I return to this podium after a hiatus of more than fifty days, and I want to say something about this break because what I have to say will be of relevance for others. Some 40 years ago, like so many Muslims from our part of the world, I endured a trauma that human beings should never endure. What most people from my part of the world learn about trauma is to ignore it. In fact, there is a culture that celebrates machismo and defines strength as the power to ignore and suppress trauma rather than confront it. Yet it is much harder, and much braver, to confront trauma than to ignore it. Nevertheless, this is the culture in which I grew up, and it is the culture in which I gained my emotional intelligence and awareness.
But the thing about trauma is that it does not simply vanish. Like all diseases, it needs treatment. After some 40 years of suppressing, ignoring, and disassociating from this trauma, it caught up with me in the most vicious way, in the form of constant flashbacks and other unhealthy emotional responses. There is always a catalyst, a precipitating cause for the trauma to finally flood the brain and overwhelm its coping mechanisms. For me, the catalyst was the ongoing genocide in Gaza and, more specifically, the feeling of powerlessness; my sense of helplessness as I saw people being butchered, night after night, left me with a deep sense of vulnerability and weakness. That was the precipitating cause that allowed the trauma to flood the brain and overwhelm it.
I am not ashamed to say that my family had the wisdom to get me help to focus on dealing with this trauma, and I learned a great deal during this time. I learned how the brain stores trauma, and how emotions are manipulated and often defined by trauma. Put simply, so much of our consciousness, our emotional intelligence, and our thought processes are affected not by the conscious brain, but by the subconscious brain. In fact, the subconscious is estimated to be 80% of what defines our emotional responses, our likes and dislikes, our fears and anxieties. Decades ago, the famous psychologist, Carl Jung, wrote words to the effect that unless human beings deal with their subconscious, they are doomed to repeat the same patterns and call it “fate,” and that is quite true.
We like to believe that our frontal lobe, which is the analytical and thinking part of our brain, is autonomous, independent, and in control. In fact, God has created our brain with instinctive qualities to ensure our safety and preservation. In the brain we have a center called the amygdala, which is believed to be the emotional center of the brain. The amygdala is not part of the frontal lobe. Upon experiencing stimuli, the amygdala translates the stimuli into a sense of safety, danger, anxiety, fear, or even perhaps wellbeing and cheerfulness. It receives various stimuli that tell the amygdala, “Be happy,” “Be sad,” “Be depressed,” or “Be anxious.”
The brainstem, relative to the frontal lobe, is not analytic at all. It is reactive. As the amygdala receives stimuli, it communicates to the brainstem, and the brainstem reacts in predictable ways: flight, fight, or freeze. When the brainstem is triggered and we get our fight, flight, or freeze responses, the frontal lobe—the thinking part of the brain—goes offline. It no longer works.
That is why so many crimes are committed when the brainstem and the amygdala are in heightened activity and the frontal lobe is suspended. So many criminals, after they commit the crime, will say, “I do not remember precisely what happened.” They do not remember because it was the subconscious brain that took over and put the frontal lobe offline. In that heightened emotional state, you do not do things that you have thought through, and your reactions are far more instinctive than anything else. They are the sum total of your experiences in life. They are the results of how the amygdala has stored trauma and interpreted the world in front of it.
And the thing about the brainstem is that it does not know time. It does not know your age. It cannot differentiate between you as a child, feeling vulnerable and weak, and you as an adult. That is why we feel the emotions and then, when the frontal lobe comes online, it justifies and rationalizes what we have done.
The good news is that God did not create a disease without creating a cure, as the Prophet said. It is possible to reprogram your subconscious. It is possible to go back, engage your brain, and teach it that the way you saw the world when you were a child is no longer relevant or the truth. That the way you defined what is good or bad in that worst period of your life is no longer authoritative and worthy of deference. But it takes a lot of work. It takes hard work to have the bravery and courage to dive deeply to engage your subconscious, to learn to reprogram your subconscious so that you do not keep repeating the same mistakes throughout your life, to stop rationalizing these mistakes in ways that are often transparent to others but are thinly convincing for yourself.
