Sh M Nizami Messageboard

Dina’s father sent her this gem, which translates:

Arguing with people who do not seek the truth is like trying to explain colours to someone who insists on keeping their eyes shut.

You won’t reach an understanding, because the issue is not in the clarity of thought but in the absence of readiness to see it.

When the other party’s goal is to win the argument rather than understanding the thought, the conversation results into energy depletion, not a means to reach the truth.

Therefore, one of the signs of maturity is knowing when to explain and when to pull back. Save your energy for those who want to understand not for those whose only purpose is to win an argument.

The other day, a comrade mentioned: "Some people see you as a troublemaker." Me: The Makkan establishment portrayed Muhammad as someone who divided the community and families, insulted their gods and ancestral religion, disrupted the established social order - painting his as a a sorcerer, liar, madman or dangerous agitator. In a well known report, Quraysh accused him of condemning their beliefs, disparaging their forefathers and “causing division” among them. The Israelite prophets were repeatedly treated as disturbers, traitors and enemies of the established order and the clearest example is Elijah. King Ahab addresses him directly:

“Is that you, you troubler of Israel?”

Elijah replied that Ahab himself had brought trouble on the Israelites by abandoning God’s commandments and following the Baals. Basically, the ruler blamed Elijah for the crisis that the ruler’s own corruption had caused! Amos was similarly accused by the royal priest Amaziah of organising a conspiracy against King Jeroboam “in the very heart of Israel.” His public preaching was considered politically intolerable and he was ordered to leave the royal sanctuary at Bethel. Jeremiah was treated as a defeatist and traitor because he warned Jerusalem that its political and moral corruption would bring Babylonian conquest - he was beaten, imprisoned and thrown into a cistern. Other prophets were persecuted or killed for condemning their own rulers, priests and the Israelite nation. God presents this as a recurring Israelite failure:

“Whenever a messenger brought you something you did not like, you became arrogant: some you called liars and others you killed.” (2:87)

The final Prophet, Muhammad's, experience belongs to the same prophetic pattern and continuous mission. The establishment/leaders and those invested in their status quo would say: “You are creating trouble.” Every time, the Prophet replies, in effect: “I am exposing the trouble you have created.” Prophets disturb false peace. They challenge corrupt leaders, complacent institutions - political or religious, economic exploitation, idolatry and injustice. Those benefiting from the existing arrangement will always describe covenantal repair (islāh) as social disorder - and I would happily take God's noble messengers as exemplars!

A good essay: https://mustafabriggs.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-jester

The US and Zionists are coming to shape the UK https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/17/trump-administration-to-grant-12m-to-groups-founded-by-uk-conservatives-jacob-rees-mogg-and-toby-young

A community that runs on the first will feel a great deal and change very little. God’s code was never a feeling. It’s a charge to steward, to build, and to repair, and it was handed to people who were expected to be equal to it.

