Dear Usuli Community,
Al salamu alaykum. It has been quite some time since I have
written. I wanted this to be special and so I turned the lights down low and
made a cup of herbal tea. I turned on the soundtrack from Interstellar to
invite the slowing which used to beckon words back when I wrote as ritual. When
writing was a form of solemn prayer that erected walls so thick only God could
reach through. When I needed to hide and gestate from the chaos and insanity of
life. When I once constructed in myself a monument to Spirit, and a testament
to the pursuit of His principles. In there I found a place outside of time, or
rather, it would probably be more accurate to say I found a place outside of
this hijacking of time. A hijacking at the hands of frail humans who sought to
dictate and colonize my thoughts, my time, and my life. A hijacking that means
every moment of my attention is manipulated and controlled either through
desire or through fear. A thousand moments between terror-inspiring headlines
and browsing the items I hope to buy, and then the day is over. This place
beyond that hijacking challenged my perceptions, because it separated me from a
reality crafted at the hands of evil and thoughtless people, and showed me its
delusion. So much, if not all of our time and space and thought has been
co-opted by forces which we would never invite into our own homes, and yet we
live their way of life, seek what they seek, and dream their dreams. I believe
because we are too scared to do otherwise.
I invite you to slow down too if you have not already.
Slow down.
Make tea.
Dim the lights.
This moment is a special one. This month carries a power decreed by God who is
closer to you than your jugular vein. Who knows if so much as a grain of sand
moves. Who is the beginning of all life and the end of all death. The One who
maintains and changes lives. The One who changed my life. Do not be confused by
everything you see around you, and mistake who is in control. Do not despair of
His mercy, and remember: this life is fleeting. This life of extreme importance
is fleeting, and is like a speck of transient dust caught for a passing moment
in a stream of His light. You were sent here for a purpose, but that purpose
and its importance is not dictated by what humans find important. It is
dictated by what your Master finds important.
When Allah revealed the Qur’an, it was not revealed to change the elite. It did
not seek to establish Islam by acquiescing to a power structure. If you are
keeping up with The
Sirah Project you will find out in episode 30 when it releases next
Wednesday, that Allah does not place importance on the elite. Those are
mechanisms which humans created and become obsessed over. Let this pause be an
invitation to what Allah, your Protector, finds important. Let this small pause
and this small silence be a reminder that in the end you will meet your Maker
in a defining pause and a certain silence. And in that moment, it shall be more
real than this life. In that moment, when all of our habits end, and our
attachments dissolve, there will only be God, and this life will feel like it
was only a dream.
This Ramadan, this fleeting moment of Divine presence invites me every year to
act from that reality. To throw the delusions of human-constructed importance
off my back and to act from the lighter garments of Divine purpose. And every
year I fall short. I fall short and realize the delusion is punctuated by a
self-reliance that lies to me: “You can reach God by your own power.” Surely,
it is only by Allah’s grace that I can find Allah. It is only by Allah’s grace
that I can change. I ask Allah for forgiveness and smile knowing this struggle
is exactly what it is supposed to be. A journey to a great shedding of the
layers which keep me from Allah, and may they shed at the pace which He
decrees, and not the pace which my impatience and arrogance demand. Every
Ramadan begins in hope and ends in a surrendering–an active, continually
returning surrendering.
I invite this pause for you because I am sure many feel as I do–overwhelmed and
dizzy from the headlines. It feels the actions of evil men hold my attention
hostage. I reject this and fight it. I will not let their filth and chaos run
my life. There is a famous poem by Dylan Thomas that I love which captures how
I feel. It always reignites the idealistic fire in my heart when Shaytan
whispers “There’s no hope. They are too powerful. Nothing will ever change.” I
refuse to be jaded.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Such is the wonderful paradox of Divine surrender that you surrender to nothing
else, even against the bleating pragmatism of your ego. Recently, I read a
piece by the eloquent Dr. Farah El-Sharif titled “The
Myth of Muslim Sovereignty”. It is an astonishing piece that I believe
everyone must read. I also must ask everyone to financially support her page,
because it is a voice that must remain and be amplified.
As the title suggests, she exposes as false the idea that there is any Muslim
sovereignty in this age and explains how fear has landed us in our current
state. Every word is perfectly chosen in that article. After reading it I was
filled with so much sadness. I believe that there is a grief we all
collectively are experiencing, although most are unaware of it. How can we be
aware of it when it is all we’ve known. Even when we raise our children as we
have led our own lives to pursue financially stable careers, there is something
missing. We are not truly able to be ourselves or to believe freely. We do not
have a home, because a home is a place where one can be themselves. A home is
not dictated by another and their interests. In the desire to feel at home and
feel safe, we convince ourselves that this is our home. We mold our desires to
fit our colonizer, and perhaps we even abandon our memory altogether and begin
to look down upon the identity which we grew from. We adorn our lives with the
symbols of Islam, the rituals, the art, but we live and love according to
values set by people that hate us and hate God.
