Rijal al Dunya - The Earth Men & The Love of the Material World (Dunya)
Part 6 - Introduction - Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World
"I don't believe, and no one in this world should believe, that a terrorist is someone who strives to make people's voices heard. A terrorist is one who commits genocide, supports genocide, stands by genocide, remains silent during genocide, and rejoices during genocide.” - Bisan Owda, Journalist Covering and Living Through the Genocide in Gaza
As I write this introduction we are witnessing the destruction of Gaza and as perhaps the crown of these series of genocides that Muslims have faced over the last thirty-five years in the midst of the war on terror. This is a deeply reflective moment for Muslims around the world, and with this genocide, maybe we can see the depth of the systems and civilizational ways of life that we have bought into, as we begin to think of ways to dig ourselves out through purifying ourselves, our economies, and our communities.
This moment reminds me of the time when I converted to Islam in 2002, the only real difference is we didn’t have social media to show the scale of genocide that unfolded in Iraq as the US military strictly controlled the media narrative. We also didn't have global alternative news sources like Al Jazeera at the level they are at today. Since 2001 when I made my first Muslim friends, over the last twenty-three years I have seen our communities pushed into boxes focused on identities prefabricated for us and an endless stream of responses talking primarily about what we are not. It is because of this policing of our identities that we have focused so much on what it means to be American Muslim, British Muslim, Malaysian Muslim, Qatari Muslim, and on and on. I’ve also been blessed to live and build with Muslim communities around the United States and around the world from West Africa to Southeast Asia, North Africa, Europe, to the Gulf, so I’ve seen how these things are playing out in different parts of the world. As we started building my organization the Center for Global Muslim Life in early 2020, the original name we used for this organization was the Muslim Futures Foundation with the idea of creating something that is focused on building a vision for our community rather than simply reacting to whatever is thrown at us day after day, and year after year as ambulance chasers attempting to put out one crisis after another.
As this era of the War on Terror moves through its fourth decade, and we see a totally new world being birthed around us in the 2020s we have to think about what the next 50 years of our world will look like. In this time from 2020 to 2070 Muslims are expected to grow from making up one-quarter of the world’s population to one-third. So much of the military, educational, philosophical, cultural, and psychological wars that our communities face are meant to put us into this permanent reactionary state that diminishes our understanding of our own worldview and our own collective power.
So it has been in these realms that I have worked primarily through grassroots community organizing to build local power for communities, and in discussing the larger dimensions of the worldview of Islam and how we should understand the metaphysical realities of our spiritual lives to see how the world is changing around us. These latter points are both lifelong pursuits in understanding and knowing Allah, while also understanding your own self, and your heart in transforming your life.
The sad reality is for many Muslims today, being Muslim is about identity more than it is about faith and calling the world to a higher purpose. The reality is, the rapid transformation of our world, and the breakthroughs in technology like generative artificial intelligence make this world difficult to look away from, as many prophecies have predicted.
There’s an incredible tradition from the Cheyenne or Tsi Tsi Tsa nation of indigenous peoples from the plain lands of the Rocky Mountains where I grew up (Wyoming and Colorado) pass down orally from a man they believed was a Prophet who was born of a virgin birth, and has a story similar to that of the Prophet Moses in his birth and upbringing. The tradition of this messenger of the Tai Tai Tsa, named Sweet Medicine, warns of a future time for this tribal group of great upheaval and transformation,
"There is a time coming, though, when many things will change. Strangers called Earth Men will appear among you, Their skins are light-colored, and their ways are powerful. They clip their hair short and speak no Indian tongue. Follow nothing these Earth Men do, but keep your own ways that I have taught you as long as you can. The Earth Men are too strong and his food will be too sweet and after we taste that food we will want it and forget our own foods. Chokecherries and plums, and wild turnips, and our honey from the wild bees, that is our food. This other food is too sweet. We eat it and forget. I am sorry to say these things, but I have seen them, and you will find that they will come true.!?"
In Arabic we would call these earth men, rijal al dunya, the men of the material world who have long lived outside of any tradition in their madness inducing pursuit of what Cristobal Colon (Columbus) lusted over, gold, glory, power and Christian dominance. To understand the Islamic side of this we have to understand that generally it is believed that we as Muslims have strong protections. That is until we follow the ways of people who do not follow tradition and that Allah warns us will lead us to destruction. There are two important books related to this by the Hadrami scholar who passed away recently, Habib Abu Bakr Al-Adani, the first called, The Concise Article-An Explanation on the Intermediate, Minor, and Major Signs of the Last Hour, and the second titled, Lifting Hardship from the Ummah. As the Shaykh mentions in his book these protections are clear in the Qur'an when Allah says,
“But Allah did not choose thus to punish them while thou [O Prophet] wert still among them, and Allah would not punish them while they seek forgiveness” - al-Anfal: 8:33
And further Allah mentions in the Quran,
"You are the best ummah ever raised for mankind, you enjoin in righteousness, forbid evil, and you believe in Allah." - al-‘Imran: 3:110
Therefore, this hardship, which befell the ummah in the past, come to us now and will continue to come in the future, for the following reasons, according to Habib Abu Bakr, first, the neglect of the conditions which make us a distinctive nation, and taking the course that led past nations to go astray. For example, if a person isn’t praying then they aren’t truly living Islam. One of the points the central points in Lifting Hardship from the Ummah, was Habib Abu Bakr’s usage of the term, ghutha’iyya period, in reference to the hadith where the Prophet ﷺ refers to a point in history where Muslims will be many but we will be like the flotsam (ghuta’) on the sea, as it relates to power and where “wahan” will be placed in our hearts. In the Hadith, it is asked of the Prophet ﷺ what is wahan? He ﷺ then replied: “The love for this worldly life, and hatred of death” (Abu Dawud). Again, this goes back to that point about identity, if we are Muslim, but don’t understand what the worldview of Islam actually is, then what will we create in the world? This is especially important for us to think about as one thing that the world pre and post-COVID represent (if such a thing exists), is a further acceleration of the worldview of unbridled technology.
How do we actually prepare for this future through our own worldview rather than as Muslims living through the lens of westernization, or the Chinese worldview, or some type of technological utopianism? If all that Elon Musk is trying to build came to fruition what do we as Muslims have to say about this, and do we participate? Of course, this is much bigger than just Elon Musk, but this is someone who is solving a problem we can agree on, in creating alternatives to fossil fuels, while also building companies that are trying to link our minds to computers, who will soon control up to 50% of the world’s satellites orbiting the earth in an attempt to beam internet to the entire planet, and of course, most ambitiously, trying to colonize Mars. While also paying billions to control discourse, and speech through his algorithmic messaging platform, formerly known as Twitter. He’s not alone in our world of billionaire mega barons whose central goal is the colonization of space or more immediately the colonization of minds through algorithms.
So like is mentioned in the above tradition from Sweet Medicine, the Shaykh believes this is the ghuthy’iyya period and one we have been in for some time at least since the beginning of colonization. Of course wealth isn't the only form of this love of dunya, just look at the leadership of the Muslims and how they hold to power and refuse to share power with the people. Then we see microcosms of this all over the place where we are building our little fiefdoms here and there without shared leadership within our communities, like many Mosque boards are a sad reflection of. As just one example of this, I recently overheard a conversation at a Mosque in the United States that is controlled by a legacy board and a community board. The legacy board controls the Mosque and its finances as the founders of the Mosque, and the community board is voted on but has no real power. The person talking was asking the member of the legacy board what would happen to his seat on the legacy board when he died, and without missing a beat he responded, it will go to my son of course.