The Sympathy Trap Having drawn the line between sympathy and conscientiousness above, I’d now like to name what I view to be one of the major problems in Muslim practice today: almost everything is driven by, and understood through, sympathy. And the irony is that in case after case the actual purpose is stated explicitly in revelation or prophetic practice, and we override it anyway! I’ll give three very brief examples and I’m sure you’ll think of many more once the pattern becomes visible. 1. Take zakat. It’s not charity (sympathy language), it is a tax regime with explicit rules of fiscal expenditure. God lays the categories out in 9:60 - the poor and the needy, yes, but also those who administer and collect it, those whose allegiance is being secured, the freeing of captives, the relief of the indebted, expenditure for those in the path of God, and the stranded traveller on the road. That’s clearly not a list of people to feel sorry for. It’s the budget of a polity: welfare, debt relief, security, administration, statecraft. Zakat is the economic arm of a civilisation, and running it well requires conscientiousness: planning, institutions, accountability, and sustained responsibility. Yet it has been reduced to feeding the poor out of pity, and most people are even taught that its purpose is to make us feel the plight of the poor. Of course there’s nothing wrong with feeling that but zakat is not about sympathy. There were occasions when the Prophet directed these funds toward reconciling hearts and securing strategic allegiance, and the poor saw no share in that particular distribution because zakat serves the order, not the emotions it happens to stir. 2. Take fasting. It’s a formative practice designed to build the resilience and discipline that produce covenantal citizens with the gumption to actually uphold the code. And here the irony is at its sharpest because Prophet explicitly outlined what it is for. Yet the popular explanation you will hear every Ramadan is that "we fast to empathise with the hungry." Once again conscientiousness is swapped for sympathy. 3. Take Gaza. Conscientiousness would mean stepping back and asking the hard question: “how do we stop this from ever happening again?” That question leads immediately to systems: to influence, to power, to the structures that permit it, and then to the unglamorous, long work of building the capability to challenge them with our own effort and resources. Sympathy asks a different question: “how do I feel, and how do I discharge that feeling?” So we donate aid and we march, the feeling is discharged, and none of it touches the cause of the problem. And so the genocide reignites every few years, Palestinians are murdered in the intervals, and the land is appropriated daily, even as the next march is being organised. Aid and protest aren’t wrong in themselves but as a strategy they are sympathy wearing the costume of action. I get that this is the uncomfortable conclusion. Muslims can be far too emotional, and the emotion is well-meaning, but well-meaning sympathy is not a strength. It’s an epic weakness. It substitutes feeling for thinking, discharge for strategy, the gesture for the solution - and it’s exactly the trait an opponent learns to rely on. Years ago I’d watch Maajid Nawaz take apart Muslim spokespeople on national television, almost gleefully, and what struck me was how rarely he had to work for it. He could count on their untrained sympathy to sabotage their own cause. He knew which buttons to press and waited for the reaction. Had they been driven instead by conscientiousness - disciplined, strategic, and sharing cultural capital with the wider society they were addressing, it would’ve been a very different contest (which is why he hit a brick wall with Mehdi Hasan lol). Now, none of this is a case against compassion. It’s a case against letting compassion do the work that responsibility is supposed to do. Sympathy responds to pain but conscientiousness sets out to prevent it.

I’d just like to make it clear that when I say someone isn't conscientious, I'm not saying they lack ordinary sympathy. The two overlap - they’re not mutually exclusive, but they are fundamentally different traits (and confusing them is part of why so much heartfelt religiosity changes little.) Sympathy is about feeling. A sympathetic person is emotionally responsive to the suffering of others so they feel pity, concern, compassion, and they want to comfort and help. I think most people are good and they have sympathy. They see someone crying and go over to console them, they feel bad for the person who has lost their job, they donate because a story has moved them. The focus is emotional resonance - how another person feels, and feeling it with them. Where I’m talking about conscientiousness it’s about responsibility. A conscientious person is careful, disciplined, and motivated to do what is right. They think ahead, fulfil their obligations, notice problems, and act even when there is no emotional reward in it. They pick up litter because they care about the state of the environment. They prepare thoroughly because others are depending on them. They stand against corruption because it harms society. They keep their promises when nobody is watching. The focus is duty, responsibility, and standards. The difference at its sharpest is where the sympathetic person asks, "How does this person feel?" The conscientious person asks, "What is the right thing to do?" Just to clarify, sympathy is an emotion that good people have. Conscientiousness is a settled trait of character that governs how someone behaves consistently, in public and in private, whether or not their feelings happen to be engaged. The two can exist entirely apart. Someone can be sympathetic without being conscientious so they’re moved by the plight of the poor but never following through or actively seeking to resolve the problem, quick to comfort people yet forever letting them down, warm-hearted but unreliable and disorganised. And someone can be conscientious without being especially sympathetic: reserved, emotionally restrained, not easily stirred, yet the one who makes sure everyone is treated fairly, upholds justice, fulfils their duties, and protects the vulnerable, because they believe it’s right and not because they’ve necessarily been moved to it. The ideal, of course, is to hold both. This is where the covenantal framework makes the distinction unavoidable. The Quran repeatedly calls believers to uphold justice, establish equity, fulfil trusts, honour covenants, demand the public good (al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf), and prevent social harm (al-nahy ʿan al-munkar). Every one of these is an expression of conscientiousness, not sympathy. They demand attentiveness to society, responsibility, moral courage, and sustained action and not merely a compassionate feeling that comes and goes. A person can sympathise with suffering and never once challenge the systems that produce it. The conscientious person feels responsible for reforming them. Sympathy is highly valuable, but it’s conscientiousness that builds healthy families, trustworthy institutions, and flourishing societies. Sympathy responds to pain. Conscientiousness works to prevent it.