In dealing with the legacy of trauma, a number of thoughts haunted me throughout this journey. I have a son and wife. They are educated and mature enough to have recognized the devastating effect that my old trauma was having on my life, my sleep, my appetite, and my moods. But how many survivors of torture from my part of the world never get help? For there is a stigma among Muslims about mental health. It does not matter that there are many Muslim psychologists. There remains a stigma about mental health. We rely on an insane idea that is more superstition than reality: “If you have trauma, trust in God and it will go away.” It is like saying, “If you have a virus or infection, just make du’a’ and it will go away.” Trauma on the brain is very much a disease like everything else that ails the physical body, and part of God's challenge for us is to understand how the brain works and to deal with the brain in a scientific and empirical fashion.
My second thought was this: it is nothing short of obscene that there are millions of people just like me in the Muslim world—people who have been detained for their opinions and ideas and abused, violated, and tortured—and then thrown back into a society that does not even encourage them to speak out. I cannot tell you the number of times I was told by elderly Muslims, “Do not talk about it, keep it to yourself.” This is although I have nothing to be ashamed about. This is something grotesque, and it is committed by governments against their citizens. If there is shame to be assigned, it is to those who commit and tolerate the practice of torture. In our societies, however, we do not ostracize those who abuse authority and violate the dignity of human beings. And we look at those who suffered and expect them to suffer in silence. We expect them to do the most unhealthy thing in the world: suppress their trauma. We turn their trauma into a private, dirty affair. We increase their suffering tenfold because we force them into isolation. If they want to speak about their trauma, then they are driven further into isolation and marginalization. We add obscenity upon obscenity, and we then wonder, “Where is God?”
A further thought that came to me is the extent to which Muslims collectively suffer from layers of generational trauma. As I made a deep dive into my subconscious, I remembered numerous incidents of indignity and trauma from my early school years. My mother once enrolled me in a school run by nuns. I remembered how I once failed to turn in my homework. The nuns told me that there is a lion's den at school, and that I will be sent to the lion's den where the lion will consume me. The nuns said, “We talked to your parents who said they do not want you. They told us to go ahead and feed you to the lion.” I remember the gripping fear that I had, in first grade, as I waited my turn to be fed to the lion. The superintendent, the head nun, then showed up to say, “If you beg me, I will not feed you to the lion.” So I learned as a child to beg for my life. I now think of the sense of betrayal I felt as a child, first toward my parents, and then toward my teachers and superintendent.
People who grow up in authoritarian and tyrannical societies suffer generational trauma that is never confronted and never dealt with.
A human being is anchored upon their sense of dignity, but generational trauma teaches the human being that they are not entitled to their dignity or that the only way to preserve a sense of dignity is to manipulate, to be a hypocrite, to do things that are not straightforward, to negotiate in unhealthy ways with the exigencies of life in order to preserve their sense of worth or being. This is why you find so many Islamic centers plagued by personality clashes and petty disputes that all have to do with clashing egos. Yes, it is because of generational trauma. It is because the parents who raised this person in the Islamic center passed on the trauma of their parents, and those parents passed it on from their parents and so on.
That is the nature of tyranny. Unjust systems traumatize human beings who then pass on that trauma to those over whom they have power. In fact, their entire relationship to power is unhealthy, for they learn early in life that they need to grab on to whatever power they can manage—otherwise they will be the ones who will get hurt. That is what tyranny teaches you. You either control power, or power will control you.
We do not only see this in our Islamic centers. I grew up with Israel being able to reach deep into Muslim countries, assassinating and killing whomever it wants. And every single time, from the '60s until today, the way Israel has been able to do this is through traitors. How many times have Muslims been able to touch anyone inside Israel? Traitors are produced by tyranny and by forms of trauma, and a place like Israel is very good at doing psychological profiles, pinning down the individuals whom it can flip. Tyrannical and dictatorial societies like Syria, Egypt, and Iran are weak and vulnerable, easily penetrated, and easily defeated from within because there is no genuine loyalty in these societies. Because whoever does their job does not do it because there are standards of professionalism. For they learn that what is far more important than any professional standard is their relationship with those above them. “I can ignore my job as long as my relations with my superiors are good.” That is the difference between a healthy society and a society that is corrupt from the inside.
