What is the Shari'ah? How is it derived? Is it rationally derived or unquestioningly followed? It is a matter of principle, or can it be pragmatic? Is it only pure obedience, or does it have a coherent moral system? Is it eternal, or does it adapt to circumstances? These questions have occupied Muslims -- both "traditionalists" and "reformers" -- for the better part of the 200 years. This class will introduce the structure of the shari'ah, how it is derived from scripture, its moral philosophy, and its ability to adapt to changing realities. Most of all, it will answer the burning question today: does Islamic law need systematic reform? These questions -- and more -- will be answered in this course, which provides a systematic overview of the origins of Islamic law, its development, its moral philosophy, and how it adapts to changing times and places without the need for full scale, complete reform.

Class Schedule:

Week 1: Morality, Justice, Language, and the Shari’ah

Week 2: The Sources of the Shari’ah and Its Disagreements

Week 3: The Moral Philosophy of the Shari’ah

Week 4: Can Shari’ah Adapt to Changing Realities?

Class Details

Start Date: Saturday, October 10th
Course Length: 4 weeks
Schedule: Saturday mornings at 11: AM EST
Class Duration: 2 hours per week

About the Teacher

Saad Yacoob is a PhD Candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University where he researches the thought of Allamah Muhammad Iqbal. He is also a student of knowledge, having read texts with teachers around the world in the Hanafi madhhab. He engages Western philosophical thought as well as the Muslim legal, spiritual, and philosophical traditions. He taught a course about the structure and application of Islamic law at Georgetown University in Qatar. This course is adapted from that class.

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The world in which AI was introduced is not one which can wield it responsibly.

Every technology take the shape of the society that produces it. When railroads were introduced in India, they could have been used as a way of connecting the region for its people, growing local industries, allowing for greater movement of people and ideas; and, indeed, that did happen, but only as an accident for the real purpose of rail. The real purpose was to facilitate the systematic extraction of every ounce of wealth from India and create a military state that forcefully repressed the population at the point of the gun.

Elite British investors were drunk off the possibility of extracting every ounce of wealth from India, and so that’s what railroads did, and all good that was created by rail was an accidental byproduct of systematic extraction.

The socio-political, economic, and cultural foundation of society has not changed; indeed, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the globalization of the neo-colonial financial and trade order, the elite capture of every political system, and the normalization of skyrocketing global inequality after 1991 and its acceleration after 2008, we are worse in the moral and ethical foundations of our society than the British were in 1848. This goes far beyond capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism; the root of it is a deep rooted spiritual disease that has infected the world which drives it towards this kind of extractionary logic:

Technology is a tool that is used to pursue a society’s highest ideals; ideals which are the expressions of what a society loves the most. The entire global world order is built on the love of self as an end in and of itself. Near narcissistic levels of selfishness permeates every level of our social order: it is present in our families, in our friendships, in our communities, in our economics, in our politics. We have built an entire civilization on the belief that every thing in existence – including other humans – are simply tools for my benefit. We are a society that only knows how to love the self, no matter how destructive that love becomes.

We have destroyed our families, destroyed our communities, destroyed our countries, destroyed the very planet itself, in pursuit of our own selfish pleasure at the expense of everything else. And that is the society in which AI is being introduced. At best, LLMs will reach the epistemic limit of their models and fail to realize the promises of its theorized capacity; at worst, we will truly achieve generative AI. And the full power of that generative AI will be placed in the hands of people raised to believe that the greatest good in all the world is their own self.

At this juncture, in possibly one of the most important moments in human history, we don’t need a political, economic, or even social revolution. We need a spiritual revolution, a rekindling of the flame of love that drives a person not into themselves but higher than the heavens and into the presence of God. Man cut off from himself is a hollow shell; cut off from other men is a beast; and cut off from God is utterly lost. To transform the wandering beast that is man today, to regain his identity as human in his full capacity, he must find his way back to God.

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Depending on whom you ask, Sir Sayyid is either a hero who confronted the backwards Mullahs, or he’s a traitor to his own people.

As always, history is much more complicated than simplistic ideological narratives might want us to believe. Villains and heroes, saints and devils – these are more often best left for the Marvel movies and kept out of historical narratives. History, however, is never about the past – it is always a narrative about the present and an implied argument for the future.

The people you hail as heroes or condemn as villains reveals what you believe about your own world and where you want it to go. It rarely survives the inspection of real history.

As always, history is much more complicated than simplistic ideological narratives might want us to believe. Villains and heroes, saints and devils – these are more often best left for the Marvel movies and kept out of historical narratives. History, however, is never about the past – it is always a narrative about the present and an implied argument for the future.

The people you hail as heroes or condemn as villains reveals what you believe about your own world and where you want it to go. It rarely survives the scrutiny of real history.

This is particularly true about a character as complicated as Sir Sayyid. Born into a court family in the last days of the Mughal empire, Sir Sayyid was in many ways the final heir of an imperial style that had become entirely obsolete. The Mughal empire was at times brutal, at times repressive; but, for the vast majority of its history, it was an empire that was built on incorporating diversity, tolerating local traditions, and finding ways to harmonize the a myriad of religious and cultural heritages under a single banner. Sir Sayyid did not understand that the British were not simply a new Mughal Empire.

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We often look back at the moment of 1858 with the benefit of hindsight; we know full well what would transpire under direct British colonial rule, how India would go from accounting for 24% of the world’s GDP to 2% – how the entire legal and financial system would be structured to create a well-oiled machine of systematic extraction and degradation that would leave the average Indian in constant fear of poverty, humiliation, and famine. Sir Sayyid sat for most of his youth in the Imperial city of Delhi, isolated from the horrors of the East India Company’s rule in Bengal.

When I first read his work Asbab-i-Baghawat-i-Hind, his explanation of the reasons for the Great Rebellion of 1857, I was struck by his naivete. Sir Sayyid attempted to advise the British about pragmatic and ethical administration: how to incorporate Indians into governance; how to show respect for local traditions and religions; how to ensure the well-being of their subjects. It wasn’t until years later that I understood him. Sir Sayyid was simply advising the British that, if they wanted to successfully govern a multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic empire, they should rule like the Mughals.

Yes, Sir Sayyid was naive, and, over time, he came to understand his own early naivete. But he had good reason to be naive. Sir Sayyid, as the heir to the court tradition of the Mughal empire, had certain assumptions about good imperial rule, which included an idea lof ensuring stability, prosperity, security, and justice for all. He had no idea way of knowing that he was not talking to a new, more powerful Mughal emperor.

This was not simple imperialism. This was an entirely different beast altogether: this was the most efficient totalizing system of colonialism.

When I teach and read about Sir Sayyid today, I am much more charitable than I was twenty years ago. Sir Sayyid – like most of his countrymen – had no understanding of what it meant to be a colony. During the Great Rebellion, They witnessed 112,000 soldiers mutiny against the British and then witnessed the British slaughter them and re-establish an even firmer control over India.

It’s almost impossible for us to understand the sheer shock of the events and the urgency of their fundamental question: “what do we do now?”

In our course on Islamic Reform movements, we are exploring how each of these reform movements engaged with the “what do we do now” question? Sir Sayyid and the “modernists” approached it from the temporal lens: “what do we do now to reestablish the political and economic power of Islam?” Others, like the Ulama, will approach it from another angle: “what do we do now to ensure the correct teaching of Islam?” One can recognize the limitations of the questions and their answers, but it’s hard to fault anyone for the imperfection of their attempts.

As heirs to these traditions, it does little good to fault them, create heroes and villains, and fall into simplistic ideological narratives. It does more to learn from their questions, the benefits of their answers, and the shortcomings of their limitations.

Sir Sayyid was not a hero, and he was not a villain. He was a man in an impossible situation who did what he believed with his limited information. He is worthy of respect for his accomplishments, and he of all people would hope that we also learned the lessons of, and transcended, his limitations.

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About the Course: Most Muslims believe that the practice of Islam today is something that goes back 1400 years. While Islam at its core may be preserved, the actual practice of Islam and the structure of Muslim societies is heavily influenced by the Islamic reform movements that sprang up as a response to the colonial incursions into the Muslim world in the 19th century. This course studies the rise of reform movements in colonial India, the epicenter of global Islamic reform, and traces much of Muslim attitudes towards Islam and modernity to the narratives that were built during this era.

Who is the course for: Anyone who is trying to understand why Muslim societies engage with Islam in so many diverse ways; the general modern debates about Islam; and how Muslim intellectuals confronted the challenges of modernity

Why Colonial India: While colonialism impacted the entire Muslim world one way or the other, India experienced one of the longest and most complex colonial administrations. Indian thinkers, such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Maulana Maududi, and Muhammad Iqbal impacted global Muslim thought. Additionally, the perspectives studies here will be unique to the Indian context, but they will find parallels across the Muslim world. India is thus an ideal microcosm of a global trend in Islamic reform..

Class Schedule:

Week 1: The White Man’s Burden: Colonialism, Language, and Warring Over the Muslim Mind

Week 2: The Question of Empowerment: Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Modernism, and the Aligarh Movement

Week 3: The Ulama Strike Back: Ulama Fragmentation and Struggle for Authority

Week 4: Revival: Islam, Politics, and Composite Modernism

About the teacher: Saad Yacoob is a PhD Candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University where he researches the thought of Allamah Muhammad Iqbal. He is also a student of knowledge, having read texts with teachers around the world in the Hanafi madhhab. He engages Western philosophical thought as well as the Muslim legal, spiritual, and philosophical traditions. He taught a course about Islamic reform movements in India and Egypt at a college level in Georgetown Qatar, and this course is a lay offering of that same course.

