It might have been Marx who first said he saw the clothes, bereft of their emperor. Art, culture, religion and philosophy, these did not determine the financial relations of the world, but rather the other way around. Critics soon contended that a direct correlation between the economic base and the cultural superstructure was too simplistic, but the pattern had been set. The root would be determined by its branches, the specific forms of the material dictating the formlessness of the immaterial – and never the other way around.
In Nietzsche’s cryptic, arrogant brilliance, these genealogies reached their apogee. Unearthing the supposed origins of Western moralities, Nietzsche transformed these into exposed, rotten cavities: What was good, just and beautiful was often the exercise of the victim against the otherwise unstoppable victor, the loser’s revenge on the winner. Today's scholars have inherited this legacy, and like the unquestioning sons of errant fathers before, are obsessed only with faithfulness. After all, if morality is just an exercise of power, or of restraining power, then that morality must be found and trivialized.
To try to find the roots of ideas from the appearances of their branches is akin to making obvious the immanence of those ideas. Mapping out the history of something is establishing its historicity, its reassuring lack of normativity. Writing the genealogy of a concept sounds unfortunately like performing the examination of an interesting corpse. It may be interesting, but it is still dead. It doesn't transcend us, as people, because it is the result of us, as people. Perhaps this is why, when societies reach the extreme of amorality, they endure the revenge of the opposite extreme.
We have arrived, socially, culturally and intellectually, at a point where many of the veracities that would seem to be pedestrian truths to normal believers have to be couched in contentious arguments which, if they say anything at all, can only be interpreted through hours of effort. Precisely, we are in danger of losing the insights of religion: Humanity without God is not humanity; having cast aside the concept of the One, we turned to the many, seeking strength in diversity, but even this anchor unmoors.
Such genealogies have penetrated the core of common culture, creating – or
perhaps improving on – the potency of consumerism. As such, we have the ongoing
preaching to listen to no more preaching, the insistence to be yourself. Be who
you really are! In the same manner that Nietzsche conducted excavations of
extant standards, we too are invited to make the same leap, into that universe
of self-endowed enlightenment, wherein the only obstacle to happiness is
casting off the yoke of oppression. Society can’t do it for you; in fact,
society will do its best to hinder you.
And the results are insistent, pressing in upon us from all directions,
trying their best to squeeze the real Islam out of us: To find yourself, you
have only to rebel, the necessary and sufficient condition of
self-enlightenment. The means is constant criticism, because only through
unchecked criticism – which has become an intrusive idol, a formless god we
unconsciously and pervasively worship, at whose altar we sacrifice tradition
and continuity – can we realize the "Truth," which is the real self.
This is why we but bound from one transgression to the next, from celebrating
abortion as the emancipation of woman to celebrating euthanasia as the emancipation of
life. (Hence there are two victors. Death and the rich.)
Sadly, such criticism knows no boundaries: It has already started to doubt the coherence of the individual – a nadir reached academically, but not yet popularly, and God help us when we do – because of the elevation of the capacities and supremacy of the mind, that same mind that decays and grows stale is allowed to explore without humility or direction. What a mind we trust in, that cannot even prove its own continuity to itself. Not surprisingly, those who have no goal get lost. But it is a good and profitable way to lose the masses; a case of corporations seizing the true implications of academic discourse, while the academics themselves are only disputing minutiae, predictably miserably unaware of the consequences of their contemplations.
Is it not odd that among the people who are most insistent on the belief that we must become who we really are themselves have a financial stake in the matter – who prey on our fear of death, and indeed any indication of grayness, mortality or gravity, in order to make themselves rich? These advocates of self-empowerment want you to empower that part of yourself that believes (or, rather, is made to believe) consuming is prospering, succeeding or standing out. They want you to become controlled by, defined by, and most importantly, limited by, that part of ourselves, our nafs, which wants and wants others to know we have succeeded in attaining those wants. We are now on the opposite end of ‘ubudiyyah.
For the Muslim, especially, this is the matter: Are our desires our real selves, or do they come in the way of our real selves? If the latter, then advertising and self-indulgence are malicious and pernicious, and must be approached cautiously. But if our real selves are no more than our desires, with no means to categorize those desires as better or worse, then advertising, and self-indulgence, are helpful antidotes to liberating the self from oppression. In which case we can and should watch all the filth we can, and expose ourselves to whatever is wrong, base and illegitimate, because that will allow us to understand what supposed evil is suitable to our real selves.
Stranger still that this profitable propaganda smacks strangely of inexplicable mystery, another religious stew, to feed the spiritually impoverished. How remarkable that we are told to be our selves. Our selves? After all, if I am to be myself, and in that lies my freedom, my happiness and my succor, then I must be very confident that I am truly becoming myself – really relying on me to find the me that has been hidden from me by society or more deviously and problematically by me – and that I am not instead becoming just another cultural stereotype, a trope, brand, theme, mantra, model, mannequin or brown-nose. (It helps that my nose is indeed brown.)
But who is Haroon, and how can Haroon tell himself to be Haroon? If there is a part of me lying hidden, how do I find that “real” “me”? Am I free to exert my own will in this endeavor? (Because one can have one’s own will, which is nevertheless not free.) How do I free, understand, listen to or realize my real self? How do I know when not to listen to or realize my self? After all, broadly speaking, I depend on so many people and so much accumulated knowledge just to survive this life: Going through existence, I obviously can’t figure everything out all over again. (Of this much, I am certain: I’d definitely die before re-inventing the incandescent light bulb.)
If it is rather a question of freeing myself of the constraints placed on me by society, is that not presumptuous, even dangerous? Not to mention, just as importantly, where did my real self come from, if there is a part of me that is not influenced from society, but rather, can and should be freed from society and the standards it imposes? If the real self is intrinsic to every person, then most likely that is the result of evolution, in which case rebelling against our parents and families wouldn’t make much sense. The real self would be an inheritance from the mother and father; as that is how genetic inheritance works, absent helpful and unhelpful mutations. Of course, this is a thought that is never countenanced, nor indeed the immense consequences for such an intersection of Islamic spirituality and biological genealogy.
Genealogies that seek earthly roots of unearthly things will only find the dependents, the accidents, never the essence – and so, predictably, they will deny that there ever was any essence. Was there not a reason God granted us Revelation, except that it might have been impossible for us, collectively, to reach its truths? Islam tells us to find our selves in a process of striving (what the Qur’an calls sa‘a). Learning, discipline and action allow us, methodically, to become what we should be. We are not yet that; we were (recall our fitra, our pristine nature) but that time passed, and now, as adults in all the implications of that state, we have to recover that self.
Let me not be taken to said that Islam denies individuality: That no bearer of burdens shall bear the burden of another; and that there is for each naught but what he strove for; and that his striving shall soon be seen (53:38-40). Each is an individual, because each bears his unique burdens alone; each is individually and eternally defined not by being himself in some inexplicable, producer-friendly sense, but defined by what he exerted himself to do – to become – and that none can escape from the coming sight of his striving, on that day when there shall be no shade but His. In the absence of the One, one can never be one’s self.
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