Generational trauma has brought the Muslim world to its knees, and tyranny and despotism have corrupted our very relationship to power, selfhood, and dignity. A country like Sweden, with a small population, builds reliable cars and manufactures airplanes and fighter jets. A country like France, with the population of Egypt, builds everything. The entire Muslim world does not even manufacture its own prayer mats. They are made in China. The trauma of despotism and tyranny infects the individual, the social unit, the family, the collectivity, and so we end up where we are today.
The genocide in Gaza goes on and on. It is a horrendous, shocking, obscene genocide that the entire Muslim world is either unwilling or unable to stop. What often happens to traumatized people is that their relationship to God, our Maker, becomes skewed and twisted. Trauma skews everything. As the genocide continues, we hear more Muslim voices asking, “Where is God's mercy? Where is God?”
I want you to imagine a friend who lives in a straw house. You say to this friend, “You live in a straw house, so it is only a matter of time before a wind comes and knocks it down.” The friend replies, “Sure, I am working on it. I am bolstering some corners and will add more straw. Do not worry.” The first storm comes, and it does not knock the straw house down. Your friend says, “See? Thankfully God did not knock it down.” The second storm comes, and it does not knock the straw house down, but it does cause some damage. Your friend bolsters the house with more straws and says, “See? Thankfully God did not knock it down.” Eventually, a hurricane comes that blows the house out to the sea. Your friend then exclaims, “Where is God's mercy?” Friend, God's mercy saved you from a number of storms. God gave you warning, after warning, after warning. God sent me as a friend to warn you, but you failed to take heed.
When we are traumatized, it is easy to avoid looking inward and instead look to the heavens, asking, “God, why are You not intervening?” But that is a cop out. Let me explain why it is a cop out very bluntly and simply.
You need to have a sense of history. Life does not start the moment you are born, and life does not end the moment you die. We, as Muslims, are a people who actively worked with the colonizer hand in hand to destroy the symbol of our unity, the Islamic Caliphate. Arabs did everything they could to destroy the Ottoman Caliphate, telling themselves that they would start a new Caliphate whether in Egypt, Jordan, or Syria. We are a people who, again, hand in hand with our colonizers, abandoned our plans for that symbol of Muslim unity. We are a people who, ever since the invention of the aircraft, have consistently been slaughtered by the colonizer through air power. We have consistently aided the colonizer in maintaining authoritarian and despotic governments that rule over us. These despotic governments have never been interested in empowering Muslims. They have never been interested in bridging the scientific gap between Muslims and the rest of the world. They have long known that the soft point for Muslims is their vulnerability before air power. The colonizer has always used total supremacy in the air, from the time the British mowed down the Wahhabis of Arabia, to the famous rebellion in Iraq when Churchill sent British airplanes that slaughtered the Iraqis from the air, to the famous constitutional rebellions in Iran and Syria. It is the same story over and over again. The ailment is corrupt, despotic, and tyrannical governments and a complacent, weak, and acquiescent people. That is the ailment. That is the straw house.
Was it predictable that Israel would commit a genocide against the Palestinians? Absolutely. It was as predictable as the American genocides against Native Americans, as the genocides committed by the Portuguese in Brazil, as the genocides committed by the Spanish in Mexico and South America. It was entirely predictable. Israel has never hidden the fact that they consider all of Palestine theirs. They have never stopped annexing Palestinian territory. What more evidence do we want after an Israeli leader said, “There are no Palestinians; these are animals”? So, are we complicit when we accept Saudi dictatorship and authoritarianism? Absolutely. Are we part of the delusion and trauma? Absolutely. When we support trauma-laden leaders who suffer all types of complexes and psychological handcuffs about power, are we complacent? Absolutely.
What once allowed Muslims to be what they were was that the Prophet and the Qur'an gave them a sense of individual dignity. And what broke the back of Muslims was when the individual Muslim no longer felt they had any sense of dignity, any identity, or any autonomy. When the Muslim individual felt he or she had to immigrate to America or France or England to innovate, to create, to be industrious and successful.
