Before I give any khutbah, family and friends typically help me by sending me articles that give me a survey of the issues happening around the world. As usual, to my persistent heartbreak, I find numerous stories of egregious violations and offenses that have been committed against Muslims, often by Israelis. Once again, the Israelis have attacked cars, institutions, or buildings belonging to the United Nations. We find repeated stories of atrocities committed by Israeli forces. There are so many stories about how constant Israeli violations have brought the West Bank to the brink of explosion. We find the leaders of Muslim countries playing the role of appeasers and distractors as they do nothing more than beg the Israelis not to escalate further or to agree to a ceasefire or to some other weak and temporary solution in Gaza. The consistent position of weak people is that they appeal for weak solutions from those whom they perceive to be essentially all-powerful, all-dominant, and all-sovereign. It is clear that Muslim leaders themselves see their own sovereignty, their own autonomy, and their own ability as severely compromised and constrained.
Add to this the reports about how experts from all over the world, including at the UN, are warning for the millionth time about the dire consequences to the planet if pollution and global warming levels remain the same. Of course, the common theme in these stories is that those who are causing the most damage to the planet, when all is said and done, are not those who will actually pay the highest price. Instead, it will be the same people who have been paying the cost for most atrocities since the onset of modernity. It will be darker-skinned people and cultures that pay the price. They have and will be the ones who suffer most because of the actions of the same people who have dominated this planet for the past few centuries, the White race, especially those of West European stock.
In this sense, there is hardly anything new. It is the same old, same old. But all of this begs the question: what is our place, as Muslims, in all of this? What is our role? What is our challenge?
We are supposed to be a believing people, and believing people live in the realization that they are in the full gaze of their Lord. As believing people, it would simply be a fundamental paradox and inconsistency to live our lives and conduct our affairs oblivious to the realization that we are always in God's full gaze.
Moreover, it would be illogical, even pathological, for us to persist in a world in which this is simply the “same old, same old.” Look with the eye of an historian. It does not take long to realize that the brutalization of Muslims now happening in Palestine has, in fact, been taking place against Muslims since the age of colonialism. The places may differ, but the brutalization stays the same. At one point, it was the brutalization of Muslims in a place like Madagascar, which we do not even think of as Muslim anymore. Or it was in Timbuktu. Or consider the break up of al-Sham into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. We have the brutalization that took place in Algeria, of course, while the Indian subcontinent has its own long story. We find the same dynamics of brutalization and colonialism wherever we turn. We find the same activism by non-Muslims, particularly missionaries, to change the reality of the ground. This theme of brutalization has gone hand in hand with colonization and the modern history of racism. Racism and colonization are inseparable. But it is not just about the brutalization of Muslims. It is time that Muslims wake up and confront the historical reality that their brutalization is inseparable from the brutalization of countless indigenous people and cultures.
All of this should pose an obvious question to any thinking, rational Muslim. We today face the “same old, same old,” and we know that our reactions have also largely been identical. There are acts of resistance every once in a while, but these acts are ultimately exhausted. "So, if we face the same old problems and find that the same old solutions have not worked, is it not the logical conclusion that we need radical change?" If the same old does not work, we must recognize and come to terms with that reality. In fact, we must honor that reality through radical honesty with the self. And the radical honesty is that what has not been working continues to not work, and there must be new trajectories and new ways of thinking and acting.
If you do not do that, then it leads to a persistent Muslim theme. Again, this is not uniquely Muslim, but it is a theme consistent with all traumatized people who do not come to terms with their trauma and who do not deliberately, with full intentionality, work to change the dynamics of this trauma.
That theme is dissociation.
You have an overwhelming reality that is persistently traumatic. You are responding to this reality through the same modes and the same dynamics, time after time. These responses have not worked, continue to not work, and will never work.
God has put within us intuitive knowledge of the truth. Subconsciously, then, when we know this is the situation we are in, what happens is that we dissociate. And dissociation takes many different forms. Intoxication, for example, is one form of dissociation. Dissociation is an indulgence in irrationality. It is the ultimate form of distraction from one's reality. While objective and empirical indications point one way, and though you concede to these indications, your response to this objective reality is a mismatch. You might say, for instance, "I fully believe in God, and I believe that all things are in God's hands. I believe that all good and all losses come from God." But your actual life—how you manage and conduct yourself in this life—exhibits that you do not, in fact, trust and put your reliance and your confidence in your Maker. That is a form of dissociation.