Monetization Ethics statement: Knowledge that leads to moral and spiritual growth should be free. It is not a commodity; it should not be subject to market forces. The reality, however, is that charging for courses allows me to dedicate time and mental energy towards teaching without worrying about the cost of teaching on myself. Therefore, while I wish for a world in which courses could be given for free without restriction, that is not the reality I currently occupy, and thus I ask for a small contribution towards the course. If you need a scholarship, please don’t hesitate to indicate that. I will not gatekeep knowledge behind a paywall.

Course Details

Start Date: Saturday, September 5th
Course Length: 4 weeks
Schedule: Saturday mornings at 11:00 AM EST
Class Duration: 2 hours per week
Contribution: $60 (scholarships available)
Recordings will be made available to students

How to Register: Click Here

Reflections on the Course:

I am preparing for the first class of September’s course, “Reforming Islam,” which seeks to understand the internal logic of the various colonial-era Islamic reform movements that shape the way we understand Islam today, I am struck by two concepts that I will be explaining to my class in depth.

When the British arrived in India, they gradually took control of a region that was far too large for them to control militarily and far too diverse for a simple system of governance. India was the jewel in the crown as well as the greatest administrative nightmare.

The golden rule of every empire – Muslim, Christian, Eastern, Western, you name it – is that a revolt is best avoided rather than defeated. The decentralized power of the masses is, in the aggragate, always more powerful than centralized power; and, therefore, it is the chief objective of every centralized power to deter the mobilization and direction of that power. This is particularly true when that power has not come to rule, govern, and develop, but rather to loot, plunder, and enrich the elite of a land far removed and distant from the colony.

This brings us to the first concept we will explore in our class: legitimacy. What is legitimacy, why is legitimacy important, and how does the legitimizing narrative of an empire restrict or enable its objectives?

As the East India Company gave way to the British Empire in the governance – or, rather, loot and plunder – of India, the Empire was in a legitimacy crisis. Following the events of the Great Rebellion in 1857, whatever legitimacy the British had was in complete tatters, and it was only the force of arms that was keeping British rule together.

It was at this time that the British Empire leaned in to a strand of thinking that had been rapidly developing from the early 1800s associated most prominently with the philosopher John Stuart Mill. The Utilitarians, as they were called, didn’t believe in the hard race theories before them. Rather, they were “soft” racists in that they believed Western civilization had advanced not just in technological capacity but in moral and philosophical thinking far beyond the “rest of the world,” and it therefore had the moral obligation to bring enlightenment to the endarkened masses.

As we will see in our class, however, the race theories didn’t just disappear – rather, just as class theories merged with utilitarianism to create a theory of benevolent classism, race theories mixed with utilitarianism to create a theory of benevolent racism – what Kipling later immortalized as “The White Man’s Burden.”

We will begin from this theoretical lens – and then we will shatter it. Drawing from recent scholarship in post-colonialism, we will argue that centering all power in the colonial administration is an impoverished lens.

The Islamic reform movements we will study in the rest of the course, then, will not be seen as simple iterations of colonial thinking; rather, we will show how limited the powerful really are. In this, we will draw from Gramsci’s conception of culture and Guha’s argument of dominance without hegemony to show that Islamic reform movements were not mice dancing to the tune of the pied piper; rather, they had their own agency, and they ended up dominating spheres of life where the British had almost no cultural relevance.

And this is a significant point to make.

We feel powerless because we believe we are powerless, not because we are powerless. When we believe the elite hold all the power in society, we turn ourselves powerless by believing in our own powerlessness. When, however, we study the rise of colonial-era reform movements, we begin to realize that real power is not domination; it is legitimacy and cultural authority.

Each of the reform movements had their central questions; each had their projects; each had their methods and methodologies. And they often hated each other.

What united them, however, was a single belief: that land can be taken, gold can be taken, rights can be taken, even lives can be taken; but the mind cannot never be taken. It must be given. It is the person who goes into the depth of his own mind and conquers it that can not be conquered by anyone outside of it.

The mind is the true battlefield of war. No nation is conquered until they give up their minds; until then, they are just defeated, not surrendered. It is as Allamah Iqbal says:

Drown within yourself, 
And find the traces of life –
Even if you don’t become a man of God, 
Become at least your own man

The dervish’s words melted me
Completely when he said,
“If you bow in front of another
You have left neither body nor soul”

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[My] temperament remained free from the prison of the season
Alas, would there be one who would understand my lament?

It is breathtakingly ironic that the man who gave us perhaps the most sophisticated philosophical deconstruction of nationalism in contemporary Muslim thought is also the one who is only ever mentioned in association with nationalist narratives. Iqbal neither envisioned Pakistan, nor did he dream of a united India – Iqbal dreamt of a political arrangement where both Islam and Muslims would be free. But what did that freedom mean to him?

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To Iqbal, freedom meant a socio-cultural, political, and economic system that enabled man to achieve his God-given destiny: the perpetual growth of the human.

As a philosopher, Iqbal is not like Heidegger, whose politics is something that can be separable from his philosophical method and system. Iqbal is uniquely resistant to fragmentation – even though he is most often read in fragments – and so his metaphysics, politics, socio-cultural theory is interconnected and linked. Khudi is not separable from ishq, God from man, man from society, society from state. Iqbal’s system envisions a world that begins in fragments and unites in the end – an ardent critic of duality, Iqbal believed most in tawḥīd, interconnected unity of all things.

Falsehood desires two-ness – truth has no association
Don’t accept association that moderates between truth and falsehood

Iqbal’s political philosophy was built on his economic philosophy; his economic philosophy was built on his social philosophy; his social philosophy was built on his philosophy of man; his philosophy of man was built on his metaphysics; his metaphysics was built on his direct mystical experience of God. In his system, dysfunction in the realm of politics was evidence of dysfunction in one’s beliefs about God, the universe, and the self. And he took great pains in identifying what dysfunction looked like:

To Iqbal, dysfunctional states are ones that turn the structures of state into a mechanism for tyrannous extraction for the benefit of the elite. All states are colonial states, because the elite – whether foreign or indigenous – colonize their populations. States, flags, anthems, and legal systems are not the end goal of Iqbal’s political thought. To Iqbal, human political organization is a means for the realization of man’s destiny:

“The unity called man is body when you look at it as acting in regard to what we call the external world; it is mind or soul when you look at it as acting in regard to the ultimate aim and ideal of such acting. The essence of tawḥīd, as a working idea, is equality, solidarity, and freedom. The state, from the Islamic standpoint, is an endeavour to transform these ideal principles into space-time forces, an aspiration to realize them in a definite human organization. . .The State, according to Islam, is only an effort to realize the spiritual in a human organization.”

So, according to these principles, is Pakistan a realization of Iqbal’s vision simply because it is supposedly a state for Muslims? Is India? Or was the colonial apparatus never dismantled from British India. Did Pakistan ever become free – truly free, in Iqbal’s understanding of freedom – or did brown hands steal the colonial yoke from white ones? Are either Pakistan or India’s political, legal, and social systems created to inspire and empower individuals to achieve their greatest potentials? Or are they structured to suck as much benefit from the masses for the benefit of the elite?

Perhaps the most tragic of Iqbal’s writings are therefore his letters to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. I reproduce a section here for those of us who still hold the dream of Pakistan close to our hearts to feel the sheer weight of grief that comes from reading them:

“In other matters too, our political institutions have never thought of improving the lot of Muslims generally. The problem of bread is becoming more acute. . .The question therefore is: how is it possible to solve the problem of Muslim poverty? And the whole future of the League depends on the League’s activity to solve this question. If the league can give no such promises, I am sure that Muslim masses will remain indifferent to it as before.

Happily, there is a solution in the enforcement of the Law of Islam and its further development in the light of modern ideas. After a long and careful study of Islamic Law, I have come to the conclusion that if the System of Law is properly understood and applied, at least the right to subsistence is secured to everybody. But the enforcement and development of the Shariat of Islam is impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states. . .

For Islam, the acceptance of social democracy in some suitable form and consistent with the legal principles of Islam is not a revolution but a return to the original purity of Islam. . .Anyhow, I have given you my own thoughts in the hope that you will give them serious consideration either in your address or in the discussions of the coming session of the League. Muslim India hopes that at this serious juncture, your genius will discover some way out of our present difficulties.”

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At times, Iqbal’s intertextuality alludes to his own concepts in subtle ways. The title for his final complete Urdu work, Ḍarb-i-Kalīm, is often translated as The Strike of Moses or The Staff of Moses. While the moniker “Kalīm” does, in fact, refer to Moses in the Islamic tradition, the motif of kalīm as one who has immediate experience of God is an important symbol in Iqbal’s works. In a famous poem in his second major Urdu work, Bāl-i-Jibrīl, Iqbal says:

In an exquisite use of allusion, symbol, and double meaning, Iqbal brings together a series of concepts into a single rubāʿiyyah that can be completely lost if read in a single pass. First, hakīmī (philosophizing) is contrasted with kalīmī (direct experience of God in the mode of Moses). The second two lines also create contrasts, but those contrasts are directly taken from the story of Moses. First, shāhī (kingship) is contrasted with faqr, which holds a double meaning: the literal meaning is poverty, but, for the Sufis, faqr has long been used as a moniker for the love of God. The contrast, then – that of poverty/love of God on one hand and kingship on the other – is a perfect contrast that alludes to the story of Moses, who forsook his place as the son of the Pharoah and instead embraced poverty as and escaped Egypt.