It describes the one who submits his face to God in faithful adherence to His covenantal code far wider than the handful of rituals many imagine. When the Prophet said submission is "built on five," he named its foundations, not its ceiling. The duty to command good and forbid wrong isnt just correcting an individual's behaviour as some misinformed people assume. It’s the obligation to establish what is publicly recognised as good, just and beneficial while resisting corruption, oppression and social harm wherever they appear - and quite logically, that requires conscientious people. As God puts it:

"…whoever submits his face to God while doing better, and follows the tradition of Abraham, who was Godward…" (4:125)

It reaches into economics, politics, family life, the treatment of neighbours, business ethics, concern for the vulnerable, the pursuit of justice, intellectual honesty, and the building of civilisation. The formative practices exist to produce such a person, not to stand in for them. So, to provoke people into thinking, I sometimes say: "You might be a Western sociological Muslim, but you aren't necessarily one of those God described as: مسلمون لله It unsettles us because we've grown used to treating religious identity as something inherited rather than embodied. And if I want to be deliberately provocative half joking I'll say “to be a true believer, you have to be "woke" in the word's original sense. It assumes you’re a person who actually cares about what is happening around you.” God doesn’t advocate "private religiosity" and ritualism. That’s not His order - it was engineered by capitalism and secularism: "religion" domesticated, locked into the interior life, tolerated so long as it makes no claim on how society is arranged, how wealth moves, and how power behaves. The prophets never taught that their bond with the King belongs behind closed doors while public life belongs to someone else. When Jesus said to render unto Caesar what’s his, he was speaking of the dunya, not God’s sovereignty. Just as the final messenger spoke of vessels of gold and silver being for the unfaithful in the hadith of Ibn Abbās, saying, “these are for them in this life and for you in the next.” (Muslim) The Prophets proclaimed God's sovereignty over every realm. Jesus himself taught his followers to pray: "Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10) Whatever secularised Christianity has made of it, that is not the language of private spirituality. It is the language of public order. On earth. Not merely in a private heart, not deferred to a hereafter, but right here: God's sole sovereignty (tawhīd) made real in the ordering of human life. The supplication Christians repeat in imitation of Jesus is a mandate, and the same mandate later handed to the Ishmaelites in 3:110, the same covenantal charge running through the whole prophetic mission since primordial times. The Kingdom of God is the extension of His justice, mercy and guidance into human society. That has always been the mission of the prophets, because it has always been the decree of the true Sovereign, Lord of the realms. So the conscientious person and the true believer are not two categories that happen to overlap. They are necessarily the same person. The inert are just furniture, and furniture, however ethnic it looks, has never repaired a single thing.

