The Nation State and the Age of Muslim Internement

Islamophobia is the twin of Nation State control. So long as Nation States exist in their choke-hold totalitarian form, anti-Muslim bigotry will never wane.

When we look at the problems plaguing our world today, menacing “isms”, rampant poverty, the leadership of corrupt criminals, tyranny on all levels and scales (global and local), it is easy to see think that this is the way the world always was. There didn’t exist a single collective time in the 20th-21st centuries (and arguably since as early as the 15th century) in which Muslims were viewed in a humanized light. Today, Muslim leaders globally are weak, spineless agents in sheepish suits and neckties on their necks like nooses. Arab leaders have fully ceded their dignity and honor to their colonial overlords and are nothing but a merry band of mercenaries in Bedouin headdress and royal robes cut from the smelly leftovers of the British Empire. The wretched populations they rule with a hard fist are left emasculated, humiliated, defenseless; having to chip away at their own self worth each day just to be able to survive and put more bread on their table.

One could easily say that authoritarianism has always been the name of the game and was always present, from antiquity to the Reconquista to the Ottoman Empire. Yet, what distinguishes these tyrannical models of yesteryear is that today, and since the early 20th century, humanity has become subjugated under the controlling thumb of an all-encompassing global system designed to choke and hold the individual, in which he/she no longer has any sovereignty or a coherent vision of the future other than which is dictated/allowed by the Nation State. The tyranny of this system rests on squashing Muslim collective consciousness. Thus, the world order we live in is necessarily Islamophobic. The measly fodder of this system is thrown away like crumbs to “third world” countries and the poorest and lowliest of the earth, most of whom happen to be Muslims, who are forced to bow down in mandatory shirk (polytheism) to the mercenaries in charge, in simple need of survival.

We are all in a collective prison of consciousness, not just Muslims. When we think of “dreams” for ourselves or our families in less developed countries, we think of a “Good” US/European passport. When we think of setting personal goals, we can only envision acceptable, respectable “careers” such as a government agent or a worker in the cog of the wheel that is the “private” sector. When we think about educating our kids, it is either “public” school or “private” school but the value systems all benefit and bow down to the limits the Nation State has set upon us, like a rope that gets tighter whenever your imagination tries to break free from this mold and pattern. When we try to describe our identity, we have no words other than our colonially constructed nationalities, (or, as of late, our gender pronouns.) And we wonder why we have record high mental health problems, suicide, abhorrent crimes, spiritually dead, and all around miserable outlook and existence!

For us to understand why the Nation State is a violent, hypnotizing aberration in human history, we have to first ask: what is a human being? Is a human being simply meant to eat, sleep, file taxes, raise good (insert nationality here) and leave enough money for one's family to afford their expensive funeral and government paperwork mandating “proof” of death? Surely, we were created for more than that. We were created for more than to relinquish all control of our lives over to Big Brother. We were created to be a Witness to Ourselves to and to God (Qur’an 41:53). How sad it is, to be at our deathbeds, to realize that our funeral was happening all along, every time we were passive and handed our voice, dreams, visions, imagination—worse of all, our souls—over to the State: the True Pharaoh of modernity.  

Islamophobia is the twin of Nation State control. So long as Nation States exist in their choke-hold totalitarian form, then the problem of Islamophobia will never wane. This is precisely why “humanity” and the “international state system” is utterly and wholly indifferent about the Age of Muslim Internment we are living in now: whether it is Uyghur camps in China, lynchings of Muslims in India, the Rohingya genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the suffering of Kashmiris, the bombing of innocent Iraqi, Afghan and Syrian children… and on and on. Islamophobia, white supremacy and bigotry are a necessity to system we are currently under.

Luckily, we are living now in a juncture in modern human history in which all the constructs that once caged us are eligible for rebirth. Reimagination is a difficult process when the marks of the mental chains imposed on us cut so deeply. But it is possible. The pandemic has brought about cliches of people joking about the “zombie apocalypse”, but joke’s on us because we were the sheeple, the nationalist zombies (with neckties and up-to-date government IDs) all along.

Many non-mainstream, enlightened thinkers have observed the gradual decline of nation state and governments’ choke-hold and have been saying this for decades. Take for example the important book, The Sovereign Individual, by Davidson and Rees-Mogg. In it, they explore the greatest economic and political transition in centuries -- the shift from an industrial to an information-based society. This transition, which they have termed "the fourth stage of human society," will liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government.

I recommend all remaining sane people of Transcendence to read it. It is incumbent upon us all to decide that it is impossible to move forward choked by tyranny of the nationalist idols of yesteryear. The only chance for survival for the wise is to begin to slowly chip away at the Leviathan nesting in our consciousness (or better yet, take a sledge hammer to it and tear that monster down).