This escape from Egypt and embracing estrangement is the allusion in the final line in which Iqbal uses the word “gharībī” to describe the concept that protects one’s khudi. The word gharīb in Urdu carries two meanings, though in Farsi and Arabic, the second is more dominant. The first meaning is that of poverty, and this is the more colloquially familiar one. The second, however, means strange or estrangement. Iqbal uses gharīb in this meaning often in Farsi, like when he says about Soroush in the Jāvīdnāma:

Thus, when taking all the allusions and double meanings together, one can see how the second couplet is an explanation of the first couplet; that is, how kalīmī is the hidden secret to khudi. When one chooses poverty and estrangement – not as an ascetic, but as an active actor in the world like Moses – as a consequence of actions that lead to the direct experience of God, one safeguards one’s khudi rather than trading it for kingship and comfort. Kalīmī, thus, in Iqbal’s universe of concepts, is intrinsically linked to the act of direct experience of God that comes from choosing khudi no matter the difficulty of the circumstance.

The Jāvīdnāma begins with Iqbal choosing estrangement from the known universe to seek the love of God and his own khudi in another realm. It concludes with Iqbal having a direct experience and conversation with God, thereby becoming a kind of kalīm. Thus, the meaning of the title of his final work, Ḍarb-i-Kalīm is not, in fact “The Strike of Moses.” The kalīm here does not refer to Moses; it refers to any person who achieves the rank of kalīmī. It is also worth noting that Zarb-i-Kalim opens with a poem titled Lā ilāha illā Allah in which Iqbal discusses all the material means by which a person can sell their khudi, and that the statement lā ilāha illā Allah is the only protection from that trade – which is exactly the allusion Iqbal makes in the above quoted verse.

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Unless one is the most unpleasant sort of materialist, it is difficult to imagine the human being as nothing more than a very intelligent animal. Consciousness is not math beholding itself; the human being is not simply an ape with a more advanced processor chip. There is something distinctly spiritual about consciousness. It is as if all of nature stands beyond the walls of the secrets of existence; it is the human being alone, when he advances beyond the primitivity of the animal mind, who gains entry within the gates of being itself.

The human being is an animal; and, yet, he is more than an animal. He is body, heart, and soul – not distinct, not the same, but three parts entangled with one another in a way that makes it impossible to separate each from the other. Of the peculiarities of the human, then, is that emphasis on one part of his nature over others allows it to grow beyond its healthy limit, to obscure all other facets, to imprison them in the dungeons of suppressed vitality.

The core of capitalism as an ideology, which is built on the foundation of reducing the human to animal, to strip him of his mind and relegate his existence to nothing more than a collection of wants driven by need and greed, empowers the animal in man to overcome the spiritual entirely, until he is driven purely by instinct. Capitalism, then, is the most heinous of self-fulfilling prophecies: it suppresses the spiritual and moral, gives dominance to the animal, and, then evidences the truth of its proposition by pointing at the fully animalized human of its own creation.

The reason materialist capitalism sees the world as dominated by animalism is not because that is the only possibility of human consciousness; it is because capitalism has created it.

The theology of European modernity is Materialism; its governance is Liberalism; and its economics is Capitalism. If one does not tear down this triumvirate of Lāt, Manāt, and ʿUzzā and proclaim the rule of the one true God over the heart of man, the world will remain in the grips of idolatry masquerading as piety:

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Capitalist Logic and Islam as Commodity

In the West, especially in the Western Hemisphere, we are told that Islam must become a business to survive. Indeed, prior to the complete commodification of Islam, the situation for our religious leaders had become quite bleak. Between board-structured governance, donation-based financing, and the general antipathy of the general populace to fund religious learning, teaching, and scholarship, the average Alim and Imam lived a difficult life – often well within sharʿī conditions for impoverishment.

And, then, a revolution occurred within the Muslim ecosystem that experimented with a terrifying proposition: in a completely capitalized environment, the commodification of Islam is the only mechanism for generating its value.

The initial experiments were modest and well-intentioned. Soon, however, the entire ecosystem became a marketplace of buying and selling religion like a stock traded on Wall Street. What was lost, however, was an important consideration: are there some things whose commodification is inherently immoral and leads to societal degradation?

The Difference Between Islam as Service and Commodity

Before continuing, it’s important to pause and consider the difference between accepting money for a service and turning that service into a commodity. Capitalism only recognizes complete commodification, but there are other models by which services can be rendered for payment. To understand this, let us consider two different scenarios.

Scenario One: The Quran Tutor

Consider Qari One who teaches Quran to young kids. The Qari lives in a locality where $80,000 USD is the median income for him to afford a respectable life. The Qari sets his rate at $45 an hour and teaches eight to ten hours a day, splitting time between group classes in the masjid, teaching in a taḥfīẓ program, and private tutoring. If someone can’t pay, he either teaches them in his spare time or incorporates him into the group classes at no cost. If someone asks for a discount, the Qari has already kept his hourly rate higher than strictly necessary to ensure that he can give discounts where he needs to. And, for a few hours on Saturday, he and his fellow Qaris teach a free class for underprivileged kids.

In this model, the Qari lives a respectable life; he accepts payment for teaching; and he does what he can to ensure that knowledge is not gate-kept behind a paywall. Let’s consider Qari two.

Scenario Two: The Quran Profiteer

Qari two has a beautiful voice, and he began posting Quran recitation on TikTok and Instagram. Over time, he grew his following and became an influencer. Qari two decided to leverage that influence and monetize his followers. He announces a tajwid or Quran course, but there is no set value limit to how much he would like to extract from his followers. He will make as much money as he can, and he will let the market decide his ‘value.’

His first 4-week course is announced at $100, and it fills up. His second is announced at $200, and it fills up. He continuously raises his prices until he finds market equilibrium: with the right marketing language that creates immense FOMO and aggrandizes the offering in the course, he can charge $500 per course. He announces 5 sessions for 25 people each, and they sell out. Qari two makes over $60,000 in the span of a month.

As his fame grows, he is invited to around the country for fundraising dinners and events. He continuously raises his honorarium rate until he is making tens of thousands of dollars per year on reciting engagements. Qari two is making close to a half a million dollars a year by the end of his first few years of monetization.

What differentiates the two? And why is Qari two a profiteer, when both Qari one and two are accepting payments for their service? The answer lies not in the act of accepting payments; rather, it is that Qari one views teaching Quran as an essential communal service while Qari two views Quran as a commodity.

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The Two Pillars of Commodification

There are two pillars of commodification: profit motive and pricing mechanics. To argue which comes first is to argue chicken and egg; they are interrelated and connected in such a way where one generates the other no matter which comes first.

Corrupted Intention: Profit Motive and Knowledge

The first pillar of commodification is profit motive, which is distinct from the simple act of accepting payment. Profit motive is born from the principle that the product or service I have should be used as a means for extracting as much monetary value as I can possibly gain from it. Qari one does not have a profit motive; he has a subsistence motive. Qari two, however, has no upper limit to what he is willing to make on Quran. He is willing to let the market decide how much value it places on Quran, and he will take as much of that value as he can.

The obvious problems with this are as follows:

1. The intention for teaching Quran must be to perform an essential service to the Muslim community. It cannot be making profit. The rule of thumb for differentiating the two is the reason why someone is turned away from the service.

a. It can be said that both Qari one and two turn students away. This is true, but the motive for turning them away differs: Qari one turns students away because of time constraints; Qari two turns them away because of financial choice. Qari one cannot teach more students without sacrificing the quality of instruction for the rest of the students due to reduction in his energy and concentration; Qari two can teach more students, but he chooses not to in order to maintain his price equilibrium.

2. Religious knowledge is an essential service for the health of society. Scarcity of religious knowledge creates religious illiteracy and spiritual illness. The commodification of essential services creates environments where supply and demand mechanics determines who receives benefit and who does not.

Manufactured Scarcity: Supply and Demand Mechanics

The second mechanism of commodification is the use of supply and demand mechanics to determine price. The basic principle of price equilibrium based on supply and demand is that certain people get priced out of a service, either because they cannot afford it or they don’t value it enough to choose it. This creates three connected problems:

1. It creates a culture of learning where knowledge “belongs” to those who can pay for it while the underprivileged are the recipients of benefaction in the form of “scholarships.”

2. Those who are not eligible for scholarships but can’t afford the programs (either due to other financial obligations or paying for many programs at once) are priced out of benefiting from knowledge

3. Those who don’t value religious knowledge and literacy are the ones most in need of it. Imagine pricing out the sick from medical care and only providing medical care for those who are well. Those who are willing to pay for religious literacy are most often the ones who need it least. Thus, supply/demand mechanics creates an environment where religion becomes a lifestyle brand for those who already value it, and those who need it most are disincentivized from pursuing it.

The Path Forward

As I think about my own future, I am struggling to see the path forward. It is true that in a completely capitalized society, only commodities have inherent value. The logic, then, would lead us to a conclusion that, for Islam to have value, it must be commodified. I don’t believe this is accurate, however. Capitalists have learned the art of creating a market for a good or service; the commodification of it, however, is a separate choice detached from market creation.

I believe that it is entirely possible to create a market for without completely commoditizing Islam, sacred knowledge, and religious services. The key is to abandon profit motives and supply/demand mechanics. Religious leaders and institutions must follow all the best practices for developing markets for their services, but the pricing mechanism must shift to focus on cost-based pricing over profit-motive pricing.

It is true that there will be a lot of money left on the table – but that is part of the ṣadaqah of knowledge. Every dollar not extracted from the community is a dollar given by the Alim, Qari, and Imam in ṣadaqah. If the religious leaders cannot give knowledge in ṣadaqah, he cannot complain that his community does not support him through ṣadaqah.

