Emotional vs Useful approaches to injustice

There's a question that I get frequently in a variety of different forms, which is basically how do you expect the Muslims to just remain silent in the face of oppression or tyranny or human rights abuses or, injustice? And this question is usually framed within the context of trying to justify rebellion or any way to justify that form of opposition or protest which more or less declares the government to be invalid, to be illegitimate. So first of all, this is obviously a false dichotomy to say that either you have to be silent or you have to revolt. There's other options, but the fact that someone cannot see that there are other options indicates to me that this is someone who, yes, indeed, should probably remain silent. Because it means that they are someone who is entirely unfamiliar with how the world works, unfamiliar with the power dynamics in their own society, unfamiliar with strategic thinking, critical thinking, or pretty much thinking overall.

They are emotionally impulsive, reactive, and uninformed. And bleeding hearts can very often cause other people to actually bleed because they are not concerned in the least with being effective, but they are exclusively concerned with the emotional gratification they get by lashing out at what makes them angry. One of the things that I love the most about the Islamic sciences is the practice of reconciling or collating ayat and hadiths, juristic rulings, principles, and so on to help achieve a more comprehensive understanding of each ayah hadith or ruling or principle. So for example, any adult Muslim person must be able to collate and combine and reconcile the hadith about changing the wrong when you see it either by your hand, by your tongue, or by your heart. This has to be reconciled with the hadith about minding your own business and leaving what does not concern you.

I don't think that it's possible to properly understand either of these hadiths in isolation of one another. You have to understand these two hadiths together. So when you see something that you think seems wrong, the first thing that you have to do is determine whether or not that thing falls in the category of things that's your business. And of course, order to do that, you have to be able to define what constitutes your business. Does it impact you?

Is it your responsibility? Do you have authority over that issue or those who are involved in that issue? Or are there others who have authority and responsibility over that issue and over those who are involved in it? So if you have then determined that this wrong or this issue does fall within the category of things that are your business, then the next thing that you have to do is honestly evaluate your capacity to positively affect it by your hand, by your speech, or by your heart. And this evaluation is more complicated than you might think because you have to actually understand clearly this issue or this situation.

You have to as much as possible try to consider a 360 degree view of this issue or this situation, including considering any predictable repercussions of any actions that you might take. Otherwise, you could very easily take actions that just make matters worse or that create new problems. And of course, you have to try to understand as much as possible all of the various dynamics that are at play in any situation which you are hoping to have a positive impact on. Because any situation or any issue that you might be reacting to has come into existence by multiple factors, multiple actors. It has a history.

For any situation, for any issue, you're looking at a product that was created by multiple ingredients. It's comprised of many parts. Many of them may be moving parts. Moving parts that are connected to other moving parts. You have to try to understand all of this and then once you do understand it then you take that knowledge to try to develop a strategy for dealing with it and addressing it effectively.

Now for most mature adult people, most of what I just said is a process that they go through when they see something that upsets them in a matter of seconds. This is how grown ups function in the world. Thinking people who have lives and responsibilities don't have the privilege of indulging in emotional outbursts anytime they see something that appears to them to be an injustice or wrong. And if they see something that appears wrong and also falls within the category of things that are their business or their responsibility to do something about, what do they do? They set about planning how to effectively address it.

This is the boring part, and this is the part that emotional people never do because it's unsatisfying, it's tedious, it's thankless, it's time consuming, it's frustrating and difficult. And by the time they're prepared to properly effectively address a wrong or an injustice, the emotional people have already satiated their outrage and moved on to something else because they're actually self indulgent children who just get emotional gratification and a feeling of self righteousness from their outrage. They do not genuinely care about solving problems. You can apply all of what I'm talking about to other less crucial areas of life to see how it works. For example, there are people who are overweight and they feel something about it.

They get depressed, they get sad, they get frustrated, they get angry, and then they eat cake. And then there are other people who are serious about the health risks of obesity and they set about making a responsible diet plan and exercise plan which they will follow in a disciplined manner for the course of weeks or months or even years to achieve the positive end of the positive objective. Now, the people who have an emotional feeling, an emotional response or emotional reaction to their obesity, those are the people that will fall for crash diets, diet fads, will fall for diet pills, weight loss pills, fat burning pills, how to lose weight in your sleep, how to get six pack abs in three weeks, and of course, the only weight that they will ever lose will be from their wallets. And this is the same kind of person and the same kind of, outcome that you get from people who have an emotional reaction when they see something that they perceive to be unjust or oppressive or what have you. They will fall for cheap slogans, empty rhetoric, symbolic protests, pointless grandstanding, and political fraudsters, or worse.

They'll fall for rebellion, uprising, societal chaos, and destruction. Now, if you don't know me, you might think from having seen a couple of my videos that I'm some sort of an apologist for the Arab or the Muslim regimes like Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia or The UAE. But again, that would mean that you don't know me at all. Just a few years ago, I was demonized in both the Egyptian and the western media internationally because of the things that I was writing in support of the anti coup resistance in Egypt. I was wrongly accused of advocating violence when in fact I didn't advocate violence, and that's precisely why I was being demonized.

I was being demonized because I was suggesting effective strategies for the anti coup resistance in Egypt by which they could not only avoid Egypt turning into a civil war situation like Syria, but also could avoid the neoliberal conquest of the country. I was demonized because power wants opposition to be emotional and unstrategic. They want you to be impulsive and unthinking. What they do not want you to be is patient, informed, and disciplined. They want you to have emotional outbursts, fiery rhetoric, and symbolic protests.

What they don't want you to have is a plan. So no, I'm not interested in anyone's self aggrandizing outrage. As far as I'm concerned, they are ultimately just accomplices to whatever wrong it is that they are being outraged about. And the truth is that they are the most reliable allies and enablers of those who are committing the wrongs even while they imagine in their minds that they're rebels.