Video link to a discussion of:
Vanquisher of the Kingdom of Fear
How 18th & 19th century North and West African scholars gave us a way out of this darkness through a living connection with the Prophet ﷺ
Farah el-Sharif, Sermons at the Court
A knowledgable elder in my family posited this thought-provoking rhetorical question on his social media page: “my question is directed to the Egyptian government: if the Prophet ﷺ himself was sieged in Gaza under conditions of thirst, famine and bombing right now, what would you do?”
My answer?
They wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t care because repressive states have already shown us that. Nothing will shame them out of their callous greed and treachery. They are announcing to us with every action, word and stance they they have no fear of God and His Messenger. If they did care, they would not be accomplices in this shameless extortion, strangulation and genocide of Palestinians. They have more fear for their own interests, worldly power and Big Brother in charge. Their calculus has nothing to do with ethics, morality or religion. Their very existence is predicated upon blind subservience to the earthly powers-that-be, so why would it make any difference at all to them whether the Prophet himself ﷺ was among the people of Gaza?
More importantly, the Prophet ﷺ is already there, among them. The burial ground of the Prophet’s Great Grandfather, Hasim ibn ‘Abd Manaf is the ancestral source of the prophetic heart of Gaza. The Prophet is there, every time a father cries to the heavens, overlooking the shrouds of his family, calling out, “send our salam to the Messenger of Allah! Tell him your ummah has failed you oh beloved of Allah!” The Prophet is there every time a wounded martyr’s mother tearfully cries, “fidak (anything for you) ya Rasul Allah!”
He ﷺ is in each act of worship he commanded they perform: a janaza prayer, Juma’a over the rubble of a millennia old mosque and fasting only to break fast on a can of chickpeas and lemons. He is there when the adthan is whispered into the ears of a baby named ‘Muhammad’ who has just been born in a tent, as a sign of hope and defiance.
He is there, every time the forehead of a crying child is kissed. He is in every syllable of Qur’an recited under bombs and between shattered limbs. He is already there, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Yemen, in Guantanamo Bay, in Uyghur concentration camps and in the dungeons of Arab state prisons. He ﷺ is “in us” both literally and figuratively:
Know that Allah’s Messenger is still in your midst. (Qur’an 49:7)
&
The Prophet is closer to the believers than their selves (Qur’an 33:6)
This is not some esoteric reality, though if you are curious about the metaphysical, pervasive, primordial presence of the Prophet, look up what sages like Ibn Arabi and others have said about the haqiqa Muhammadiyya. To keep things simpler, “he is in us” can be understood in the same way of this Hadith Qudsi:
Allah will say on the Day of Judgment, ‘Son of Adam, I was sick but you did not visit Me.’ ‘My Lord, How could I visit You when You are the Lord of the Worlds?’
‘Did you not know that one of My servants was sick and you didn’t visit him? If you had visited him you would have found Me there.’ Then Allah will say, ‘Son of Adam, I needed food but you did not feed Me.’ My Lord, How could I feed You when You are the Lord of the Worlds?’ ‘Did you not know that one of My servants was hungry but you did not feed him? If you had fed him you would have found its reward with Me.’ ‘Son of Adam, I was thirsty, but you did not give Me something to drink.’ ‘My Lord, How could I give a drink when You are the Lord of the Worlds?’ ‘Did you not know that one of My servants was thirsty but you did not give him a drink? If you had given him a drink, you would have found its reward with Me. (Bukhari)
If Allah is closer to the believer than their jugular vein, and the Prophet is closer to the believers than their own selves, and if, per the Qur’anic understanding he ﷺ is “still in our midst”, this would mean that when every drop shed from a believer is a direct attack against the Prophet ﷺ himself.
But our understanding of events today is so far removed from this idea. That is because of our ignorance and the way we’ve accepted this political system in which God and His Messenger ﷺ are not the ultimate guiding authorities in this temporal realm. We have been subdued by the external reality of this deformed system in which ‘might makes right,’ so that what is true and just matters not in the face of worldly, mundane power. In essence, our very existence and imaginations are gripped by what I call: the Kingdom of Fear.
The ‘Kingdom of Fear’ is the global political system we are currently living under. It is foremost a mental occupation: it renders even our own unique Islamic vernacular, narrative and view of the injustice completely paralyzed and forbidden under the hegemonic, demonic grip of the ‘axis of compliance’ and ‘state fundamentalists’. As Edward Said wrote, “imperialism is decided in narrative.” Since their inception, secular Arab and Muslim-majority nation states have done the bidding for empire and lulled and drugged their masses with their state-compliant religious institutions that control and regulate all public discourse on Islam. It is not difficult to see who exactly all these decades of repression, tyranny and injustice ultimately benefit: since the fall of the Caliphate about a century ago, nation states became proxies for Western-Zionist hegemonic interests and thus became fully subservient to the legion of the devil: overlords of the Kingdom of Fear.
It is only the devil who would make men fear his partisans. Fear them not; fear Me, if you are true believers. (Qur’an 3:175)
This brings me to the key point of this post: the only antidote that is able to obliterate the Kingdom of Fear—the only way out of this Shaytanic grip, the only thing that can smash its devilish minions—is the Master of the Two Worlds, Leader of the Banner of Praise: Muhammad ﷺ. After all, his central, polar authority is undisputed and outlined in all of Islam’s doctrinal sources, even he said of himself ﷺ:
I am Muhammad, I am Ahmad, I am al-Mahi through whom Allah obliterates unbelief, and I am Hashir (the gatherer) at whose feet people will be gathered, and I am ‘Aqib (after whom there would be none), and Allah has named him as compassionate and merciful. (Sahih Muslim)
Similarly:
I am the master of the children of Adam on the Day of Judgement, and I am not boasting. The Banner of Praise will be in my hand, and I am not boasting. There will not be a Prophet on that day, not Adam nor anyone other than him, except that he will be under my banner. And I am the first one for whom the earth will be opened for, and I am not bragging. (Tirmidhi)
The Gaza genocide has brought about a lot of messianic rhetoric: Evangelical Christians are unapologetic about their narrative of “Christ as King”, Israelis are unequivocal about their status as “God’s chosen people” and are hellbent on eradicating all “amalek”. As such, Muslims can no longer afford to be hesitant about claiming the living message of the liege of all prophets enshrined in the metaphysical presence of Muhammad ﷺ.
Allah has decreed, “I and My messengers will certainly be victorious.” (Qur’an 58:21)
How a Harvard Seminar Taught by a German Orientalist Changed my Life
Let me explain the importance of this reality by telling you a bit about a philology seminar I took in 2015 that was taught by respected German legal scholar Baber Johansen, who is now retired from the Harvard Divinity School. This course got me hooked on studying Islamic and Sufi texts and set me on the path of lifelong research I am on now. It was about 18th and 19th century intellectual currents —mainly from North and West Africa—and it was entitled “Islamic Modernism: Part I.”1 Not the most exciting title I suppose, but it offered a portal to a discourse sorely missing from our present day mainstream narrative on Islam. We read primary texts in Arabic from South Asia to North Africa, mainly by Sufi scholars. At times, we did not understand what linked all these texts together, but it became clearer once it we started to weave one, big, important intellectual and spiritual current that constituted Muslim scholar’s first collective “response” to modernity…