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Progressivism does no better – it simply internalizes and regurgitates liberal logic while critiquing its imperfect practice instead of recognizing that deficiency in liberal practice is indicative of a much larger dysfunction in the core concepts that underpin the entire apparatus of liberalism. Progressives are nothing more than the Puritan zealots of the liberals, and their “cancellations” are the contemporary equivalent of witch trials held in the heart of modern Salem. To the liberal and progressive, bigotry and deviance in belief is the greatest sin. Deviance must be inquisited, and bigots must be sacrificed at the stake for the sin of incantation.

It is no surprise, then, that the liberal and progressive offers no real meaningful answer to the plight of the suffering of the many disenfranchised people of the world. What good is greater theoretical equality for the Palestinian? What will come from greater theoretical equality for a woman or person of color? What will come from the recognition and apology for the evils of the colonial enterprise? The liberal – even the most sincere liberal – can offer nothing but a theoretical equality; and history is the greatest instructor that theoretical equality means little in the face of actual extraction.

And, indeed, what is justice other than systematic, methodical freedom from extraction – from the exploitation of the resources, toil, and effort of one party for the benefit of another while systematically trapping the exploited party into a cycle of extraction? Will equality in theoretical rights grant equal exchange of value between parties? Indeed, theoretical equality has been one of the greatest means of creating systematic exploitation and extraction. Let us turn our attention for a moment to the global financial and trade order, which is the contemporary mechanism for the perpetuation of modern colonialism.

The contemporary global order does not simply colonize the East; modern colonialism is a dual colonialism. On one end, it creates a system of trade and finance that traps neo-colonized nations into subject relationships, creating dependency on the peanuts tossed at them by neo-colonial ones. The forces of neo-colonialism pay cents on the dollar for the labor of neo-colonial subjects and dramatically lower the cost of production for their own products. Meanwhile, a secondary colonial apparatus exists both within the colonial nations and the colonized ones: a colonial elite that turn their own populations into colonies.

Just as the colonial country extracts from another country, the colonial elite within the extracting and extracted countries turn their own nations into colonies for their economic embezzlement. In America, the world’s largest colonial enterprise since the British Empire, the billionaire class has turned corporate legal and financial structures into a mechanism of untold extraction from the American populace. Just as the nation of America uses law and trade to colonize other nations, the American elite use law and trade to colonize the American populace. This same system exists within colonial nations in relation to their elite and populace.

Not only can this not be remedied by liberalism – it has been caused by liberalism. The liberal emphasis on theoretical rights, freedoms, and identities over real world functions of economic, legal, and political structures has created the very extractionary system. Free trade, legal equalities between the powerful and the powerless, and focus on identity over extraction has enabled the elite to use their power to manipulate legal and economic structures using freedoms and equality as the mechanism and identity as the distraction.

If you are not amongst the elite, Liberalism is of no use to you. The idea that betrayed you will not save you.

If you are a person who experiences real extraction at a systematic level, greater equality based on identity is the red herring, the distraction, that keeps the economic, legal, cultural, and political systems in place that enable your extraction. You need a theory far greater, more robust, more grounded in reality; you need something that shifts the focus away from equality in rights and freedoms and something rooted in equality of real exchange of value. The former is liberalism; the latter is justice.

And justice – real, practical, serious – is the only thing that will save man.

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Who Is Iqbal

Allamah Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) is one of the most innovative and profound Islamic thinkers of the last 200 years. Born in colonial India, Iqbal’s works have been translated to languages across the world and has been credited as the spiritual forefather of several of the most important Muslim social and political movements.

A philosopher-poet in both Eastern and Western traditions, Iqbal inherited both the German idealist and nihilist traditions as well as the Sufi philosophical tradition and attempted one of the a daring and challenging syntheses of Eastern and Western thought

What Is the Reconstruction?

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is Iqbal’s most challenging prose work. While it is often read as a metaphysical text, this course approaches it as Iqbal’s attempt to build a foundation for an alternate modernity.

At a time when other thinkers were attempting to theorize resistance movements, Iqbal was more concerned about the destructive tendencies inherent in European modernity’s philosophical foundations. The Reconstruction, paired with his seminal Persian poem, the Javidnama, is his attempt to rectify those dysfunctions and imagine a Muslim modernity that overcomes Western limitations.

Who Is Saad Yacoob?

Saad Yacoob is a PhD Candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University where he researches the thought and reception of Allamah Muhammad Iqbal. He is also a student of knowledge, having read texts with teachers around the world in the Hanafi madhhab. He engages Western philosophical thought as well as the Muslim legal, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, making him a uniquely well-positioned reader and evaluator of Iqbal’s project. His current research project is a critical reading of the Javidnama in English.

Course Details

Start Date: Saturday, July 25
Course Length: 4 weeks
Schedule: Saturday mornings at 11:00 AM EST
Class Duration: 2 hours per week
Contribution: $50
Recordings will be made available to students

Ethics Statement on Monetization

Knowledge that leads to moral and spiritual growth should be free. It is not a commodity; it should not be subject to market forces. The reality, however, is that charging for courses allows me to dedicate time and mental energy towards teaching without worrying about the cost of teaching on myself. Therefore, while I wish for a world in which courses could be given for free without restriction, that is not the reality I currently occupy, and thus I ask for a small contribution towards the course. If you need a scholarship, please don’t dedicate to indicate that in the form. I will not gatekeep knowledge behind a paywall.

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The vision of the mullah is empty of foresight
The pure wine of the Sufi is without burning

Was, however, Allamah Iqbal antagonistic towards the Ulama? Indeed, his contemporaries did not think so. In fact, his insistence on continuously consulting Ulama for political and other action greatly frustrated political elites and modernists alike. Iqbal answered them by saying, “the fiqh of Islam is not incapable of providing us leadership.”

At the same time, Iqbal’s poetry is replete with attacks on the “Mullah,” a caricature of an out-of-touch Alim that is continuously censured in his poetry. For example, the states:

That the Mullah has received permission for sajdah in India
The simpleton thinks that Islam is free

How, then, do we make sense of Iqbal’s seemingly contradictory views? The answer, as so often happens, is in a portion of the Jāvīdnāma. In this section, the protagonist, Zinda Rud, guided by Rumi, meets Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Sayyid Halim Pasha in the sphere of Mercury. There, Sayyid Halim Pasha gives him a message to take to the religious scholars of the Muslim world. Iqbal begins the section with a scorching statement:

دین حق از کافری رسوا تر است
زانکه ملا مؤمن کافر گر است

The religion of God is more disgraced than disbelief
Because the Mullah fashions infidels from believers

One would imagine that Iqbal would then cast off the need for religious scholarship and propose a sola-scriptura, return to the texts, do away with authority kind of Islam. To assume so, however, would be to simplify a complex thinker. Iqbal ends the section with a message from Sayyid Halim Pasha to the religious leaders of Islam:

مرد حق جان جهان چار سوی
آن بخلوت رفته را از من بگوی

ای ز افکار تو مؤمن را حیات
از نفسهای تو ملت را ثبات

حفظ قرآن عظیم آئین تست
حرف حق را فاش گفتن دین تست

تو کلیمی چند باشی سرنگون
دست خویش از آستین آور برون

سر گذشت ملت بیضا بگوی
با غزال از وسعت صحرا بگوی

Give this message from me to the scholar gone into seclusion: the man of God is the soul of the physical world! O, you, whose thoughts give life to believers - your breath gives resolution to believers! Your constitution is the protection of the Quran; your religion is to speak clearly the word of God!

You are like Moses - how long will you remain depressed? Bring forth your hand from your sleeve! Teach us about the stories of our nation; teach the gazelle about the wideness of the desert! Your nature is illuminated by Mustafa (saw); tell us, once again - what is our final destination?

Unlike simplistic thinkers before him and after him, Iqbal did not believe that Islam needs to be “liberated” from the Ulama. Rather, he believed that the Ulama are an integral part of the revival of Islamic civilization. The Alim who stayed reclusive and simplistic in his understandings of contemporary events – that was the Alim targeted for his censure. The Alim who was critically engaged, forward thinking, and ready to provide leadership to the community – he was not only respected and consulted by Iqbal, he was also considered an essential part of protecting, guiding, and reviving Islam.

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In a speech at the Aristotelian Society in London, Allamah Muhammad Iqbal defended accusations that the Prophet ﷺ was a madman or psychopath with this statement:

Muhammad, we are told, was a psychopath. Well, if a psychopath has the power to give a fresh direction to the course of human history, it is a point of the highest psychological interest to search his original experience which has turned slaves into leaders of men, and has inspired the conduct and shaped the career of whole races of mankind.

Judging from the various types of activity that emanated from the movement initiated by the Prophet of Islam, his spiritual tension and the kind of behaviour which issued from it, cannot be regarded as a response to a mere fantasy inside his brain. It is impossible to understand it except as a response to an objective situation generative of new enthusiasms, new organizations, new starting-points.

The Explanation

Iqbal’s defends the honor of the Holy Prophet ﷺ by pointing to an essential point: the civilization of Islam transformed human history. It introduced new modes of thinking in every science, from law, moral philosophy, politics, and more. It didn’t just borrow Greek thought, change it slightly, and pass it on. Instead, for Iqbal, the hallmark of its civilization was “the intellectual revolt of Islam against Greek philosophy.” And, to Iqbal, that intellectual revolt was not an organic growth of historical context; rather, it was a radical shift in thinking that resulted from the very ethos of the Quranic revelation.

“The Qur‘an,” Iqbal begins in his preface to the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, “is a book which emphasizes ‘deed‘ rather than ‘idea.’”