The Conscientious (or why you have to be woke in the original sense): I've spent enough time around people who used the term "Muslim" as self-description to know that an identity tells you very little about someone’s conscientiousness - plenty who claim the label have less of it than a brick. Others mistake conscientiousness for conformity to an ethnoreligious culture or, where the Protestant notion of piety is engendered, they reduce it to preserving inherited habits, winning theological arguments, or displaying ritual observance while staying indifferent to the world around them. But conscientiousness is a concern for our environment, for the condition of human beings and for the state of the world - it’s the inability to sit easy while things are broken around you. Before "woke" became a lazy insult in a culture war, it meant something serious. It came out of Black American speech: "stay woke" was an instruction to refuse to sleep through the systemic wrongs a comfortable society would rather ignore. Lead Belly used it to warn Black travellers to keep their eyes open and decades later it passed through music and the movements against racial violence, before being commercialised, weaponised, and finally emptied as everything eventually is in the neoliberal order. It simply meant being awake to reality, conscious of injustice, alert to the structures that shape people's lives. In that original sense, the idea is deeply covenantal. The Quran is addressed to Ishmaelites and Joktanite allies who were conscientious, calling those who were indifferent “munāfiq” and those who opposed repair and a just systemic order as “kāfir”. These weren’t theological terms - theology didn’t exist. They reflected an attitude towards God’s order on Earth. One can recite the Quran, wear it, inherit it, and remain a brick. God's message only works for the conscientious: it is for them, and a warning to those who work ruin on earth. Read the Proclamation as it actually presents itself and you find it relentlessly concerned with structure: with justice, with wealth and its hoarding, with orphans and debtors and the abused, with power and how it corrupts - with the ordering of society, not private spirituality. The practices God ordains aren’t rituals in the modern sense of private devotional theatre performed for personal comfort. They are formative, designed to shape a particular kind of human being: the covenantal citizen, capable of contributing to reform and repair. The covenantal prayers (salāh), the fast, and the redistribution of wealth into the polity (zakāh) are the gym in which conscientiousness is trained. It’s not the endpoint at which it stops. That is why God defines the community He addresses the way He does: كُنتُمۡ خَیۡرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخۡرِجَتۡ لِلنَّاسِ تَأۡمُرُونَ بِٱلۡمَعۡرُوفِ وَتَنۡهَوۡنَ عَنِ ٱلۡمُنكَرِ وَتُؤۡمِنُونَ بِٱللَّهِۗ وَلَوۡ ءَامَنَ أَهۡلُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ لَكَانَ خَیۡرࣰا لَّهُمۚ مِّنۡهُمُ ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَ وَأَكۡثَرُهُمُ ٱلۡفَـٰسِقُونَ ﴿١١٠﴾

You are the best of the Covenantal communities brought out to steward the people: you demand the public good, and prevent social harms, and you keep faith with God. If the former Bearers of the Covenantal Decree had also kept faith it would have been better for them. Some of them are faithful, but most of them are deviant. (3:110)

Notice the order and the emphasis: the immediate audience (the Ishmaelites) is not praised for the volume of its ritual worship but charged with a public mandate: to demand the public good and prevent social harm. That is the definition. And God is blunt about why the former Bearers of the Covenant forfeited their standing: for a failure of faithfulness that showed in their abandonment of that public, reforming responsibility. Their unfaithfulness (lack of imān) was structural, not liturgical. The way "Muslim" gets used across the West today isn’t how God used the Arabic descriptor. "Muslim" now functions as a sociological identity: an ethnoreligious label and membership of an ethnic community. Obviously, that’s not how the Proclamation principally employs the Arabic word muslim.

A sincere and righteous sister recently asked me: “One huge change I’ve made in applying my deen, even since I joined you, is recognising that we are not required to do anything ritualistically. Although this makes a great deal of sense to me, every now and then I still feel doubtful… I think the other mental barrier I face in fully embracing that approach to deen is the fear that everything can potentially be explained away. A person could basically do whatever they like and call it deen if they are smart enough to provide a logical reason for what they do. I’ve seen people make a very compelling case that hijab was situational and served a purpose at that time, but that it is no longer needed. So what stops that from happening to every law from the Lawgiver?” Her wonderful husband responded: “Anyone can claim anything and use verses or Hadith to justify it. This has always been the case. The question is which claim is correct? The one backed by the best understanding of all the available evidences and information. But again, this isn’t new. This is how everything has always been. Every age has asked the same question. You’re asking this question now as if this is some unusual “new” methodology. That’s masking what’s actually going on in your mind. What’s actually going on is that the conclusions that are actually most correct simply aren’t the ones you grew up believing were most correct, and that creates an internal friction.” I say: My guy is 💯. And what he said for his lovely wife also goes for many others. And yes, anyone can say anything, and depending on the level of the audience, gain acceptance or rejection. But there is common sense reasoning to be applied, as Ibn al-Qayyim put it:

َإِنَّ الشَّرِيعَةَ مَبْنَاهَا وَأَسَاسُهَا عَلَى الْحِكَمِ وَمَصَالِحِ الْعِبَادِ فِي الْمَعَاشِ وَالْمَعَادِ، وَهِيَ عَدْلٌ كُلُّهَا، وَرَحْمَةٌ كُلُّهَا، وَمَصَالِحُ كُلُّهَا، وَحِكْمَةٌ كُلُّهَا، فَكُلُّ مَسْأَلَةٍ خَرَجَتْ عَنِ الْعَدْلِ إِلَى الْجَوْرِ، وَعَنِ الرَّحْمَةِ إِلَى ضِدِّهَا، وَعَنِ الْمَصْلَحَةِ إِلَى الْمَفْسَدَةِ، وَعَنِ الْحِكْمَةِ إِلَى الْعَبَثِ، فَلَيْسَتْ مِنَ الشَّرِيعَةِ، وَإِنْ أُدْخِلَتْ فِيهَا بِالتَّأْوِيلِ The covenantal Law is built and founded upon wise purpose and upon the flourishing of God’s subjects - in this life and in the one to come. All of it is justice. All of it is mercy. All of it is flourishing. All of it is wisdom. So every point of law that has passed out of justice into tyranny, out of mercy into cruelty, out of flourishing into ruin, out of wisdom into futility - is no part of the Law, whatever interpretation was used to smuggle it in.

(After some current projects, I hope to sit down and translate Ibn al-Qayyim’s Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn or get my kids to!)

Along with serving God’s message and the Proclamation (Quran) He sent down, another one of my main aims is simple: I won’t quietly stand by while modern religiosity becomes a form of self-sabotage for those who sincerely seek to be faithful to God. I believe this has become the norm, and so too do many others. People are burdened with restrictions that God never imposed, while the things He actually emphasised are entirely neglected even unknown! Endless theological disputes consume people’s energy over questions that have little bearing on living a faithful life. Cultural and ethnic traditions are confused with revelation until challenging inherited customs is treated as though it were challenging God Himself. Communities also become captive to immigrant anxieties, preserving the fears, insecurities, and social dynamics of a particular moment of their experience as though they were timeless features of God’s code. The result is that the Quran, which was meant to liberate, instead becomes something that exhausts people (through their assumptions about it). Instead of producing confident, principled individuals who improve the world around them, the assumed dīn often produces hesitation, defensiveness, and withdrawal. This self-sabotage extends beyond theology. Politically, the faithful can become trapped in reaction rather than vision, defining themselves by what they oppose instead of what they’re building. Socially, they can become insular, suspicious of wider society, reluctant to engage institutions, culture, education, business, and public life with confidence. Rather than exercising stewardship they retreat into ethnic survival. Then, when the inevitable frustrations arrive as it does for many, they end up blaming God for a life that God’s guidance never asked them to live. They blame revelation for burdens that humans created. They blame the true code for restrictions that their culture imposed. They blame God because the “religion” they inherited has failed to produce flourishing. But God didn’t sabotage them - modern religiosity did. God’s guidance was never intended to produce this. The Proclamation speaks of rushd: sound judgement, maturity, right direction, and wise conduct. Divine guidance cultivates people who think clearly, act responsibly, establish justice, fulfil trusts, build strong families and institutions, seek knowledge, create prosperity, and contribute to the wellbeing of society. It calls human beings to flourish under God’s guidance - we’re not meant to shrink under the weight of human additions. Faithfulness should make us more capable, not less. More courageous, not more fearful. More constructive, not more reactionary. More open to truth, not more captive to inherited assumptions. For many serious and wonderfully conscientious people, religiosity leaves them weaker, more fragmented, less effective, and less able to fulfil their covenant with God and responsibilities to humanity, We should have the courage to ask whether we have confused the “religion” with the traditions, anxieties, and ideological baggage that have built up around it. God’s guidance emancipates. It elevates. It leads to rushd - and where there is rushd, there’s the possibility of genuine success and human flourishing.

قُلۡ أُوحِیَ إِلَیَّ أَنَّهُ ٱسۡتَمَعَ نَفَرࣱ مِّنَ ٱلۡجِنِّ فَقَالُوۤا۟ إِنَّا سَمِعۡنَا قُرۡءَانًا عَجَبࣰا﴿ ١ ﴾ یَهۡدِیۤ إِلَى ٱلرُّشۡدِ فَـَٔامَنَّا بِهِۦۖ وَلَن نُّشۡرِكَ بِرَبِّنَاۤ أَحَدࣰا﴿ ٢ ﴾ Say ‘It has been revealed to me that a group of jinn listened in and said, “We have heard an amazing proclamation, it guides to rushd so we shall keep faith with it, and we will never associate our Lord’s sovereignty with another.’

