Towards the Revolution of Hearts in an Age of the Soul Wound

We speak of revolution, and yet we have no true conception of what the destructions of our civilizations have meant to each of our lives in losing our true spiritual power rooted in our hearts. In this sense there is no true decolonization, in so much as there is so much that we can never get back. Even within our traditions, much of what has survived which is easily accessible are the material aspects, the forms of our beliefs, without the deeper spiritual realities that don’t easily fit within colonial modernity. From lives lived with divine assistance, to lives of the isolated mind alone with our ideas. We become today intellectuals instead of friends of Allah (awliya). To break through to the other side of existence is to chisel away at the covers surrounding our hearts and with each strike of the blade the spiritual light grows stronger. Maintaining this spiritual light involves moving to new ways of being and ways of knowing as the central goal of the spiritual path as the goal is living our lives within the state of divine presence with the direct knowledge of Allah, a long term ma’rifa, spiritual tasting and knowing the divine realities that can last in each of our hearts. As we begin, we bring our spiritual chisels along for the journey in the form of a tasbih (prayer beads) and come with me as we commit to the deep radical work of transforming both ourselves and our world.

We must each move through this process ourselves, to move our families and communities for the diaspora of hearts to connect and create truly revolutionary change, and an ummah wide reality. This is the only way forward as we face genocide after genocide that have gone on for more than 500 years now with an inevitable planetary destruction at our doorstep through rising fascism and white supremacy that refuses to give up its grip of power, nuclear disaster, or rapidly worsening climate change. These are the extremes of this age of the self (nafs), what the Mayan have called, the era of death, as scientific extremism with no limitations has led us to this existential moment for humankind. Yet we cling on to this hub of dunya (love of the material world), because the realities of dismantling these systems would be too difficult for most of us who lack any connection to the divine presence. This work begins in each of our hearts, and it is hard, deep, life long work in dealing with the intergenerational trauma living within our families and communities. 

The trauma of colonialism, enslavement, and generations of exploitative capitalism that lives off the sweat and blood of our labor lives on in each of us as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), various forms of addiction, as minds unable to rest in a peaceful state (ADHD), and ultimately as the plethora of diseases destroying our lives and families like cancer and heart disease. Within Native American indigenous psychology this reality has been deemed by the community as something much deeper than the incoherent conception of the soul in Western psychology as a reality of, “spiritual injury, soul sickness, soul wounding, and ancestral hurt,” what Eduardo Duran calls, the soul wound. For Muslim communities the reality of this soul wound is described throughout our sacred texts as it relates to goodness and evil in our world, living a blessed life versus living a cursed life. This decolonization then is both an individual process and a communal process, as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ described when he said, “The parable of the believers in their affection, mercy, and compassion for each other is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.” What we have faced over the last five hundred years as a community then as a process of intergenerational trauma is what we could call, an ummah wide trauma.

The Martinican poet and politician Aime Cesaire wrote of colonialism as a poison that is distilled straight into the veins of the colonizing race. What of our world 60 years after the revolutionary era of the 1960s when Cesaire was writing where popular pundits speak about “retiring” words like colonialism. Where politicians like Barack Obama as the first Black president of US Empire, talk of Black suffering and enslavement as the United States, “original sin,” but never speak of the settler colonialism and series of genocides throughout the Americas that laid the foundation for the global spread of European civilization and US imperialism. Many White people today do not know or do not care to recognize their own ancestry and check “American” on census forms as if their families were immaculately born into these lands who just arrived here with no story, and no past. Yet these same people dine in the restaurants of White nostalgia to almost every era of White existence in this country whether its the Cracker Barrel, 1950s dinners, or Applebees, so how are we surprised when they so easily buy into this cult of white supremacist nostalgia that is, “Make America Great Again.” This reality of living without past and without tradition is one of the goals of the monoculture of globalization that wants to act as if these systems of power do not exist as it uses diverse names like “Islamic Finance,” but in reality these are often attempts at putting lipstick on the pig of unfettered financialization of our world and westernized global capitalism run amok. Aspirational whiteness can build the wealthiest cities in the United States today that are majority people of color and yet they follow the masters playbook laid out for them in their gated communities.  

It’s interesting that a 2022 NY Times bestseller is today saying many of these same things, but without saying them as explicitly. In Gabor Mate, the famous physician and psychiatrist, newest book he writes of this poisoned culture of Cesaire, what he calls a “toxic culture,” in his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, that this toxicity includes, “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.” This is a trauma informed understanding of therapy, that sees the world unraveling in front of us as we continue to ignore the root causes of our illness in making the world as a White supremacist myth, and how this reality of colonial modernity is making us all sick in an unprecedented way. The process looks something like this: 

Colonization / Enslavement  - Genocide / Epistemicide - Trauma / The Soul Wound - Intergenerational Trauma - PTSD - ADHD - Illness