To Iqbal, that ethos of action drew Islamic thought into conflict with the parts of Greek tradition, mostly dominated by Platonic thought, that was prevalent in the ancient world leading up to Islam. Indeed, Christian thinkers much favored Plato’s more imaginative and abstract method over Aristotle’s method that was grounded in mutually intelligible everyday experience. It wasn’t until the advancements of Muslims across disciplines reached Europe that Aristotle was finally reintroduced and incorporated into the medieval Church tradition. For much of its history, as Nietzsche pointed out, “Christianity is Platonism for the masses.”

However, Muslim thought has been engaged in real-life grounded knowledge building since much before the translations of Aristotle became widely read and incorporated into Muslim thought. The sciences of Quran, hadith, law, theology, language, rhetoric, and prosody engaged in extensive inductive reasoning, bringing together disparate pieces of information in the real world to create categories and organize them into a taxonomy. To Iqbal, Aristotelian thought gave Muslims a systematic language as a framework for what they had already been doing; as Ibn Taymiyyah (RA) points out, one doesn’t need to study logic in order to think logically.

To Iqbal, this mode of thinking – the real-world focused, inductive, action-oriented knowledge production – was the greatest intellectual legacy of Muslim civilization which challenged prevailing philosophical milieus of the time. Its transference to the Latin speaking world created a revolution in thought in Western Europe, one which eventually led to the scientific revolution.

How does all this tie back into the Iqbal’s defense of the Prophet ﷺ? To Iqbal, Muslim civilization’s radical revolt against Greek thought was not a natural progression of historical process; illiterate Arab tribesmen could not singlehandedly transform the world’s philosophical milieu without some kind of direction that then shaped the rest of human history. That direction had to be otherworldly, and its otherworldliness was centered around the person of the Prophet ﷺ.

An atheist might reject God; but he cannot reject the grandeur of the man who transformed the world.

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There are many reasons why Islamism failed; some of them are internal to Islamist movements – such as their lack of serious engagement with the Islamic tradition – and some of them are the result of a concentrated effort by imperial powers and their indigenous allies to criminalize and demonize Islamist movements. While both can be acknowledged, debating which of these was more important in the eventual failure of many Islamist movements is to miss the forest for the trees. There is only one real cause for the failures of Islamism: the inability of Islamists to recognize their own inheritance of colonial legacies.

Most Islamist movements inherited a fundamental assumption of their Marxist predecessors; that is, the structural formations of state and economy are the primary actors of social organization. Thus, to both Marxist revolutionaries and Islamists, social change can only meaningfully take place when the means of production (economies) and modes of governance (the state) are put in the hands of those who will lead society to its true freedom – which, surprise surprise, is a Marxist or Islamist. To the power-obsessed ideologue, seizing power is always the correct means to achieving the objective.

Both Marxists and Islamists recognized, however, that a political movement was impossible to build on a purely political platform; that culture must first be dominated by their respective ideology before a political movement can manifest. Within Marxism, this was most robustly elucidated by Antonio Gramsci, whereas Sayyid Qutb and Abu al-A’laa Mawdudi refined this concept within Islamism. While both movements were able to mobilize against colonialism and push against liberal capitalism, both movements failed against their greatest foe, the one foe that was able to mobilize popular imagination and dominate public opinion: ethno-nationalist fascism.

Gramsci was the most obvious victim, as he was heavily persecuted by the Mussolini government. Marxism’s greatest and most brutal foe was not, in fact, the United States – rather, it was the Third Reich, which committed more violence against Marxism in the course of a few years than the United States did over decades. Similarly, the greatest foes of Islamism in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and other states were not the forces of American imperialism; rather, it was virulent ethno-nationalist (or, in the case of Pakistan and India, native elitism disguised as geographic nationalism) that was supported and instrumentalized by Russian and American imperialism.

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Thus, for both Marxism and Islamism, the real question is as follows: why did they fail to capture the imagination of the very people they claimed to represent (the working class for Marxists and Muslims for Islamists). When the question is posed to both groups, each produces a series of complicated theoretical analysis, the purpose of which is to obfuscate the question, not answer it. The reason for that is simple: the answer is damning. Marxists and Islamists failed to galvanize the populations they simply did not answer the most pressing and important concerns of the people they claimed to represent. Marxists characterized their own base as sheep who were under the control of ideological structures; Islamists characterized them as imperfect Muslims.

Both failed to look at the writing on the wall: their theories and movements were, by in large, had limited relevance to the very people they claimed to represent.

The case of Islamism is without a doubt the most interesting. By-in-large, Islamists focused on a politics of identity while post-colonial populations had significant day-to-day concerns: how they were going to feed their families, educate their children, and manage geo-political tensions. Ideological sloganeering and displays of piety often took the place of serious, pragmatic, and realistic economic and social policy. Most importantly, however, Islamism played within a framework that was at odds with the very concepts they claimed to champion. As I stated in my previous post, Islamic law is a highly pragmatic and context dependent system.

Islamists by-in-large bought into colonial-era ideas about Islam as a rigid system that was outdated and required reform. Many Islamist thinkers leveraged salafism to claim that they would retrieve an “original” Islam that had been misinterpreted by the 1400 year old Islamic tradition. That “original” Islam, however, was fixed and rigid – because, again borrowing from colonial era caricatures of Islam, the religion was perfect and unchanging. This brought Islamism into direct clash with every major movement in society: pragmatic statesmen who required legal flexibility; ulama who understood the tradition better than Islamists; modernists who wished to westernize; Marxists who claimed moral authority, etc.

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In the course of this contention, Islamists were unable to put forward a compelling narrative as to why their understanding of Islam and a moral society was more compelling than that of the ulama, the ruling elite, and the socialists, all of whom claimed Islam as well. The inability to monopolize discourse on Islam meant that they failed to create a mass popular movement and were left to contend over power politics – an arena where their uncompromising geopolitics made them an easy target of both the USSR and America. After the fall of the Soviets and the beginning of the American moment, the promises of neo-liberal institution building appeared to make them redundant because the whole world was promised riches beyond measure as long as they accepted the new world order.

As the neo-liberal order collapses, however, and the world undergoes economic, geopolitical, and ideological realignment, Muslims have to ask a serious question: how does one learn from the failures of Islamism if we will advocate for truly Islamic states? The answer, in my view, is fourfold: 1) recognizing that pragmatism is not at odds with Islam; 2) deep engagement with and mastery of the Islamic tradition; 3) an emphasis on social spiritual revival over political ideological contestation; 4) an emphasis on Islam as a religion that solves the social, material, and emotional problems of society.

None of this can be done without a full mastery – and recognition of the limits of – the Islamic tradition. The Islamic tradition provides a robust methodology, but that methodology must be adapted to the realities of modern societies and advancements in modern knowledge. But, as someone who has spent more than a decade engaged with that tradition, I can confidently say, the tradition, with all its flaws and limitations, is our greatest strength and guide. Its methodology is profound; its achievements spectacular. Any attempt to create post-Islamist Muslim movements must be rooted in a deep respect for that tradition as well as a recognition that it must be adapted – not copy and pasted.

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Or is the Muslim, so consumed in the humiliation of his own spirito-material inadequacy, who reduces Islam to an isolationist cult separated from all humanity?

Islam was not sent to man to be a cult of misery, isolated from society, a hermit on a hut far from the city who sees nothing but the blemishes of men and abhors their company. Islam is the steadfastness of Abu Bakr, the justice of Umar, the foresight of Uthman, the resoluteness of Ali. Islam is the generosity of Abdurrahman, the sword of Khalid, the memory of Abu Hurayrah, the insight of A’ishah, the wisdom of Umm Salamah, the knowledge of Ibn Mas’ud, the thoughtfulness of Ibn Abbas. Islam is the river that carves through the canyon of existence to bring life to the barren fields of the universe.

An Islam that does nothing but blame societies is the Islam of Shaytan – the Islam of hopelessness and despair, the Islam that sees itself as living in the past and absent in the present. Islam was meant to be the moral and spiritual message that revives the world; the Muslim its moral leadership. We lost sight of that when the colonial order convinced us that the dunya is in their hands and all we have left is akhirah – and, in the process, we lost both dunya and akhirah.

As the world order collapses around us, we must ask ourselves once again, “what is Islam?” Is Islam just another crude nationalism? Is it just a tool for states to keep social cohesion as they attack one another? Is it the reason we run to the hills and abandon the world to those who haven’t the moral clarity married to the consideration of reality? What is our Islam? Is it the divine message from God? Or the Islam of Shayṭān?

The Islam of Shayṭān is of two kinds: it is either full of despair or resigned to realpolitik of crude nationalism. It is either divorced from reality or a slave to it. It either runs from the responsibility to lead the moral order of the world; or it forfeits the moral message of Islam to pursue the world and all its temptations. The Islam of Shayṭān is, at the end, characterized by despair: not in the world, nor the past, nor the future, nor even in oneself. It is, at its core, characterized by despair in the reviving power of the love of God, and, as such, it is despair in God Himself.

“And do not lose hope in the mercy of Allah, for no one loses hope in Allah’s mercy except those with no faith.” (12:87)

The Islam sent by God as the final message for man is one of hope; of passion; of love. True Islam is an Islam that goes into the markets, doesn’t hide in the hermit’s hut. True Islam is the one that clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; heals the sick. True Islam struggles against oppression; speaks truth to the powerful; brings relief to the suppressed and repressed. True Islam is believed in the soul; felt in the heart; thought in the mind; acted in the body. True Islam is, at its core, a message of continuous hope – because true Islam is, at its core, a message of love.

True Islam turns the hearts of men to lamps lit by the light of God. True Islam is the guide through darkness illuminated by the candles of love of God. It doesn’t see contingent beings; it is moved by the love of the necessary, the One without time or place, the transcendent and imminent. It is a desperate desire to be with God; a trembling tumult to seek out God; an violent wall-like wave of will to be loved by God. When you look past what need not be and seek through your love He who must always be, despair dissipates. Because hope is in Him, for Him, and through him.