I believe the faithful need an infrastructure that can be a place of genuine leadership, genuine learning and genuine change, a community of highly informed people who are part of their communities and wider society, grounded in place and time, valuing the contribution that all can make, but capable of looking back to learn from the past and forward to imagine different futures. To play their part as stewards of God’s order on earth, to allow and cultivate its flourishing rather than extract and repress it. Most of our pressing problems today are housing and the cost of living, not to mention from the manosphere/secular feminism and the far right to acutely poor levels of mental health and loneliness. Rather than boosting the humanities, social sciences and covenantal disciplines to tackle these evident problems, we’ve come to focus on STEM subjects at the behest of corporations, massively feeding the financial system and succumbing to the paradigm others have set for us, or leaving those determined to stick with real life scrabbling for breadcrumbs. The world is really messed up. Even those doing well materially have little to meet God with, so in our age rituals that comprise of sounds or actions we don’t understand have become the hope of eternal salvation - all borrowed from secularised Christianity. The paradigms that govern our everyday life, from the way we maintain relationships to the way we raise our children and the ideas about life we imbue them with (religious or secular) are not our own. We have adopted them from elsewhere and offered them as inheritance as if they were natural. So here, the key word is unlearning – and that should be the foundation of our learning today. Current thinking has delivered this broken world, unpicking, reshaping, and restoring healthy thinking has to be at the heart of 21st century learning. Without it, there is no serious resistance. In today’s world, intellectual and strategic thinking isn’t allowed to be truly productive, original and genuinely change-driving in the neoliberal order and ethno-religious communities. A lot is driven by the competitive drive to survive and raise funds, and thereby most advocate the same old tired, stale, failed models and thinking. It fails to understand that there are many ways to live, to flourish and survive, as humans have over hundreds of thousands of years on this planet. Anyone not singing the same old tune will find it hard to find a place in the public and community institutions of today and thus operate at the margins, funded often by their own independent efforts and few supporters. Intellectual/scholars should obsess over quality and efficacy, not mere marketing. We need to escape from combative and colonial ways of knowing and writing. Our faith and shar’ī language must be decolonised and abandon the Protestant frameworks of colonialism embedded during the British Raj. Along with finding answers we also need to ask important questions and find comfort with uncertainty in the formative stages. Some might argue that such work wouldn’t survive in most public contexts, but doesn’t it need to, if our species is to grasp its ignorance, the limits of its powers, the damage (fasād) it has done and continues to do to this planet and its people? And what about getting together to co-create a new kind of educational infrastructure that builds a new sustainable, caring, future for us all? I see that as a world working towards covenantal ideals. It means we need to get away from the idea of an education “market” borrowed from neoliberalism and expel that failed model from our thinking. Instead we build an education community, an education of godliness, flourishing (falāh) and repair (islāh) - the explicit message of the final message. What does it need to be? Healthy and secure for its members, contributive and generative for the world - truly civilisational building.

The Arabic word khalā’if (خَلَائِف) is a plural noun that literally means "successors," "inheritors," or "stewards."  The singular form khalīfah (خَلِيفة) means a successor, deputy, or steward. This is also where the English word “caliph" comes from - which was transliterated instead of being translated to make it feel exotic. Now, Khalīfah actually has two broken plural forms in Arabic: khulafā’ (خُلَفَاء) and khalā’if (خَلَائِف).  The word khalā’if appears several times in the Proclamation (Qur'an) and carries a profound meaning. It generally refers to generations of humans who succeed one another on Earth, inheriting the land, its resources, and the responsibilities left by those who came before them. For example:

"He is the One Who made you successors (khalā’if) upon the earth..." (6:165). "Then We made you successors (khalā’if) in the land after them so that We may observe how you will do." (10:14).

When God speaks in Arabic about khalā’if, the Most High isn't just talking about people who randomly show up next in line. It implies a trust or stewardship. It means you have inherited the power, authority, or environment from a previous generation, and you are now the one being observed on how you take care of it.

