What's next if we all hate each other?
How to rehabilitate consciousness and morality into the left
What’s been happening in Syria has deeply spiritually and politically shaken me and so that’s made me very observant of the movement around me. Watching the continued brutality of Zionism’s reach but also the failures of these Muslim nation-states (Turkey, Saudia Arabia, the UAE) that also have no morality or standards, who are also bought and bribed by capital and power, it’s embarrassing, it’s frustrating! My father has been speaking to me about the interconnected ways that Western Imperialism has muddied the standards, and recently he told me, “Muslim betrayal is the biggest part of Muslim oppression.” The ugliness of European colonial invention is only what gets perpetuated now, this is how we exist, within these barbaric ways of being that were initiated by people who justified— through the Christian religion — that it was their God-given right (and fate) to slaughter half the world’s population, and take those people’s land and resources. This current society is a direct result of the greed of European colonization, and six hundred years later, we’re still in this same cycle of abuse that has been maintained through these faulty international relations and alliances, trade deals and whatever the fuck US and Western imperialism wants to impose. We are still here, incapable of coming out of this bind.
It’s important and I need to state here before I get into anything else that I defend the right to resistance, and to violence as a necessary means against an oppressive or occupying force. It’s a controversial statement in some intellectual circles (lol) but I’ve thought about this a lot in the last year, and I believe and will defend the right to resistance as a public intellectual.
Yet the older I get, the more I realize my life has made me a very non-violent person and a lot of this is because after being almost murdered by my mother not once, but twice, surviving and getting into my mid-30s has brought me to a very mindful consideration about how I am and what I need for my own survival. I understand my dimensions more, I know what I can do and what I can’t do, and I don’t feel shame or a sense of martyrdom to sacrifice myself anymore. I say anymore. This is an important distinction — as a highly traumatized person — I have often thought this was my role in the revolution, to keep giving until I break, but anybody who has been an organizer for a long time (and shout out to all my elders who taught me about this in the last year) reminds you… this takes time. Freeing Palestine in our lifetime with the persistence and dedication it deserves is a prayer, so it requires a spiritual dimension and resilience that we don’t talk about in leftist circles… it’s something we don’t even comprehend, but this is not only how we sustain movements, it’s also how we sustain liberatory behavior and momentum.
At the same time, I know that if I had grown up in Palestine or even if I was raised in Bangladesh during the genocide I would have resisted and picked up arms. This is very much my nature, to fight for justice. But, in this life and this body, I also understand that my functionality is different. As a writer and thinker — my role in the revolution is different. I think it’s important to know your role and to respect everyone’s role who is working toward liberation, as well. I really believe we have to rely on something beyond just violence as a means to end—this is when we have to rely on the spiritual dimensions of faith that allow you to keep going and keep bettering yourself for the sake of something bigger than yourself. We forget that this is apart of revolutionary praxis, as well.
Now, as a full-time organizer, I’m thinking a lot about how to sustain movements but in a more legitimate and practical way. My main role in the Writers Against The War on Gaza is as the comms liaison, so I deal with a lot of interpersonal relationships amidst the grueling but very necessary work of liberation. My stamina is there, in relationships, in connections — for me, it’s the foundational care work that most people overlook or disregard, but as someone who has been studying and writing about revolution for the past decade, I have thought a lot about how we revolutionize — and guess what, it’s not by discarding one another. It’s not through perpetuating colonial or violent measures with each other.
These past few weeks I’ve been feeling disenchanted with the left. Over the last week, it’s been concerning to me to see that there are people who truly believe that Bashar al-Assad (former Syrian tyrant) was a powerful ally to liberation… I’ve felt shocked by people on the internet, I’ve felt shocked by what’s coming out of Syria. The sheer depravity—I mean, it’s been hard to process it all.
I am also frustrated by the performance of political radicality versus the more considered work of actualizing that radicality into action, not just speaking about it, lecturing others and berating people who seemingly don’t agree with you. I’m tired of the contradictions we have in ourselves and the contradictions we don’t allow in each other, I’m tired of the violences we impose on others because we haven’t healed so we just perpetrate the same toxic cycles under the guise of “leftist politics.” I keep thinking of this Paolo Friere quote from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” And also: “How can I enter into dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?... How can I enter into dialogue if I am closed to - and even offended by - the contribution of others? At the point of encounter there are neither yet ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.”