And then, and only then, can you be the follower in the footsteps of Ibrahim. Then, and only then, can you be the light that spreads the moral message of Islam.

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I was never much of a walker, but I learned to enjoy these strolls in Istanbul. There is something so calming about the constant flow of the bright, blue water of the outstretched strait. I would collect my sorrows throughout the days and bring them to the banks of the Bosphorus, sip them with a cup of cay, exhale them into the breeze and feel them float in flight across the sea. I have learned since then to take my sorrows on long walks, let them seep into the depths of my mind, and escape my body with the constant tapping of my moving tasbih.

Today, like so many of these days, I brought with me my welling grief.

As the steps slowed into a steady stroll, my mind wandered into the depths of the cavernous words attributed to Imam Ali (ra) when he described taqwā (God consciousness) as follows: “fear of the Majestic; action upon revelation; satisfaction with little; and preparation for the day of departure.” My lips repeated continuously: qanāʿah bi qalīl – satisfaction with having little in this temporal existence. How does that lead to taqwā, especially when taqwa is given the metaphor of carefully collecting one’s garments while walking through a path beset by thorns to ensure that they are not ripped.

Taqwā is also coupled with two other concepts in the Quran: ṣabr (patience) and iḥsān (doing good). When taken together, taqwā is to avoid harmful and sinful acts, iḥsān is to do good acts, and ṣabr is the ethic necessary to consistently do both. How, then, is taqwā manifested by satisfaction in whatever little Allah gives us in this dunya? As I so often do, I found my answer in reflecting on my own sorrow – and, more importantly, the thoughts that cross my mind when I am beset by the pangs of grief.

My ghazals beautify all my grief
Like vibrant hues of a coral reef

My words have painted sorrow like
Autumn colors a withering leaf

I’ve tip-toe through my happiness
With glances of a sneaking thief

Some lives are like a bed of nails
On which we’re dragged without relief

Some lives are like the April rain
Where joy will peak for moments brief

The novel of my life has used
Disappointment as its motif

I’m hanging by a single thread
That breaks the day I lose belief

How many times in the tumult and toss of tearing, ripping, hurling grief have my lungs filled with lament that screamed with wailing words wondering why? Why me? Why this? Why now? Why? Why, after all this hope? Why, with nothing left to cope? Why should I dangle from a rope? Why does joy always slip like soap? Why is happiness beyond my scope? Why’s my heart in perpetual break? Why must I burn upon the stake?

Why is the fire that sets my heart ablaze. It burns, until the smoke of sin exhales from my lips, and the soot of disbelief piles within my chest.

I walked with grief tucked into my breast: solemn, slow, steady. And, then, the thoughts came together to remove the curtain covering explanation: “why” arises when grief is unembraced, unaccepted. Why is the remnant of hope aflame – as if finding the answer may revive the buried dreams we laid. What, instead, if grief is embraced: instead of “why,” recognizing what is, is, and nothing else can be. The “why” will not solve the “is;” only accepting that what is, is – embracing the inevitability of what is as what must be can begin to cool the flames.

What is, is. What is, must be. There is no future where what is will not be; no past where what is was never meant to be. What is, is. And that is all that is.

The hopes that failed; the loves that lost; the dreams that were buried; taqwā comes when I am satisfied with them all. Indeed, even before they fail or are lost or are buried; taqwā comes when I accept that the hopes and loves and dreams are less important to me than seeking the pleasure of my Allah. When I am prepared to fail and lose and bury, then I am prepared to avoid the sinful acts I would otherwise engage in out of desperation to avoid the pain of grief.

Taqwā is found in accepting grief; befriending grief; embracing grief. Taqwā is found when the pain of grief is less than the pain of displeasing Allah. Taqwā is found when the love of God is greater than the love of the creations of God. Love is found when the hope is not in Allah – when the hope becomes for Allah.

When all of this has come to end
I’ll see you once again my friend 

I’ll see you when the this bank of mine
Has emptied of its love to lend 

I’ll see you when I’ve used my pride
As currency to make amends 

I’ll see you when the trumpets call
And hallowed books of deeds descend 

I’ll see you with a tired smile
While reading what my deeds have penned 

I’ll see you as the heavens part
And all the broken hearts ascend 

I’ll see you where the roses grow
In gardens that the angels tend 

If all this grief is the price for you
Then I’ll pay in full again and again

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If there are a thousand critiques of secularism, Muslims have subscribed to a thousand and one. Whether it’s the secularization of society by relegating religion to a corner of life, or the separation of religion and governance, or the assumption of unreason as the root of religion, Muslims have engaged in critiques of every aspect of secularization. And, yet, Islam itself has become thoroughly secularized, and there is one word at the center of this secularization: ummah.

In its current usage, the word ummah as nothing more than a call towards another petty nationalism. There is hardly anything that separates most “ummahtic” thought from the intellectual productions of gross nationalisms of previous generations. Islam becomes just another imagined community held together by a shared narrative of “ummah,” while the core message and vision of Islam is thrown to the side and barely ever engaged. Islam is not another petty nationalism, not another gross communal identity that attempts to achieve power at any cost. Islam is a spiritual message, the consequence of wish is human flourishing. But its core message is not about dunya but rather akhirah.

If there is anything that has animated Muslims from the time of the Rasul ﷺ to the present, it is an intense anxiety over salvation, over our final meeting with Allah. The Muslim’s primary concern is his standing with Allah, with what he will take to stand before Allah, with how his dunya will be judged in the akhirah. What we have in Islamic political and intellectual thought, instead, is intense contestations over civilizational hierarchy, authority, and symbols. This is why the political and intellectual movements of the 20^th century have failed to capture the Muslim imagination.

The average Muslim is more Muslim than those who purport to stand for the causes of Islam because the average Muslim still fears most for his akhirah while these movements have become thoroughly secularized in their objectives, methods, and outlook. Where the average Muslim is animated by Allah, these movements become animated by appeals to ummah.

There is no ummah before there is millah – the millah (community) of Ibrahim (as), the millah of the one who called first and foremost to the oneness and worship of Allah. Islam is not about symbols. It’s not about anti-colonialism. It’s not even about liberation. It’s about Allah – His glory, His majesty, His love and sanctity. For all their pretentions of critiquing the “West,” Muslim activists and thinkers alike have failed to center Allah. They have forgotten Him, and so He has made them to forget themselves.

All righteousness is in searching for Allah. All virtuousness is in finding Allah. And then, and only then, all goodness is in acting as the sword of Allah. Reverse the relationship between Allah and ummah: your first concern is Allah, and only Allah. And, when you become fixated on the pursuit of the pleasure of Allah, you become in community, in millah, in ummah with those who, like you, latched on to the love of Allah.

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What if I told you, however, that much of Muslim society is already secularizing. It just looks different than it does in the West.

As social and political life are inseparable from the logic of Islam, the secularization of Muslim society by relegating Islam into the corners of the private closets of our existence is an impossible task. That doesn’t mean, however, that this doctrine of material rationalism cannot find insidious ways to achieve its objectives. As it could not strip society from Islam, secularization stripped Islam from its soul instead. All the forms of Islam – salah, zakah, Siyam – remained, but they were thoroughly stripped from their spiritual objectives and were replaced with materialization.

Thus, salah has been increasingly forgotten or rationalized as a meditative practice; zakah has been turned into a kind of taxation, where a person desperately finds every possible excuse to save themselves from the “burden” of the tax; and Ramadan has been turned into a festival of material consumption, an excuse to host lavish gatherings and increase consumption while the spiritual objectives of the month fall by the wayside. Ramadan, which was instituted to further the spiritual connection with Allah, has been “Christmas-ized” – it has quickly become absorbed into the capitalist ethos of further spending and self-indulgence.

Materialism, rationalism, capitalism – they have usurped the spirituality of Ramadan.

This is not to say that iftar gatherings are bad; or that spending time with friends and family is blameworthy. Rather, it is to ask, “what is the social function of Ramadan?” If the social function of Ramadan is to recenter family and community in our lives, we have failed to understand what the month is all about. Family and friends become recentered when we pursue the objective of Ramadan; Ramadan is not about social obligations and connections. Ramadan has one purpose, and one purpose alone: to suddenly interrupt our own heedlessness and force the soul to reconnect with its Creator.

This Ramadan, ask yourself if you have secularized Ramadan by secularizing the function of Ramadan in your life. If Ramadan is a vehicle by which you increase your worship, repent from sins, rebuild lost habits, and perform good deeds – and, as a consequence, you strengthen social relationships – then you have maintained the spirituality of Ramadan. If your Ramadan is a vehicle by which you host lavish parties, gather friends and family, and spend an ungodly amount of decorations and catering and gifts – and the spirituality of the month is a secondary concern – then you have secularized your Ramadan through socialized commercialization.

Secularization in Muslim societies looks very different. It will not be achieved when Muslims privatize their religions; secularization will be achieved when Muslims turn their religion into a means of this-worldly salvation instead of otherworldly salvation. For a Muslim, the dunya is a means to the akhirah. Even when we seek to create goodness in this world, we do it out of a concern for our next world and as a command from Allah. Everything that is done seeking His pleasure remains; and everything done for our own pleasure is a pile of ash set against a whirling wind.

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Secularism as a Historical Phenomenon

In the modern world, secularism is like a hammer used to on a screw. Concepts are not historically neutral; most concepts are born within particular historical contexts and are meant to address the serious problems that pervade their socio-intellectual environments. They cannot be divorced from that context, and they are only useful within those contexts. Secularism is one such concept. It has its conceptual genealogy that situates it within the context of early modern Europe, and, divorced from that context, it ceases to be useful.