Where, then, is God's mercy? God's mercy manifests despite our follies. God gave us the tools to build an entirely new civilization. I am referring to the oil discovered under the holy lands in the Hijaz. If the Americans, the French, or the British had inhabited these lands, they would not have bought palaces and expensive cars and wasted the money on nightclubs. They would have actually put the money in industry. But God gave us this oil, and we stood by as a group of nobodies from the heart of the desert, the Al Saud, wasted this money. We destroyed the Caliphate. We embraced despotism and erased the dignity of the human being. We made trauma a normal part of our life.
Let me give you an example that educated and pained me. There were five Jewish individuals in the place where I went to deal with my trauma. I respected these human beings because they were very different personalities, with very different traumas, very different everything, but when it came to Israel, they were of one heart and one body. What also impressed me was the way these people observed their religious laws, the rules for the Sabbath, and kosher meals. They went the extra mile to observe kosher rules and worship on the Sabbath. Everyone in the institution had to be educated about what they may or may not do on the Sabbath. It was known that if there was a lecture, they were not going to be taking notes because they were observing the Sabbath.
I remember a copy of the Torah in the closet where they kept the kosher utensils. The institution was forced to accommodate very complicated kosher rules because they, as a people within a religious tradition, demanded that their identity, their autonomy, and their sense of being was respected and honored. So, before you turn to God and ask, “Where are You?” think about your own self. To what extent are you truly observant of God's norms and commands? To what extent do you truly put yourself second when it comes to a cause? To what extent are you truly dedicated and deserving of God's victory?
I noticed a story in which a judge has ruled that UCLA cannot allow protestors to block Jewish students from campus. We all know that not a single Jewish student was attacked or hurt during these campus protests. It was, in fact, pro-Israeli protestors who have attacked pro-Palestine protestors and injured up to 50 of them. But again, I have to admire the initiative, the zeal, the energy, and the commitment of the Jewish students. Even though, as far as I know, not a single Jewish student was harassed or hurt, they know how to demand their rights. They know how to put their money where their mouth is. They are not all talk. They filed lawsuits to create rights even where no space for such rights existed. Although they are students at UCLA, they did not do what Muslims do. “Well, I do not want to make waves or create problems. What if I sue UCLA and UCLA retaliates?” No, they found other Jews who paid the bills to hire top-notch lawyers that sued UCLA and forced UCLA in this position. Although UCLA failed to protect pro-Palestinian protestors, it is now under even more pressure to move against pro-Palestinian protestors in favor of Jewish students who know how to demand their rights.
This is the type of initiative of people who do not suffer from generational trauma. They are not into themselves. They know how to commit to a cause and pursue that cause.
Another article sums up the point I am making through another powerful example. The article talks about how Modi of India, despite his persecution of Muslims, is a close ally of Shaykh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh who was recently overthrown. Modi is an Islamophobe, but Sheikh Hasina did not care. The message sent to Modi is that you can persecute Muslims, and it is no problem. It is the same message that was sent to China. The same message was sent to Israel by the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. “Do whatever you want to Muslims, it does not bother us. Slaughter Muslims all you want, we are your friends.” The article discusses the irony that when Sheikh Hasina was overthrown, India, which has a notorious horrible human rights record when it comes to Muslims, started complaining that Hindus in Bangladesh were not protected. Freeze the picture and pause here. We know that Modi is a notorious persecutor of Muslims. There is no evidence that a democratic Bangladesh would persecute Hindus. Immediately, however, Modi started claiming that democracy in Bangladesh would only elect “Islamists.”
In the current moment, you can target Muslims in China and no Muslim will raise their voice. You can target Muslims in India and no Muslim leader will raise their voice. You can target Muslims in Gaza and no Muslim country does a thing. The point I always come back to is the individual. What is your position? What is your stance? Forget all the grand themes. You cannot change what you cannot change. But you can make a difference when it comes to you. Have you worked on your trauma? Have you confronted your demons? Have you become a healthier human being for the sake of the Ummah? The Ummah needs healthy intellects and healthy psyches. Have you focused on all the ways you can help your people? Or do you still give money to tyrants and despots? Do you still go to Dubai to go shopping, even though you know what the UAE does? Do you still support those who are supported by the UAE or Saudi Arabia?
Think of your own self. Because ultimately, when all is said and done, God is only going to hold you responsible for what you did with your own self. The self, and nothing but the self.