"Not a Da'ee"

I think it's delusional for anyone to think that the morally right thing to do, the Islamically correct thing to do is any course of action or inaction that has the predictable and proven result of keeping Muslims weak, subjugated, and impoverished. I don't see any moral good in that. Allah told us that we are the best ummah ever raised among mankind. We enjoin good and forbid evil. And I don't know of any Muslim community anywhere in the world that doesn't have members of that community who are enjoining good and who are forbidding evil.

Every Muslim community in the world has its, has its imams, has its, and just regular brothers and sisters who are constantly offering the to one another. The condition of enjoining good and forbidding evil is met in every Muslim community in the world, both in the Muslim world and in non Muslim countries, in the real world and in the virtual world. I mean, you can't look in the comment section on almost any video or any post on social media without finding some Muslim, quoting an ayah or quoting a hadith or giving some kind of Islamic advice. We've got that covered in my opinion. I think we've got that more than covered.

As I've said repeatedly, I am not a diy. I'm not an Islamic scholar. I'm not a preacher. And I'll be honest with you. I'm not worried about your akhirah.

I know that may sound like a terrible thing to say, and it will shock the ears of some people. But your is your problem. It's not my problem. I'm not gonna be asked, your questions on your and I'm not gonna be held accountable for your soul. I'm only gonna be held accountable for my soul.

There are plenty of people out here giving dawah and teaching aqidah and so forth, and that's all commendable. But that's not me. I'm worried about your dunya. I'm worried about the dunya of the Muslims, and I'm interested in strategies that will improve the conditions for Muslims in this world. If I can help to make Muslims lives in this dunya better, maybe it will be a source of betterment for me in my akhirah.

So that's my primary focus. I have three priorities that I've talked about many times, Muslim economic sovereignty, Muslim political independence, and Muslim psychological decolonization. And I don't subscribe to the idea, that Muslims will never achieve any of these things unless or until they become more pious or more righteous. I think that you, cannot possibly have understood, the gravity of if you believe that. More pious or more righteous?

Then who? You can't tell me that the Muslims aren't more pious and more righteous than the people who are oppressing us. We don't have to become perfect before we deserve to not be subjugated. We already deserve not only to not be subjugated, we deserve to be free. We deserve to be independent.

We deserve to be and we deserve to have authority. And in order to achieve that, we have to have power. And achieving power in a world that's full of competing, ruthless, malicious, unjust, and immoral powers, that's going to require strategy. That's going to require tact. It's gonna require patience and some degree of compromise and trade offs.

But I believe that we're in an historic moment, with the pivot of the global economy to the global South and to the East and the dismantling of the post World War two global order. And as I've said, the owners and controllers of global financialized capital are not going to, fight this pivot. They're expediting this pivot. They're facilitating this pivot. What they're gonna fight is for control of managing the shift.

They wanna maintain the status quo. They want the neoliberal model to continue. And in my opinion, that's the challenge that we have to win. We have to commandeer this transition that's taking place and develop a new model, a model that's guided by our principles, by our dean, and no one can do this but us. Because look, we believe in trade.

We believe in the free market. Muslims believe in private property, profit making, so on and so on. All of that's fine. But in an age when the private sector has disproportionate influence over the conditions in society, we also need to constrain business within the moral framework of Islam. Business, the private sector, companies, corporations, and so on, and the societal impact of business must not overstep or undermine or interfere with the of the Sharia, the objectives of the Sharia.

Trade, investment, business, business operations, profit making, all of those things cannot be allowed to deteriorate the people's religion or exploit the people or deprive the people, ruin their livelihoods, drive them into debt, diminish their honor, destroy families, pillage their resources, increase the misery index of the population. Muslim political and economic power, in my opinion, would reinject morality into the political and economic spheres. It would reconnect, morality with the private sector, which the enlightenment very deliberately divorced. One of the real motives behind the separation of church and state, was precisely to liberate business and profiteering from any form of codified morality. And there's no one who can correct that catastrophic blunder other than the Muslims.