In my opinion, even kufr is a form of dissociation. We know God primordially. Before we come to this physical world, in fact, we are with our Maker, and we come into this world with intuitive awareness of our Maker. But it is the consistent paradoxes that confront us in life that force us to deny what we know intuitively, within our hearts, to be the truth. Kufr itself is a form of dissociation because we know that everything has a logical cause; in our material world, everything comes from something, and everything that has an end must have a beginning. Yet we adopt the entirely illogical position that although this is precisely the law of causality in our material world, we convince ourselves that something came out of nothing, and that although everything we know in this world has an end, we tell ourselves that it had no beginning. We somehow convince ourselves that this is an enlightened, logical, and somehow rational position. In reality, it is the height of irrationality to say, “Sure, everything comes from something else in this material world, but I am going to believe there is no God and that, somehow, this entire universe sprang out of nothing."
In my opinion, it is a form of dissociation.
But dissociation itself is a matter of degrees and levels. The height of dissociation is when you know that the bills will not pay themselves, or that if you do not study you will not succeed in life, and yet you convince yourself that, magically, you will be fine, so you slack off on whatever you need to do and live in a fictional, make-believe world. That is a form of dissociation. Or even foggy memories; when your mind refuses to remember the details of something, or invents details that were not present, that is a form of dissociation. We dissociate in all types of ways that are often not very healthy. But it is a coping mechanism, one that could be very destructive.
If you study indigenous populations that have been colonized, you find that the way that these populations relate to the meaningfulness of their own culture suffers from a great degree of dissociation. You often find that the way that colonized, indigenous cultures attempt to honor, remember, or preserve their native cultures suffers from many painful gaps in logic. That, too, is a form of dissociation.
I submit to you that this is the case with modern Muslim cultures. This even happens among some converts, unfortunately, who may become Muslim because they are impressed by Islam's enlightening energy, its open-mindedness, and its pragmatism over other systems of faith. But they then escape to a tradition that is more fiction than reality. They escape to a tradition that is centuries old and that requires a great deal of training to even comprehend, and they convince themselves that these symbols of the past are somehow a sufficient articulation of Islamicity for the present. That, too, is a form of dissociation.
To dissociate is often much easier than confronting reality head-on and thinking systematically about what problems you must come to terms with and what solutions you need to pursue in order to deal with those problems.
But I want to share perhaps the most concrete example of dissociation. It is why I chose to talk about this topic today. I recently received a letter. Sadly, it is not an unusual letter at all, but this one stood out for different reasons. This letter, like so many others I receive, was written by a Muslim born and raised in the West by parents from the Muslim world. It does not matter whether they are Indo-Pak, Arab, or whatever else. It does not matter. This person was raised by their family as a Muslim and, like so many other young Muslims today, they reached a point in which they experienced a crisis of faith. In fact, according to them, this crisis of faith reached the point of kufr. That they no longer identified as a Muslim or related to Islam. In my view, this person, having been raised as a Muslim by their family in the West, had probably already experienced so many moments of irreconcilable paradoxes that they eventually chose to dissociate through kufr.
However, as what happens in so many of the letters that I receive, God guided them to the halaqas and khutbahs of The Usuli Institute online, and after listening to this material, they started feeling re-anchored in their faith and reconnected to their Islam. Through their journey with Usuli’s online material, they started returning to their sense of Islamicity.
Again, I would submit that the reason The Usuli Institute appeals to people like this is because the Islam that we teach requires you to be fully present in the moment. You do not dissociate into mythical beliefs. You cannot sit on the sidelines while you wait for the wonders of the Mahdi or the evils of the Dajjal. People who do this are dissociated people, and that is why this kind of material is so insanely popular. It is because we are a traumatized and dissociated people. So the person who wrote to me found their way back to Islam, but the world that now confronts them includes the horrors of what is happening to the Palestinians, to Muslims in China, to Muslims in India, and so on. This person became active in doing what they believe God requires of them, living in the full gaze of their Lord. This person, like any human being who lives in the moment, wanted consistency between the principles they ascribe to and the normative implications of these principles in their life.
What happened next is nothing new. It has been happening since the dawn of colonialism. As what often happens, this person became active on their university campus in protesting Israeli atrocities and bringing attention to the plight of Palestinians. They became active in doing what they believe their Lord and Maker requires of them. And this brought them to clash with their parents. Their parents saw their actions as entirely unwise and unsafe, so they ordered their daughter, the writer of this letter, to stop her protesting.