It’s the posturing of liberation and the incapacity to actually think and WORK with liberatory politics in mind that has been mind-boggling to me recently. When Grace and Charles Lee Boggs wrote that revolution begins with a series of illuminations and that a revolutionary period “initiates a new plateau, a new threshold on which human beings can continue to develop” they meant for us to expand our dimensions, our parameters of thinking, our understanding of the world. This also means how we operate within it. When we fight violently, for necessary reasons, we have to remember it’s just a means to an end. Our revolution lies after the rebellion. We have to think of structures and communities that we have or can create to develop and hold us in this new world, or else, what’s our plan? More chaos?
“To engage in {r}evolution today is to decolonize petrocracy. That work takes place at multiple levels, not least at that of the imagination,” writes Nicholas Mirzoeff in “Decolonial {R}evolution: Petrocracy and Geological Modernity from Detroit to Palestine and Back.” This is in accord with the Black radical tradition delineated by Cedric Robinson as “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”
I do feel that the militaristic discourse on the left sometimes usurps purpose and true understanding of liberation and also mirrors the oppressor’s behavior and tactics. Now, I don’t fault anyone for this but I am starting to question who is really invested is fighting toward liberation and I’m also looking closely at who says they are but maintains the status quo through coloniality and patriarchy and the unchecked arrogance or ego that permeates a lot of movement spaces. For me, as a comrade and human being living in the Global North, I believe my responsibility is to consider something beyond the struggle—because I am an abolitionist, I lean towards abolishing all systems that perpetuate harm and re-establishing new boundaries of care and consideration. This is what I mean when I speak about revolution, and maybe that’s something we need to be clearer about… what do we all mean when we speak about revolution? For those of us who do not have to (and DO NOT) martyr our lives for the struggle should think more about how to help the movement in other tactical and long-lasting ways… so we can actually maintain revolution and free ourselves.
Liberation is not fighting arms until the end of time, feeding the military complex and the West’s need for armament. Never forget that the US is the biggest manufacturer of war in the world, to maintain that is to maintain their mission. The current warfare in the world is the Western World’s creation and so there’s nothing radical about Assad or Al Qaeda’s violence. They’ve forced Muslims and Arabs and oppressed people to play their game — and I understand that due to our current circumstances, we have had to fight back, but we can’t forget that our real goal is liberation from these systems, from this warmongering.
This is not the way we once were. Muslims are still some of the most intellectual and intelligent masses in the world, and this is our service to humanity—to teach the world about beauty, morality, justice, kindness, God, the divine and pleasure again. The fact that Muslim society was often (not always, but often) beacons of morality and spaces where people of faiths co-existed and THRIVED—these are historical facts that deserve your attention so much so… I’ve decided to write a book about exactly this. I’m tired of people not understanding the vast richness of Muslim civilization and WHY we are here in this geopolitical reality that’s been entirely orchestrated by the West for land grabbing and resource extraction. But it’s more than that, Western (both US and European) colonization targeted the Muslim world because we were and have been such a threat to the Western establishment and imagination. Their ruin of us has been psychologcal, sexual, physical (of our lands and bodies) and it continues, the onslaught is their obsession with a war that they impose onto us because they want to destroy us.
Because of this, we have been forced tricked into playing within the European colonial apparatus — so I wonder if we fully understand that when we play within their rules of engagement they are naturally in power. Let’s think about how everything that we currently exist in is of their invention, it’s their make-believe. Another way to look at this is to say that anyone can create a new world, a new way of being, but how do we transform the masses to understand this? To know (and understand, then enact) that we could collectively choose something else entirely.
But it’s almost like Muslims play into the stereotypes of who the West says we are. But this is not us, this warmongering is not us. We are the future. I believe it’s my destiny as a Muslim to excavate the past so that I can write about the future and where we can go, what awaits if we work collectively together. To me, so much of this knowledge is embededded in Muslim spiritual texts, customs and teachings. It’s in our lands—physical and metaphorical—it’s in our bodies, our languages, our skin, our hair. Our liberation is already within us.
If you’re a spiritual person, this last year has probably shaken you. To me, as a Muslim, it’s brought me closer to Allah, as I witness the determination of Palestinian Muslims, I reckon with their steadfastness, I also think about what liberation looks like for them and the rest of the planet, and I mean what it feels like, what it tastes like. Like, what do we mean when we say liberation? What do we mean this on not just a theoretical or existential level? To me, liberation means an exit from these current systems, from colonial order, it means freeing us from them, their imagination, their calculus, their bind. This is a tall order, yes, but with collective action — as they (the colonizers) showed us — it is possible.
Petrocracy is what geographer Kathleen McKittrick has called a “plantation future,” or “a conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city.” Fossil fuel capitalism is the future predicated by racial capitalism in the plantation period. Decolonial thinking, McKittrick insists, demands a new focus on life, rather than systems.”