The genesis of secularism as a concept begins in the aftermath of the extremely destructive wars of religion – a series of wars that resulted from the political instability caused by the Protestant reformation – most notably the Thirty Years War. The scale of suffering resulting from the war is hard to overstate. Between 1/4^th and 1/3^rd of German-speaking populations lost their lives, and the war spread disease, destruction, and political collapse across the continent. The war was unprecedented in Europe, and nothing matched its scale of destruction until the First World War.

Accordingly, the wars of religion were a deeply traumatic experience for Europe, and its inconclusive result left the significant question of managing religious pluralism. Europe was thus faced with three unprecedented and simultaneous challenges: industrializing economies, mechanizing militaries, and religious pluralism (something that hadn’t been a problem of Europe by-in-large for almost a thousand years). European thinkers had to theorize forms of governance that allowed for efficient centralization of economic and military management while ensuring that the resulting expansion in government involvement in society did not result in instability due to religious repression.

This laid the groundwork for conceptualizing secularism, which began as a niche concept of mutual Catholic/Protestant “tolerance” and eventually expanded into a socio-political value of “public” agnosticism. What was meant to be a governance tool for managing religious difference evolved into an overarching ethic governing all of society. Contrary to popular opinion, however, secularism did not rapidly secularize society; rather, for the majority of modern history, secularism as a governing ethic coexisted with a deeply religious and devout population. The logic of secularization – the process by which all society becomes areligious – exponentially expanded after the Second World War. As such, secularization and secularism need to be treated as separate phenomena. The first is not a natural process resulting from the second; rather, it is as much a historical phenomenon as any other, such as fascism, rather than a historical process like industrialization.[1]

The Logic of Secularism

The core logic of secularism was not simple social harmony; rather, it was the consideration that governance is the meeting point of interests of a religiously divergent populations; as such, those populations must negotiate governance in a language that exists outside their religious commitments. What it assumes (without recognizing the assumption) is that the religious pluralism is, in fact, not very plural; that is, it is negotiating between religious groups that inherit the Christian spirito-intellectual heritage, not religious groups that are divergent in every aspect of their theology, law, practice, and intellectual heritage. To put it simply, negotiating between Catholics and Protestants in England is significantly different than negotiating between Hindus and Muslims in India.

Secularism assumes interreligious intelligibility and subsumes overlapping ethics and values in Christian society under the umbrella of “reason.” This is because, as religion retreats from governance as the common language of negotiation, a new language must take its place. The Enlightenment provided that language, which was a language of rationality and reason. The Enlightenment was, in many ways, the philosophical defense of an early modern Christian culture, and, as such, the “reason” put forward by Enlightenment thinkers was a kind of secularized Christianity. Thus, “reason” was less a philosophically universal concept and more a highly sophisticated theorization and systemization of early modern Christian culture.[2]

This underscores the core problem of secularism as it is expanded into non-Christian environments. Secularism assumes two things that are, like it, not universal: the establishment of a “public” square and the dominance of “reason” over “religion” in that public square. What iterations of the secular outside of the European and American context have highlighted, however, is that “reason” is not, in fact, a universally intelligible language of negotiation; and that “reason” as an Enlightenment concept is as much an imposition on non-European populations as any other historically contextual concept.

The Problem of Secularism

How do populations with entirely different religious traditions and intellectual heritages negotiate if the shared language of “reason” is equally alien to and predatory of them?

Secularism in such circumstances creates greater chaos than it prevents, as every religious community becomes anxious about the predatory nature of secularism. In these environments, unlike the European environment where secularism is highly co-existent with Christianity, secularism does necessarily secularize. This is because, in order to adopt secular governance, one must adopt secular logic of “reason” and “public,” which necessarily forces non-European populations to negotiate in a language born of a Christian and European heritage. Secularism in India and Egypt and Turkey is necessarily secularizing where secularism in England and America may not be.

The result of this secularizing logic is a rubber-band effect where religious communities are made to feel existential anxiety over their spirito-intellectual sovereignty. There is also much to be said about majority/minority discourse within secular logic: by insisting on monolegalism (that is, one law for the entire land negotiated by an assumed neutral “reason”), secularism necessarily creates a “majority” community that is entrusted with the rights of a “minority” community. Thus, the “minority” communities have greater incentive to secularize, whereas the “majority” communities have a greater incentive to resist secularization.

How, then, can religious pluralism be managed without adopting secularism as a mal-adjusted mode of governance for modern pluralistic societies? The Islamic tradition offers us a possible model: religious communalism. Communalism moves beyond trite notions as “tolerance” and “coexistence” governed by a logic of secularism and moves instead towards communal sovereignty of religious traditions. It does not see religion as inherently dangerous, an inherently emotional affair that is opposed to “reason;” rather, it views religion as an inextricable part of human nature and its perseveration as central to social stability.

Religious Communalism

The foundational principles of religious communalism is: recognition of religious communities; multi-legalism – that is, the ability of communities to govern according to their own laws independent of acquiescence to those laws by other communities; and a political language of interest rather than reason – that is, intercommunal relationships are negotiated based on shared or compromised interests rather than assuming a language of “reason” that is independent of “religion.” Lastly, religious communalism entails a right to offend that is entirely different than the right to blaspheme.

Religious communalism entails the right to offend sensibilities of practice without affording the right to offend sensibilities of belief – whereas secularism affords the right to offend sensibilities of belief without offending sensibilities of practice. Hindus can practice sati (the practice of burning widows alive with their deceased husbands); Zoroastrians can practice intrafamily marriage; and Muslims can practice polygyny; all without needing to appeal to the sensibilities of other religious communities based on an opaque sense of secularized “reason.” In order for such a system to come about, however, governance must be detached from a much larger conceptual problem than secularism: nationalism.

National identity is necessarily threatened by pluralistic religious communities unless national identity is thoroughly secularized. The only mechanism of governance by which a state can embrace religious communalism is by the abandonment of nationalism. The abandonment of nationalism as a governing logic for political sovereignty, however, comes with it a reimagining of right to rule, legitimacy, and political systems. A country that is not legitimated by nationalism has no logic to its claim over territory nor for choosing its leaders.

Secularism, thus, is a necessary embedding in a larger structure of “nationalized” politics. To move past the problems of the first, one must first theorize solutions to the second: how does a modern state, which is necessary for the efficient centralized governance of highly industrialized economies and militaries, legitimate itself and create a political system without appealing to ethnic or geographic nationalism? It is only when that question is answered that the question of secularism be answers.

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[1] One of the great mistakes in historiography is treating the present as the telos of the past. The past is not a necessary, purposeful march to the present; rather, the present is a result of a meeting of purpose, providence, accident, and coincidence.

[2] As distinct from a theoretical defense of Christianity as dogma and practice.

And, indeed, it would be foolish to deny that martyrdom and self-sacrifice do not create great personal suffering. In this, we are agreed. The difference, and the most revealing distinction, is the valuation placed on self-sacrifice. To the pop-psychology aficionado, self-sacrifice is the root of personal suffering and a “complex” to be “healed” from; to a system of values of bygone days, however, it was known by another word entirely: heroism. The layperson is sacrificed for; the hero sacrifices.

Every great religion and civilization has the motif of the self-sacrificial hero. For the Christian, Jesus died on the cross for man’s sins. For the Jew, Moses sacrifices a life of luxury to roam the desert and emancipate his people. For the Muslim, the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) sacrifices every worldly possession, family, and prestige to propagate the worship of one God. Joan of Arc sacrifices for France; Robin Hood sacrifices for the poor; and Salahuddin sacrifices for Jerusalem.

For a bygone age, leadership required heroism; heroism required sacrifice; sacrifice required the capacity to hold a great weight of personal suffering for the benefit of others.

In today’s world, the lens has shifted from an ethic of heroism to an ethic of victimization. The exact genesis of this is complex, but it likely starts with the appropriation of the main motifs of the Civil Rights Movement for the sake of lesser, more frivolous causes. The immense acts of heroism which defined non-violent movements, especially the Civil Rights Movement in America, were divorced of their heroism and distilled into a narrative of power and victimhood. The oppressed turned into victims, and shame became the currency by which one buys privilege.

Over time, the primary social currency in society has shifted from heroism to victimhood, which itself is a dangerous and pernicious narrative. Victimhood strips all agency from suffering; a person must lack agency to become a victim, and any exercise of agency to push against suffering relieves them of their status as victim. This is most obviously seen when Palestinian exercise of agency is used to delegitimize their status as “victims.” In truth, Palestinians are not victims; they are heroes. For a society that no longer understand heroism, however, the Palestinian is viewed as a maladjusted relic of a bygone age.

In personal relationships, the currency of victimhood is purchased by levering pop-psychology and its emphasis on trauma. If you can identify a trauma, you can purchase victimhood, which in turn can be used as social currency. Thus, the emphasis moves away from hoisting suffering onto our shoulders to create a better world for us all; nor does it appreciate those imperfect heroes that spend their lives carrying suffering for the betterment of others. Rather, the emphasis becomes solely on eliminating individual suffering – or leveraging suffering for social benefit.

In this way, Donald Trump is the perfect leader for a narcissistic, completely capitalized society. Trump does not position his eligibility to lead because he has sacrificed, experienced great suffering, and overcame. Rather, he believes he is eligible to lead because he has always “won;” that is, he has always experienced the greatest joy and gain and profit possible. He is not a hero who fell and got back up; or a martyr who sacrificed himself for the greater good. No, he is the aspiration for a perfect life incarnate.