We are not historically literate people, so we have no clue how persistent this has been since the dawn of colonialism. I cannot tell you the number of stories, from the moment Napoleon landed on Egyptian shores, of younger people who have told their parents, "It is time for us to resist," and whose parents said, "No, stay home and stay safe." It has been happening now for centuries. The parents will of course cite the same old argument—just so we see the extent of dissociation—that goes as follows: "If you respect me, you would obey me, and God has commanded that you respect me. So I am telling you that you should not protest and you should not translate the principles you have learned about Islam into action. You should instead prefer what we, your parents, see as safety. If you disobey, then you are acting un-Islamically. You are being a bad Muslim because you are dishonoring your parents."
First, there is a point here that is so incongruent, so inconsistent, that we cannot but see the extent to which a traumatized people dissociate. I want you to imagine with me that Islam did, in fact, come to teach that respect and obedience are one and the same. Now imagine what the effect of that would have been on the birth and the growth of Islam, from its genesis till today.
If Islam would, in fact, have taught that to disobey parents is to dishonor them, then there would have been no Muslims, for anyone who has studied the Sira knows that one of the major complaints of the Meccans against the Prophet was that he was getting kids to rebel against their parents. A consistent complaint about the Prophet was that he was turning kids against their parents. "The young are breaking away from our traditions, following Muhammad and disobeying us as their parents." As we all know, this even led to military confrontations in which children fought against their parents in some of the battles. But the dissociated Muslim mind will then say, "No, this was different because these were unbelieving parents, and it is different if the parents are Muslim." The claim, then, is that we can separate obedience from respect if the parents are not Muslim: if the parents are not Muslim, then disobeying our parents is not necessarily disrespectful; if the parents are Muslim, however, then obedience and respect are one and the same.
That is exactly the argument the parents of this woman used. "If you respected us, you would obey us." "But the entire message and mission of the Prophet Muhammad was built and anchored by disobedient children!" "No, no, these were unbelieving parents, and that is why it was okay to disobey them. But when your parents are Muslim, you have to respect them, and you show your respect by obeying them.”
I have a simple question regarding this logic: where do you get that from? God tells us in Surah al-’Ankabut:
Now [among the best of righteous deeds which] We have enjoined upon man [is] goodness towards his parents; yet [even so,] should they endeavour to make thee ascribe divinity, side by side with Me, to something which thy mind cannot accept [as divine], obey them not… (Q 29:8).
This verse is addressed to all human beings (al-insan); it is not addressed solely to Muslims. The command is for all people to treat their parents kindly, decently, generously, and honorably. But if the parents try to pressure the child to disbelieve in God? No, you cannot obey. God repeats in Surah Luqman:
[Revere thy parents;] yet should they endeavour to make thee ascribe divinity, side by side with Me, to something which thy mind cannot accept (as divine], obey them not; but (even then] bear them company in this world's life with kindness, and follow the path of those who turn towards Me" (Q 31:15).
It is the same message. When parents try to force you to accept that which you cannot understand, you cannnot obey them. In Surah al-’Ankabut, God follows this verse not by talking about kufr, but rather by talking about people who fear their fellow human beings more than God (Q 29:10). They are worried about being harmed by fellow human beings more than they woryd about being harmed by God. God then goes on to tell us, right after this, that God knows the difference between those who believe and those who are hypocrites (Q 29:11).
The context of the verse is very clear. It is not talking about parents who try to force you to be an unbeliever. It is talking about parents who try to force you to “associate partners” with God in a way that is not convincing and not persuasive; in other words, in a way that forces you to adopt what you do not believe. God is saying, "When you blindly obey your parents and fear human beings more than you fear Me, you are not only a liar but also a hypocrite." And that hypocrisy is a form of shirk. “Associating partners” with God comes in many different forms and degrees. When I fear my fellow human beings more than I fear God, and when I obey a fellow human being because of my fear of fellow human beings, that is both shirk and nifaq (hypocrisy).
Who distinguished respect from obedience? It is not Khaled Abou El Fadl, it is God. For God starts by categorically telling us to honor our parents, but God then tells us that honoring our parents does not mean blind obedience. Nor is God making this distinction in the context of unbelief. The whole context is about who we fear. Do you fear human beings more, or God? It is in the context of not being a hypocrite, a liar, someone false in your belief. The text is so obvious—the distinction between respect and obedience—that it makes one wonder how we could have gotten it wrong. How could so many people have gotten it so wrong for so many centuries?
It is dissociation. False consciousness. It is when people are saddled by generational mistakes.