Are we raising technicians and not human beings? I have many children, may God guide them to good, and as most parents today, my wife and I discuss their futures considering the rise of AI, the job market, and the increasingly competitive neoliberal environment. Even the most academic of my children are seriously considering the trades, but our concern is that work and training becomes the be all - and that they don’t end up well constituted intellectual and intelligent human beings - highly informed in what it means to be human. Talking a friend, he was expressing how much hasn’t changed in the way our generation is raising the next. We have confused training with formation. We aspire to produce kids who’ll do a a lot of technical stuff but understand very little of what matters most. Out of anxiety for high grades and secure careers, our children undergo decades of institutional instruction. I’m not problematising it - society needs its lawyers, physicians, engineers and tradespeople. But we should be honest that the very years that make a child fluent in a profession doesn’t leave much room for the learning that makes a human being. Are we as the faithful heading in a direction to have generations skilled in law, medicine, finance and the trades who little consider the reality of the cosmos they inhabit, God’s covenantal law that ought to order it, how a society ought to be arranged so that all may flourish, the civilisational values Allah calls us to embody, and the revelation in which all of this is contained? Will neoliberalism win this war of attrition? They will know their field and be strangers to their purpose. I’ve found that this shortcoming reaches even into the ordinary business of being human. Given that we’re not highly informed, they’ll have little grasp of how a person is formed, how children and adults move through their stages, how the psyche and emotions are shaped and shaken at particular ages, how hormonal and emotional disposition seriously affects the way we deal with / manage family, friends and colleagues. God speaks of these things to cultivate us. Yet we’ll turn out experts in systems who can’t read a son, a spouse, or a grieving friend - or understand that values God wants us to espouse for the betterment of our environment. It’s not about ritualistic halal and haram, it’s about the environment one builds that’s conducive to the human spirit - this is the point of the program God refers in Arabic to as islam-ing. Many will flourish financially and that’s important. But watch what happens to the human spirit under this arrangement, and it’s something we often see in people we come across: it is the spirit dampened and drawn down into a neoliberal frame that offers nothing richer than material comfort. When the soul finally protests, neoliberalism hands back a thin ritualism that lacks purpose as a consolation prize. Of course, we don’t have the luxury of pretending our neoliberal environment doesn’t exist. We live in it and I believe we’re obliged to navigate it intelligently and to succeed within it. But we have to navigate it without it costing us the humanity Allah created us with. To let it is to become an empty shell that’s capable, credentialed and comfortable, but estranged from the emancipation He gave us. The real education is the one that returns us to ourselves as creatures of God - that teaches us the cosmos, the law written through it, the shape of a flourishing society and how we contribute to its existence, and the weight of our own souls. Everything else is a skill. This is a formation. Our children deserve both, and as parents we have to actively mitigate for the first crowding out the second.

The problem many face today is that they overlook how the Proclamation is a normal act of communication. They don’t approach it as a conversation between the Creator and His creation (a dynamic, responsive discourse) but instead as a cryptic text to be dissected through formulae, grammar, and scholastic tools. They read it as if it were a structured essay, with fixed arguments and sequential logic, instead of a living dialogue that interacts with the listener. When one treats revelation as a conversation, it begins to breathe. The shifts in tone, sudden changes in subject, rhetorical questions, and varying audience (Israelites, Christians, Ishmaelite faithful, Ishmaelite pagans) all make perfect sense. Remember, God isn’t writing a thesis. He is speaking. The Proclamation is speech (qawl, kalām) and not a textbook. But centuries of institutionalisation, theological defensiveness, and grammatical literalism have turned that living word into a fossil where recitation became performance and understanding became largely irrelevant. Instead of listening, people began “studying” the text which can drain it of its original force. The irony is that this was never how the earliest audience encountered it. The Companions didn’t “analyse” the Qur’an. They heard it. They felt addressed, warned, consoled, corrected. It was God talking to them, not God publishing an essay. When we read it like an academic paper, we miss the very quality that made it transformative. The Qur’an’s power lies in its dialogical rhythm in the way it provokes thought, rebukes arrogance, and draws the reader into observing a conversation - basically a transcript.