We were raised by workaholics and became workaholics ourselves, ever pursuing a
sense of safety and purpose out of jobs that serve the values of a society
which ripped our homes from us. We grow into parents that do the same to our
children, not knowing how to pass on the deep, cellular security which allows
for us to act bravely, because we never experienced it ourselves. This is
grief.
For those of us who go back to the countries which we came from, we feel a
conflicting sense of judgement and nostalgia. We love our cultures, but even
they have become superficial expressions of the cultures which grew out of the
fertile soil of Islam. For the Muslim, the true Muslim, who desires a life of
Islam, and not a culturally superficial Muslim, they feel they have nowhere to
turn. They do not feel they truly belong anywhere. I believe Dr. Farah
El-Sharif explained why that is perfectly, and what we repeatedly do that keeps
us locked in this same place; this same prison.
We choose the path of least resistance, we keep our heads low, hoping that it
will guarantee us safety. We hope the storm will just pass and Allah will
magically lead us to safety. This is what we have always done, and it has
achieved the exact opposite outcome. We have even manipulated our religion to
rationalize this path with theological stances that God is in control, that He
willed the current situation, and so we must just pray and hope for the best.
We hide in our masjids, and in our community iftars, and put the responsibility
on God when it is us and our forefathers which created and allowed this
situation to become what it is today.
What God’s religion needs now is a people with a fighting spirit. Those who
will not give up, nor shrink. Those with dignity and pride. Those whose
attitude is “I will show up everyday and struggle, and if I fail, so be it.
Those that come after me will pick up where I left off.”
I pray for peace every night for all of us, and I pray that Allah builds in us
the courage to earn and create that peace for ourselves. Religion becomes the
opiate for the masses when it becomes distilled into a feel good bedtime story
that justifies inaction and cowardice. Maybe other religions are for that, but
not Islam. Islam is not here to make you feel good. Islam is not here to make
your life peaceful, or to make you less stressed at the end of the night. Islam
is not about you.
While the paradox of Divine surrender is a beautiful one, its antithesis is
what I call the paradox of selfishness. Which is: if I only manage life and its
people well enough, I can somehow wrest satisfaction and safety from life. The
paradox is (as Farah El-Sharif brilliantly alludes to) that this selfish
approach actually is what has made us so deeply unsafe. It has made us easy
targets. We relinquished control out of fear, not out of Divine surrender, and
those hungry for power and consumption took the reins, established leaders for
us, manipulated our religion to serve their own ends, and ensured that our
existence is for their benefit. Meanwhile, we spend decade after decade telling
ourselves that we gave the control over to God. How could that be true when we
gave control away for the sake of a value system that opposes what God set
forth in the Qur’an?
To surrender to God is to fight. To surrender to God is to be courageous. To
surrender to God often does not feel like a night at the yoga studio. To
surrender to God, in this current age, is going to be a very, very scary
endeavor.
However.
If you read the Qur’an, and venture to understand it, you will be comforted.
You have the greatest ally of all. It is only scary because of the delusions we
have built our sense of safety on. One step at a time, my friends. And most
importantly, you are not doing it alone.
The campus protests scared them. Minneapolis terrified them. There are examples
of resistance all over the country, successful examples. And they are not
examples of people focused on comforting their own fears. They are examples of
people who refuse to go gently into that good night. This is the fighting
spirit Muslims need right now. This is the fighting spirit I hope you raise
your children with. Standing up worked so well it scared them, and now they are
doing unspeakable things despite it being out in the open. This is not the time
to shrink, this is the time to keep going, to organize, and to be brilliant.
Minneapolis is also an example of a people who were dedicated to each other.
They did not whine that they did not have control. They established health
networks, traffic stops, etc. They provided infrastructure because they felt,
“this is our city.” They took control and did not wait for permission to take
it. They did not sit around saying “Well if God wanted me to have control then
he would have put me in power.” These are the thoughts of a defeated people, of
a colonized people that have allowed Islam to be twisted into a vacant set of
symbols that rationalize cowardice, fear, and inaction.
Recently, I spoke to a friend who had begun giving presentations on Palestine
at various local masjids. They asked him to make sure the presentation was not
political, and I responded in shock: “we’re still doing that?” It doesn’t work,
my friends. Even if it did work, it would be unethical, however it simply does
not work. It does not make you safer to shrink. It just makes you cattle
waiting for the slaughter.
This Ramadan, I pray we continue this great awakening, I pray we return to the
Qur’an for something beyond self-centered feelings of comfort, and allow it to
empower us to take back what God intended for us to have: an identity, a voice,
and a home. I pray that we embrace life as a messy and beautiful struggle,
rather than our sterilized and perfection-obsessed idea of it. I pray that we
learn to embrace being uncomfortable, rather than seeking comfort. I pray that
God shows us the way, and that we walk it, we cannot do this alone. I pray for
God’s grace and forgiveness. And may Allah bring peace to the Prophet Muhammad,
all the Prophets, and their followers, who laid a path for us to carry the
torch forward. One step at a time, my friends. May Allah bless the rest of your
Ramadan.
Cherif Abou El Fadl
cherif@usuli.org