One of the worst things about trauma is that it lives generationally. The fears, anxieties, mental hang-ups, and failures of earlier generations are passed on to the generation that follows. It could take the form of an abusive parent who yells and screams or insults and beats. It could also take the form of a cowardly mother or father. It could take the form of an emotionally unavailable parent. It could even take the form of an intellectually dull or intellectually pathetic parent.
That is generational trauma, and this is also how despotism lives on. Dictatorial societies are such not because what is passed on are the insults and the beatings, but because what is passed on are the normative psychological conditions for despotism and authoritarianism. And one of those is to equate obedience with honor. One of those is to claim “I believe in God" but then teach their kids to be afraid of human beings more than they are afraid of God. One of those is to feel insecure and unsafe in this world, for that is what despotism teaches. And because they feel unsafe and insecure, they feel that they cannot trust anyone. They feel that their protection is in money. One of those is to teach your kids that they are not worth anything unless they are an engineer or a doctor, not unless the balance in their bank account increases.
I have always wondered, when reading history, why it is that all the adventurers of modernity are White. Why is it that we always find a White person who rose to the peak of this or that mountain, who discovered this or that, or who did all the scientific experiments until they figured out electricity and whatnot?
It is not because they are genetically superior. It is because of how they were brought up generationally. They were taught to be fully present in the moment and to not dissociate. That White person learned from their generational heritage: “do you want a difference in this world? You have to make it yourself, you cannot rely on anyone else. Do you want truth in this world? You have to figure it out. Do you want respect in this world? You must demand it. Do you want dignity in this world? You must assert it yourself.”
That is why the attitude of this White person vis-a-vis the world,, as it has been for centuries, is that they are willing to take the risk. They have enough self-confidence to be able to take the risk. Meanwhile, colonized indigenous populations shrink into themselves. They learn fear, not adventure. They learn that the lack of safety is the basic presumption of their life. And they also learn some toxic lessons, like that to honor someone is to obey them. And because of that lesson, they keep passing the mistakes and problems of one generation onto the other.
Here is the utmost paradox. It fully encapsulates the effects of the dissociation that I am talking about. Look at the matter from the perspective of the parents, not the child. Do you think these parents did not know that their child had reached the point of kufr? This woman had reached the point where she stopped believing in Islam. Do you think her parents really had no idea? I submit to you that these parents were more than happy to pretend not to notice the kufr of their daughter. So long as their daughter does not join demonstrations, does not protest what is happening to the Palestinians, so long as she stays home and pretends to be a Muslim, so long as she lives as a hypocrite, so long as she marries when she is supposed to marry, and preferably marries the type of person who impresses her parents, someone with a good job and a high salary, then who cares if she has any Islamic backbone, Islamic ethics, or Islamic morality? So long as that is the case, these parents will be happy.
That is the real paradox. And that is also how grotesque dissociation is.
This is what is so staggering. These parents will be happier with a hypocrite daughter who is not really a Muslim than an authentic Muslim daughter who does what, to their mind, is unsafe, like joining demonstrations and standing up for Palestine. What could be more dissociative? What could be a more glaring proof of dissociation than the fact that this describes so many of our parents?
Our very relation to Islam is so hypocritical, so pathological. “Islam is the greatest religion." But how and why is it the greatest religion? "Well, it orders women to cover up." Does it have anything to contribute to humanity? "We are not sure, so do not bother us with that.” If someone gave you a lie detector test, it would show that you do not really believe what you are saying. That is dissociation. It is a world full of falsehood and insincerity.
Consider the result of a culture that has become this way. That result is Saudi Arabia. It is the United Arab Emirates, Sisi’s Egypt, and the mullahs of Iran. No civilization and no real progress was ever built on the blind obedience of anyone to anyone else. That is the amazing thing. Respect and honor, yes. Blind obedience? No.
It is not just those who broke away from their families and joined the Prophet. Think of every young person who joined the armies of Abu Bakr in the first civil war. Think of every young person who joined the Islamic armies that took on the Byzantines. Think of every young person who joined Imam al-Husayn. It was a very risky and precarious cause, but it is also a just cause. The first failure of the Islamic Ummah was when so many young people failed to join the right cause of Imam al-Husayn and instead chose safety. They chose to remain next to their parents at home. We are still paying the price for that act of cowardliness and dissociation till our very day.
