Coffee Conversations | Liberation on our own terms

Okay. So the factors in society that lead to colonize mindsets and the past and present. So

Well, obviously, is actual invasion and and actual physical colonization military and economic colonization. That was Yeah. That's the beginning of it. They they understood that they have to colonize your mind. They they came in to colonize your societies physically, militarily, economically, whatever.

But that's not sustainable if they don't colonize you psychologically, if they don't colonize your mind and change the way you think. So that you have to think like them, because otherwise they don't have anything to make you think that they're superior other than their their actual physical power. So, I mean they understood that it's not it's not sustainable, it's not viable to rely exclusively upon military force and and force of arms or strength or what have you to dominate people. You have to dominate them psychologically, which means that you have to you have to superimpose your way of thinking, your system of prioritization, your system of assigning value upon the colonized people, so that they will start to think of you the way you think of yourselves as superior. Because there's nothing actually superior about you in terms of civilizationally, culturally, morally, in terms of your actual values, in terms of your sophistication, in terms of your refinement.

There's nothing superior about you, you're inferior in every way. And that's proven by the fact that you've colonized these people, which is a brutal, savage, primitive thing to do. So you've already proven by the fact that you're even there to oppress those people that you're primitive and you're not as evolved and you're not as refined or civilized as they are. So now you have to come up with some way to convince those people that you're that they're actually inferior to you. And the only way to do that is to is to implant in their minds a whole different system of value.

And then that pervades throughout the whole society, and that's gonna be done through, obviously through the curriculum that you impose upon them, the education system that you impose upon them. Because that's one of the first things that they would always do is to start schools, and they would take credit for that, like we're educating these people. No, you're you're mis educating them. You're trying to make them ignorant because without without without sort of industrial industrial scale indoctrination and propaganda, the people themselves already know what you are and what you're about. So you have to make a very organized and systematic effort to indoctrinate the population, which is what they called education.

To to to the whole purpose of it was to make them it's not even just about education, it's about trying to implant upon them a whole approach to life, a whole way of thinking about the world, which they're dictating. They're trying to to make themselves the arbiters of truth. The ones who can explain reality to you is the colonizers. The one who can explain to you the way of the world, and the way that you should interact with the world, and what your role is in the world, they want to be the ones to dictate that to you. But we know as Muslims obviously, that the one who created us is the one who tells us about creation, the one who tells us about our role in creation, role in the world, what the world is for, what the world is like, how we're supposed to operate in the world and all of that.

That's there's only one who can tell us how to do that and that's Allah and Allah and Rasulullah as our source of information about the world and our information about ourselves. And that's what their whole education system was about. That they that they established in the Muslim world and in all of the lands that they colonized in the global South. The whole point was to the whole point was to disconnect us from the religion and from the understanding that the religion gives us about ourselves and about the world and about them and what they do. You know, they wanted to they they they wanted to reinterpret reality for us in a way that would make them basically really like the like the word in the Quran, to be to be the ones who determine what reality is for us, and what our role is, and what our purpose in life is, that they they think they they can dictate that to us.

So this is this is, you know, among the practical ways that they would do that, and then there's so many, you know, related indirect ways that that was manifested, in terms of like how the colonizers would reward certain people, you know, they would reward behavior, it was a system of reward and punishment, that you would be rewarded for capitulation and conformity, whether you believed it or not. And then generation after generation it soaks in, you know. And then when it when it when it sort of transferred over to American imperialism, American empire, American empire hasn't been enforced the same way that British imperialism was, or Portuguese, or Spanish, or French, and that it hasn't been primarily through military force. Although there are obviously many examples of them doing that. But it's developed into a different system of rule because of know mass media and globalization and so on that they're able to National Monetary Fund.

Yeah. Yeah. The institutions, yeah. In post World War two, I mean, we can really say that the American empire, even though there were there are examples like in The Philippines and Mexico and so on, of American empire prior to World War two, prior, you know, in the 19 eighteenth nineteenth century. But really the American empire, we can say started 1948, 1947.

And that's why that's why I've said many times, it's gonna be the shortest empire in history. Because it's not it's not even gonna make a 100, it's not even gonna be a 100 long. So they had the Bretton Woods system, they had the United Nations, they came up with all these so called international institutions that were just the internationalization of American domination and American control and American enforcement of American policy through so called international organizations. It was just a they were just mechanisms, just tools for internationalizing American policy without making it look like it was American policy. So it didn't look like it was America that was enforcing these things, it was the so called international community.

Civil order?

Yeah, the rules based order. Their rules and their orders. And after generations after generations after generations the psychological colonization is so pervasive, and it's and it infects, you know, every area of our lives and our thinking. My my position with regards to the whole the whole topic of, secularism, there was never a change in the West. They didn't ever go from a theocracy to a to a to a secular.

They've never that's never happened. It's always been worldly. It's always been it's just passed from one authority to another to decide what what you can do and what you can't do. It's never been based on religion at all. It was just they they call it secular, or they call it theocratic, or the rule of religion or whatever, because the people who were in charge were the church.

That's all. It's just who who has the power. But the basis upon which decisions were made has nothing to do with religion, has nothing to do with morality or values or principles or thinking about God or anything like that. It's it's it's always worldly, always. And the same thing and the same and and the opposite argument is true in the Muslim world.

I don't care if you have a government that's that that's so called is secular. Muslims don't act like that. Muslims don't make decisions like that. Muslims don't make policies like that. Religion is always a factor in our decision making.

It was never a factor for you people. Yeah. So you were always secular and we were always religious and we always will be. So the secular and theocratic, these aren't words that work for us.

Yeah.

Again, the the the really simplistic thinking level of the West, that they just have to come up with a model, and so they say theocracy.

Right.

And for them it's just a model of who is the one who is in power. Mhmm. And like I said before, you just passed it from the church fathers, to then your kings, and your feudal lords, to now oligarchs. It's just it's the same. You just it's it's exactly the same.

And and throughout, it's never changed how decisions were made. It's always based on materialistic incentives. Always. You've never changed. And we've never changed.

Even if you talk about the Khilafa and whatnot, and then 1924 it was gone, and now we have the so called nation states and secular government, whoever, Muslims still make their decisions based on Islam. It's it's They always will. They always did and they always will. It doesn't matter what kind of a government you have. Yeah.

It's just that you have a messed up template, and you think that you could put place that template over us and just describe us.

It doesn't matter what they think, but we're talking about what we think. So it's very important for us to understand that this does not apply to us. This doesn't apply to us.

It's a very important distinction that we need to make.

Yeah, and this is part of the the decolonization.

Yeah, because we run with it.

Yeah, we don't there's no reason for us to accept your terms and your labels and the way that you explain us to yourselves, and the way you explain our societies to ourselves. Because then that will do nothing but make us misunderstand ourselves and our own societies. But we understand your society, we understand ours. You don't understand ours, and you don't understand yours because you lie to yourself about yours.