d. Are we treating the Sunnah as prophetic moral-political guidance, or as isolated prooftexts to simply justify sectarian positions? e. Are we training scholars who can think from first principles, or those who merely reproduce ethnic and political inherited positions? f. Are Muslims trying to win acceptance from liberal modernity or react to it, or do they have an independent and detailed conception of a ‘good society’ and trying to build one under God? For me, decolonising Islam is about reclaiming Hanīfic intellectual autonomy. 6. It also means being honest about internal decay. Let’s be frank, decolonising Islam can’t become an excuse to blame everything on colonialism. Many Muslim failures are internal: anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, sectarianism, class and ethnic interests, bad education, sentimental religiosity, and populist preaching. Being serious and mature about decolonising Islam means removing colonial distortions without romanticising Muslim decay. It’s not about nostalgia but Abrahamic reconstruction - just like the mission of Muhammad, the sayyid of the Messengers.

I was talking to some young folk, and I feel I managed to explain what one of my projects is quite clearly. So I thought I’d share here: I feel that one of the major missions of my generation and the next must be to reform Islam. But what type of reform? Well certainly not the type that attempts to align it with modernity’s values. The reform I’m speaking about concerns decolonisation. At its best, it means freeing “religious” imagination from categories imposed or distorted by colonial modernity, so Islam can be understood on its own terms again. I acknowledge that the phrase is often vague, so I would break it down like this: 1. It doesn’t mean “make Islam anti-Western.” A shallow version of “decolonising Islam” just means: reject the West, romanticise the pre-modern past, and call everything modern colonial, modernist or liberal. Come on, that’s not serious, just embarrassingly reductive. A lot of anti-Western discourse is itself modern and shaped by the very colonial conditions it claims to resist. Decolonising Islam has to recognise that some anti-Western Islamist habits are also products of colonial modernity. So the issue is not “West bad, East good.” The issue is: who defines the categories by which Islam is understood, and who decided on those English equivalents? 2. It means recovering Islam from colonial categories. Colonial modernity didn’t only occupy land. It also reorganised knowledge: law, religion, state, identity, education, tradition, civilisation, progress, and backwardness. In the Islamic case, this often meant Islam was reduced to things like: - “religion” in the private Protestant sense - “Sharia” as a frozen legal code - “Muslim” as an ethnic identity bloc - “tradition” as an ossified medieval archive - “reform” as alignment with liberal modernity and neoliberalism - “extremism” as excessive religiosity rather than distorted moral-political reasoning. Our decolonial approach challenges the presentation of these categories are neutral. 3. It means de-Christianising the concept of “religion.” I think this is crucial. Modern people often understand Islam through a Christian-Protestant frame: religion as belief, worship, private spirituality, personal salvation, and institutional clergy. But dīn is not “religion” in that sense. It is a code, a way, a binding order, a social-moral covenant. A serious decolonial reading of the Qur’an exposes how we have unconsciously forced the Proclamation into Christian-secular categories of “religion.” Decolonial Qur’anic study also requires “de-Christianising” how the Qur’an is understood and how its relationship to Muslims is imagined. Having done this with hundreds of people over the years, the impact is phenomenal. 4. It means resisting both Orientalism and identity-populism. They are both traps. Orientalism is Islam studied as an object thats classified, historicised, pathologised, and explained through external assumptions. But you also have reactionary identity Islam where Muslims respond by turning Islam into an ethnic flag, a wounded identity, or a populist badge of belonging. Both severely miss the point. Decolonising Islam doesn’t mean replacing Western caricatures with Muslim slogans. It should mean returning to the moral, legal, covenantal, and civilisational substance of the revelation. As the Qur’an puts it, it means moving from “Islam as identity” back to the tradition of Abraham, and particularly its Ishmaelite legacy, covenantal responsibility, public justice, moral order, and faithful stewardship. 5. It means rebuilding intellectual sovereignty. When you think about it, a strong version of decolonisation involves asking: a. Are our questions actually Qur’anic questions, or modern imported questions? b. Are we translating key terms accurately, or preserving ideological transliterations that haven’t even been understood in their context? c. Are we treating “fiqh” as contextual case law expressing a living juristic method, or as museum law?