When heroism is replaced by victimhood, we cease demanding or appreciating sacrifice from our leaders; and older systems that are built on the conception of sacrifice no longer make any sense to us. But an ethic of sacrifice is not a “complex;” and perseverance for personal ambition is not a virtue. When we shift the lens in our lives away from trauma and suffering and towards heroism and sacrifice, our lives make more sense. We can imagine ourselves as beneficiaries of great heroism without requiring those heroes to be perfect.

And our suffering ceases to be victimhood but becomes a source of our own heroism; that we are asked to heroically transcend our suffering for the betterment of our families, communities, and societies. At its core, victimhood is a disempowering narrative; heroism is an empowering one. If you have to choose, choose to be a hero, not a victim. Choose to forgive, carry, and transcend suffering.

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Just as my flu started, I began reading Attas’ Islam and Secularism, a thinker who I have purposefully not engaged with in the past, and I was deeply puzzled by two central themes in the work: the identification of secularism as a consequence of a latent dissonance embedded within Christianity’s philosophical structure itself and the particularization of certain modes of knowledge creation as “Western.” Although the book was a complete bore and hardly enjoyable, it did force me to think a little about the interaction between secularism and “Western” modes of knowledge production.

For the first, I find it a case of universalizing a particular; and, for the second, I find it a case of particularizing a universal. Allow me to explain.

Secularism as an Historical Particular

Much of Western political thought treats secularism as a conception “discovered” by Europe as a progression towards a more advanced civilization. Modern understandings of the universe and the greater and greater capacity for measuring, controlling, and creating can’t seriously be doubted without gaslighting one’s own intelligence. This is more or less a given. What this greater advancement in material knowledge, however, does not necessitate is a greater advancement in philosophical, moral, and social knowledge. That is, just because we have discovered the requisite knowledge to make cars does not necessitate that we have also “discovered” the requisite moral, philosophical, and governmental knowledge to answer whether we should - or, if we should, how we should use them.

Nor is it logically necessary that such principles will be produced after or concurrent with the production of cars. This is because material knowledge is not the same as immaterial knowledge; and the greater advancement or degradation of one does not necessitate the other.

For much of the last 200 year’s dominant strand in European thought, however, this is necessarily the case. Greater philosophical and social knowledge goes hand and hand with greater scientific knowledge. So, too, is the case with secularism - that Europe “discovered” a great moral and philosophical conception that, simply due to its chronology in human history, was greater than what came before it.

Just as science can be universal - as a particle is a particle in both Paris and Delhi - so, too, is philosophy universal.

This kind of failure to separate and classify two distinct (though sometimes interconnected) affairs is a basic error in thinking, and one finds it prevalent in both Western thought as well as neo-traditional reactions to Western thought. The only difference is that the former views this through the lens of superiority while the latter views it through the lens of critique.

In reality, secularism is not a “universal” principle discovered by the West nor a natural development out latent dissonances within Christian thought. Secularism is, in my view, a tool of governing religious pluralism necessitated by the particular historical realities of 16th Century Europe that is slowly universalized in different ways depending on the area of its deployment - be it the US, France, Britain, Germany, Turkey, or India.

To put it plainly, it’s not that deep. Secularism isn’t a universal principle. It isn’t a philosophical “final form” of Christianity. It isn’t the only mode of governance by which one can navigate the consideration of religiously pluralistic societies - in fact, in non-Western contexts, it is possibly a quite bad one (something to write on later).

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“Western” Forms of Knowledge Production

The opposite of universalizing particulars is particularizing universals; that is, to turn something that is universal into a phenomenon of a particular instance. This is what both Western thought and its neo-traditional critics do with contemporary knowledge production, particularly with empiricism and the scientific method. The Western narrative is that Renaissance thinkers rescued the backwards world from dogmatic and magical/fantastical thinking and introduced it to the rational scientific method. Neo-traditionalists don’t necessarily disagree with this narrative - they simply change the associated adjectives.

In fact, this position is mostly nonsense.

While absolute empiricism is almost impossible to defend philosophically, the privileging of empirical and materially experiential knowledge to produce new knowledge is hardly a Western conception. Allow me to demonstrate.

The scientific method is made up of a question, then data collection, then observation, hypothesis, testing, and theorization. Every major Islamic science has gone through this exact process. Let’s take a neutral discipline that is formalized prior to the philosophical movements in Islamic thought to show how Muslims organically did the same. That science is the science of lughah (language).

The core question was, “how does the Arabic language function?” The first step was to collect data in the form of scripture, poetry, speeches, and saying of the pre-Islamic Arabs. The second step was rigorous observation - whether Khalil bin Ahmad’s observation of poetic patterns or his student, al-Sibawayhi’s, observation of grammatical patterns. Then, a hypothesis about the function of the Arabic language was created and rigorously, even brutally (and, in the case of al-Sibawayhi, mortally), tested through debate and argumentation. Finally, the highly sophisticated theories were formalized and turned into fine tuned and well developed theoretical schools.

This process can be seen in all the Islamic ‘hard’ sciences, such as Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Usul, Aqidah, etc. These disciplines then gave rise to other, secondary disciplines, such as the Maqasid/Qawa’id, Balagha, etc disciplines. This method would be deployed by al-Ghazali on human psychology and Ibn Khaldun on human society. This is not a “foreign” mode of knowledge production. It is embedded in the very core of Islamic thought.

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Islam Doesn’t Need “Indigeneity” Discourse

Islam doesn’t need an indigeneity discourse. Islam is a universalist religion. A universalist religion must assume that reality is mutually intelligent for all humans, and that knowledge exists independent of culture and tradition. There seems to be a retreat from the battlefield of ideas, where Muslims refuse to go man-to-man with Western traditions and prove the metal of Islam’s core scriptural realities on a mutually intelligible playing field - despite the fact that this is what the Quran demands of us.

For all the “saving Muslims and losing Islam” discourse that the neo-traditionalist parade, it seems to me that it is they, in their retreat from that mutually intelligible battlefield, who ask us to give up the most core element of Islam: its universalism and provability.

If Islam is a message for all mankind, it has to be intelligible to all of them, a mercy to all of them, a salvation for all of them. And, in “saving” Islam, that is what neo-trad is sacrificing in Islam.

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There is grief that is hot, that bursts the peak of a mighty mountain, that unleashes wails in plumes of ash, that flows tears in molten rock. That violent sorrow, that thrashing anguish of loss; that is the heat of flowing grief. There is, however, another kind of grief – a grief of seeming normalcy, of chai sipped in a corner alone, of smiles that cut the fog of silence with a light joke, of long glances in the distance, of sound trapped in a gulping throat. That arresting sorrow, that chill in the middle of the night – that is a cold, freezing grief.

But frozen grief can slip, drip by drip, until it pools, then wells, then flows. My grief has begun to thaw, and, so, too, my ink. The letters congealed on the tip of my pen begin to spill, bit by bit, until they pool into words on a page. Words turn to phrases; phrases to sentences; and, soon, love begins to leak, and grief begins to speak.

There are a thousand things I want to say about my Badre Khalu, Dr. Yaqub Mirza – and there is so much that has already been said. It has been said that he was a successful businessman who never allowed material success to compromise his values. It has been said that his generosity and kindness were an integral part of the lives of all who knew him. It has been said that his humor masked a blistering intelligence and a keen foresight. What is there left to say about him as he was to the world; but there is much to be said about what he was to me.

To me, he is hope.

Badre Khalu was the mirror image of my own father. Both came from humble beginnings. Both built themselves through sheer tenacity of will and brilliance of mind. Both had a charm and charisma to them – my father’s more rambunctious and vibrant, Badre Khalu’s more calm and confident. Both built their businesses at around the same time. And, most importantly, both married women from the same family. And, then, the paths sharply diverge – not so much a fork in the road as much a fissure that splits the earth in two.

When my father acquired his wealth, he quickly moved to the best part of the city, built a luxurious house, ensured that everyone knew that he was successful. His insecurities stemming from his humble beginnings crept through like a hidden darkness, until the poison consumed him, the toxins subsumed him, the wealth he had built ruined him. His was a legacy of pain – to himself, those who trusted him, those who invested in him, and, most meaningfully to me, those who loved him.

My father built everything, and, then, due to the perniciousness of his own character, lost everything.

Badre Khalu, however, never allowed his wealth to ruin him. He lived in the same house he built in the mid-80s, drove the same kinds of cars, wore the same kinds of clothes. He was a paragon of practicality over pretension, humility over hubris. His wealth was at the disposal of those who deserved it most; his life was at the service of those who needed it most. His faith became illumination that flowed through his veins like a vibrant light, until the brightness emanated from him and scattered east and west like the rays of a sun whose light peaks from the curtain-clouds behind which it hides.

As a child, I used to watch him with a kind of reverence and admiration that only increased as I grew older. For me, the son of the man who destroyed himself, what terrified me most throughout my life was that I was destined to follow in my father’s footsteps – that the darkness in him was something I would be incapable of escaping from. That terror was a darkness that would descend upon me, blanket me, leave me horrified by the prospect of success. And, in those moments, the visage of my uncle would break the darkness with his light.

To me, he is not just an uncle, or a successful and faithful businessman. To me, he is, and always will be, hope: hope that it is not just the circumstances of a man that make him but the choices that he makes, the values that he aspires to, the faith to which he clings. I grew up suckling on that hope; as a young man, I learned to aspire to that hope; and, today, as I approach my full maturity, I am companion with that hope. My past does not define me. My fear does not define me. My father does not define me.

I am not the heir to the darkness in my father’s blood. I am an heir to the brightness of my uncle’s light – not because the inheritance is natural, but because he bequeathed it to me, and because I choose to be.

Just as he chose to be the man we all knew him to be.

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