So, yes, I am transparently and unapologetically interested in the dunya of the Muslims. And in my opinion, working to help Muslim states and Muslim economies to gain power, consolidate power, stabilize power. This is essential to protecting, defending, and spreading Islam. After Othman bin Afan was murdered, the court dispute between Ali bin Abitaleb and Muawiyah was that Muawiyah wanted Ali to execute justice immediately for Uthman, but Ali understood that he needed to stabilize his own authority first. Muawiyah was morally right, but strategically wrong.

Ali was strategically right and morally right because he knew that his intention was to execute justice for Uthman, but to do so without creating more fitna and more insecurity and chaos. He had a longer term view, and this is the way I look at things or the way I try to look at things. Of course, every moment that the killers of Uthman walked free was distasteful and hated by Ali bin Abi Talib, but he was wise enough to know that he had to consolidate and strengthen his own position before he could act. He had to position himself securely, to be able to take the necessary actions. And this is what I think the Muslims need to do today.

We need to grow our power. We need to increase our leverage, consolidate, and stabilize our positions, increase our spheres of influence, build our networks of solidarity, accumulate private sector power until we don't have to adhere to anyone else's economic model or anyone else's political program. And in my opinion, if you're against that, if you're obstructing that, if you are hindering that, or if you're belittling that type of endeavor, then you're not serious about Islam, and you're not serious about righteousness, and you're not serious about justice because you are determined to keep the Muslims weak and subject and under the heel of the immoral owners and controllers of global financialized capital. And like I said, don't tell me what good is Muslim power if it's given to bad Muslims. Didn't we want the Byzantines, to defeat the Persians?

Why? Because at least they were people of the book. So don't tell me that you don't wanna see any kind of Muslim succeed over the, shaythonic, atheistic, nefs worshiping owners and controllers of global financialized capital. Don't you dare tell me that you think that those people are better than even the worst of the Muslims, that those people have more right to control our affairs than a Muslim who maybe sins and does wrong day in day out, but who testifies Muhammad Rasulullah. Of course, he's better.

Of course, it's better for everyone if he succeeds. Of course, Muslim power is better than atheistic power. The worst Muslim guilty of major sins is gonna be the one who gets saved from the hellfire by the intercession of Rasulullah himself. So don't you try to tell me that you would rather have some western oligarch having power over your country than him. I mean, would throw a Muslim under the bus just over his sins, but you would welcome a non Muslim despite his kufr.

And you probably would try to justify that on the basis of that's insane. Religious critique and criticism is crucial. No doubt about it. This is the most, unique aspect of how we approach the world as Muslims. And the fact that we are constantly reminding each other about Allah, about the halal, and about the haram.

This is precisely why we are the only ones who can reshape the economic and political order in a just and moral way. But just like Muawiyah, you should also understand that you may well understand the morality in any given situation, but not understand the strategy that is at play in that situation. Someone might have thought that Salahdin, was negligent or even immoral because he was instead fighting the Fatimids while the Crusaders were occupying the holy Land, but that was strategy. No doubt there were some people who believed that he was not following the right Islamic way, but of course he was right. And if Salahdin had died before he ever had the opportunity to raise his sword against crusaders, Allah would have known his intention.

He would have known his strategy and the reasons why he did what he did and his reward would not have been diminished. So moral and religious advice and critique has its place, but so does strategy and intentions. So like I said, I'm not a diy. I'm not a teacher of Islam, and no one should try to learn their deen from me. And frankly, you shouldn't be learning the deen from any talking head on the Internet.

You should learn your deen from human beings face to face in the masjid, in school, from scholars and students of knowledge. You should take the religion seriously enough that you dedicate actual study to it. Don't be like those people who think that they can browse, WebMD and pretend that they're medical students. You can't browse Islam QA and call yourself a student of knowledge. Take the religion more seriously than that.

Take Islamic disciplines more seriously than that. And that's your own job for your own soul. I can't help you with your soul and you can't help me with mine. But what we can both do is help each other and help all of the Muslims to make our situation in the dunya better. And hopefully by doing that, we can also improve our own standing in the akhirah, insha'Allah.