically, the West is going extinct. The whole global economy is shifting in our direction precisely because your way of thinking has betrayed you, and our way of thinking has kept us, the most cohesive, the biggest, and the youngest population in the world. You know, when an individual follows Shaitan, relies upon Shaitan, seeks help from Shaitan, he may get some momentary benefit, but ultimately Shaitan will humiliate them. He's just playing with him.

That goes for individuals, and that also goes for civilizations. The matchstick of the West was bright for a moment, but it's already burning out. This is why I say you have to connect your mind to the continuum of history, the long view. You know, it's like the ayah that talks about the, how they take a step in the darkness, whenever there's a flash of lightning. When there's a a a flash of light, then they move.

But then the light is abruptly and quickly gone again, and they're lost. Well, in the broad scale of history, Western so called civilization has been just such a moment, just a moment, just a flash of light. Yes. It's bright, and, yes, they move fast when it flashes, but we're walking in the sunlight, past, present, and future. So you shouldn't be amazed, at the brief flare that the West has been, no matter how startling and how impressive it may seem.

It's just a spark, a hiccup, between a dark history and a dark future. You know, the Crusaders, controlled Jerusalem for almost one hundred years. Muslims were born, lived, and died who only ever knew Al Quds under a European colonizer control. There were Muslims who were born, lived, and died in the during the who never got to hear the being called correctly. You know, we were persecuted by the for over two hundred years to one degree or another.

There were Muslims who never got to see the end of that, and who may have thought it never would end, but it did, it did end. And the tyranny and the domination of the West is no different. It will be just another footnote in our history, and their period of domination, and power in the world and influence is gonna be a footnote in their history. And look at the difference. The overwhelming majority of Western history has been miserable struggle, deprivation, strife, cruelty, and barbarism.

That's between their flashes of prosperity and stability. But see how they are, during those flashes. Even more barbarous and more violent than when they're in their periods of darkness. They committed more atrocities and more brutal savagery in modern times than they ever did in pre modern times. Their periods of ascendancy are characterized by intensified and larger scale violence and oppression than their periods of decline.

And by ascendancy and decline, I mean periods of relative power and prosperity versus periods of instability and relative deprivation and lack of power or influence. So when they're doing well, so called, when they're doing well, relatively speaking, it does not make them better, it makes them worse. All the negative characteristics of their so called civilization just get amplified and intensified. Meanwhile, the only time that you see the Muslim world deteriorating in its values and its religiosity and overall moral character is when it is being dominated by the West. Any moral decline, in our part of the world is directly and causally connected to colonization.

And when we have periods of power and prosperity, you see what we achieve. You see how we are. We excel in justice and morality. We cultivate decency and goodness. Everyone who ever came, under Muslim influence was made better by it, not just materially, but morally.

We spread fairness and social welfare. We uplift societies. We nourish contentment and peace and stability and harmony. Even today, even in some of our most pillaged and colonized countries, our people remain steadfast in their principles and their moral character. Our charitableness, our decency, it's all there until now.

And our poor, our oppressed, our exploited, our victimized populations, victimized by the West, our people are still happier and more content than westerners, more hospitable, more kind, more generous, more peaceful, more compassionate, and more rooted, and more grounded, and more conscientious about morality until now. We have to be forced to be bad, or they have to be forced to be good. I've said it before, and it's undeniable that when you see any Muslim, who is morally confused, you are inevitably looking at a Muslim who is westernized, colonized in his mentality, in his personality, and in his psyche. The West causes confusion, it causes cognitive dissonance, and it causes mania. But Islam causes clarity and certainty and calm.

So, yes, when we rise and when they rise, our qualities, our respective qualities are amplified. Their qualities are amplified, and our qualities are amplified, and the difference is stark. And, of course, the difference is stark because, of course, we as a nation, as an Ummah, did not begin, did not originate from the pre Islamic desert Arabs, nor from the pre Islamic, communities of the subcontinent, or the Malay Archipelago, or the the the peoples of North Africa, and so on. Whatever any of us was before we were Muslim, when Islam came, we were born as a new nation on the earth, or rather we we we merged into the history of believers from the time of Adam regardless of ethnicity, regardless of tribe, location, language, or what have you. Our belief, caused us to transcend our connection to the history and the development of our respective peoples, lifted from the confines of that history.

And the nation that we became was one based upon, built upon, and developed from religious and moral beliefs, not any of our, various anthropological backgrounds. So, yes, the West is what it is because of how they began, and we are what we are because of how we began. And that's why we are a nation unlike any other, because we never had a a primitive beginning. Because our origin literally comes, from the message sent down by Allah. We're a nation born from revelation.

So right from the start, we began, as a moral civilization. We didn't become one. We are the moral civilization, the only moral civilization that ever existed across time from Adam until today. There never was a time when we weren't civilized. We don't consider, the Jahiliyah period, the ignorant period of our respective people's histories as any more relevant to who we are today than a man would consider his period of development in the womb of his mother, as relevant to who he is today as an adult.

For non Muslims, for the West, they have yet to emerge. They have yet to, transcend their history, and they have yet to therefore, become truly civilized.