Think of every young person who took risks that were incomprehensible to their parents as they traveled new routes to make new discoveries for the Islamic civilization that was. Think of all those who traveled for years in pursuit of knowledge. Do we think the Islamic civilization was built by kids who sat next to their parents obediently? Do we think the parents who said goodbye to their child as they traveled for ten years in pursuit of knowledge were so different than us? Do we think they were happy to say goodbye to their children, not knowing whether or not they would survive the journey in the desert or be accosted by highway robbers? They were not different. They were simply not dissociated. They understood that when you become a Muslim, you embrace the idea of living for principles. They knew that honor and respect is one thing, but also that blind obedience is disrespectful to the self and to God, and that is why it is shirk.
Go back to the woman who wrote me this letter. Her parents are telling her to stay home and to stop protesting and being active for Palestine. The irony of ironies is that I am confident that if she did stay home, stop listening to Usuli, and lose her faith, so long as she simply does not put her lack of faith in their face, so long as she does not confront them with her lack of iman, they will be happy. Would you not call that a dissociated state? Would you not call extreme paradoxical behavior?
These are clear examples of losing cultures, cultures that have been traumatized by invaders and colonizers. But I must also point to examples of the opposite. I know of a Palestinian student in Ohio who was consistently protesting and speaking out in defense of Palestine. Lo and behold, I have recently learned that this student was the only student nominated to both a Rhodes Scholarship and a Marshall Scholarship.
My own experience in life has taught me the following: our enemy respects bravery, and our enemy is more vicious toward us as we exhibit cowardliness. The very same people who have colonized indigenous folks learn, in due time, to honor those who deserve to be honored, to admire bravery, and even to admire resistance.
I have mentioned this in a previous sermons, but it deserves to be mentioned again. In my own law school, Jewish law students sued their own university to demand the rights of Jews on campus. It is a lawsuit that I completely disagree with, but one has to admire the intentionality and bravery of these individuals who decided to demand the rights of their own people and who went to such extreme lengths as to sue the school they study in. Now this university will think ten times before daring to somehow not honor the rights of these students.
It hurts me when I think of the Muslim counterpart. Can I imagine a Muslim law student suing his or her own school to demand and defend the rights of Muslims? It is inconceivable to me, because I know the Muslim psychology. I know that this student will be told by his or her parents and their community to not make trouble. “This could happen, that could happen. They could retaliate in this way or that way." I know that God is never present in any of their calculations.
We have all heard the expression that religion is the opiate of the people. Religion is an opiate when it is used to dissociate—not just dissociate from, but is dissociate with. It is an opiate when people use religion to dissociate from being fully present in their moment. But when you are fully present and aware of what your world demands of you, of what your principles and boundaries are, and of what your goals are, then you are fully aware of your relationship to your Lord. You are fully aware that your endeavor on this earth is a partnership between yourself and your Lord. You are fully aware that your Lord is not going to take over for you. Your Lord is not going to do it for you, but your Lord is sure going to help you. You are fully aware that your Lord will, ultimately, evaluate and judge you. That is what it means to be fully present.
But when religion is used to dissociate, a religious person adopts all the characteristics of a person who is intoxicated. They may be intoxicated in medieval texts. This person may simply avoid living with the realities of life by being addicted to reading medieval prescriptions and trying to twist and shape the self to fit these medieval prescriptions. Or they may adopt all the characteristics of a person who constantly fantasizes about the coming of a savior, the curses of the antichrist, or that this world does not matter because it is all about the Hereafter. So they live in a non-harmonized relationship with their world. This is not what Islam came to teach.
I end with this. I challenge every student of the Sira to give me just one example in which the Prophet was not fully present in his moment. Give me one example from the Sira in which the Prophet exhibited the signs of a dissociated person. Whether the Prophet was with his family, his companions, his community, or facing the challenges to his community, we see in the Sira a human being who was fully present in his moment. And I challenge you to find in the authentic Sunna of the Prophet any teaching that encourages a Muslim to dissociate from the reality of the world.
Why am I underscoring this so heavily? Because the generational ailments of a dissociated people leave us with paradoxes and inconsistencies that are deadly to the soul. And one of the main inconsistencies, paradoxes, and traumas is despotism itself. The equating of obedience with respect is authoritarianism itself. To live a life thinking that I am somehow contributing to the world when, in fact, I contribute very little other than my consumption. I make no inventions and no progress. All I make is generationally passed down forms of dissociation.
Many indigenous cultures have been conquered and vanished or are on their way to vanishing. We cannot accept that conclusion for Islam. We cannot vanish. We must commit ourselves not to the “same old, same old,” but to looking radically and honestly within. We must recommit to the normative ethical universe that is core to the Islamic message.