We don’t see how our disposability of one another mirrors colonial logic, we can’t even see how far they’ve skewed our understanding of ourselves and the universes we come from. They’ve flattened us into bite-sized distillations of human beings so we are all too traumatized to fight back. That’s what it feels like witnessing what is happening in Lebanon and Syria by the Zionist machine. It’s dehumanizing. It’s terrifying… but this is also their goal. To eliminate not only through destruction of life but to eliminate all sense of future, dreaming and resilience outside of just survival.
South African scholar Lesley Green says that in order to restore reciprocity there must be a “decolonization of the technosphere.” Mirzoeff writes: “The decisive step of the required {r}evolution against petrocracy is this decolonization, such that the planet is no longer flattened into a set of exploitable resources.”
What this also means is that we must avoid flattening ourselves and each other into exploitable resources.
Do people just think Muslims and Arabs and Black people and Indigenous people or oppressed people just have to forever be in subjugation to war and oppression? Do you not see the end of this for us? Do you not consider a future where we are all free? Is that so impossible for you to believe?
Do we think decolonization is just feeding more war? Just fighting back forever? Is this what we think of when speak of the struggle as ongoing? I find the limitations of people’s true dedication to liberation quite demoralizing. Their lack of radical envisioning and future orientation is a danger to the sustainability of the work of the left when naturally we are stronger if we build our understanding with what revolution can be for all of us, together.
Let me clear: I’m fighting for a Palestine to be free so that no Palestinian ever has to fight ever again. I am fighting for a Palestine that has peace, where all people, as they once did, live freely, under a secular state where all people are equal. I am fighting for a Palestine where the olive trees are rehabilitated, where clean water is available, where people can fish leisurely and go the ocean, the sea, the rivers, and the land, and just be. This is what liberation means to me. I am fighting for this for everybody. I am fighting so Congolese people can enjoy their mineral rich resources and dense land and beauty, I am praying that Sudanese women don’t have to mass suicide and can enjoy their beautiful fertile land by the Nile and Sudanese men can enjoy the freedom of their God given birthright, I pray that South Koreans can be free of greedy American intervention and propaganda and that Korea can be united once again.
This is what I mean when I talk about liberation
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Mirzoeff writes, “So much remains invisible due to this colonial gaze.”
We must remember that they have blurred our vision. What is radical when all you’ve been taught is hate? We’ve never tried the revolution of love and expansion and it will take us a lot to get there, to get out of the colonizer’s gaze. Softness is a skill, and it is also liberatory. In order to decolonize spiritually we must remember that warfare is not of us. That militancy is only a means to an end—softness and care are the real revolutions. A society where everybody is protected and safe is what I’m fighting for.
If their task as colonizers is to break us then the real salve to their brutality is our healing. It’s as simple as that. But, are we willing to do the work to heal, in order to not fucking fight each other and throw each other under the bus? This will be the real test — are we willing to do the spiritual work necessary for revolution?
I often think of Báyò Akómoláfé’s intelligence in sharing that “Limiting it to white people would be perpetuating white epistemologies,” and I think about this all the time in every context. Are we willing to come out of the white epistemological dance of violence? This white warfare? This white demonstration of discarding bodies and humanity as if that is not itself a desecration of one’s own humanity has to end. But it’s also about taking accountability… are we ready to take accountability for our liberation?
Mirzoeff concludes, “In 2011, Tunisia rose up when Mohammed Bou’azizi, a fruit seller, burned himself after being insulted by police. Later that year, Bilal Berreni, a French graffiti artist of Tunisian descent known as Zoo Project, went to Tunis to make a series of works depicting the martyrs of the revolution and migrants at a camp called Couacha, near the Libyan border. In 2013, consistent with his goal to create revolutionary art, Bilal made a second visit to Detroit. His father said that for Zoo Project, Detroit “represented the failure of capitalism and believed that from that chaos something can be born.” He went to explore the graffiti in the abandoned housing projects on Detroit’s east side. He got into a game of dice with some young local people, who robbed and killed him for fifty dollars. Bilal’s body remained unidentified for months. Berreni was right—“Detroit” is both the strait of {r}evolution and of despair. His case reminds me of the psychopathologies of colonialism identified by Fanon. It burns. The rebellion is ongoing. Can it become {r}evolution?”
The last few decades (and centuries, shoutout to the Haitian revolution) have been a rebellion. Now we have to think of what’s next. This line from Grace Lee Boggs resonates: “We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves.”
Boggs writes “radicals don’t usually take about souls—but I think we have to.” We have to think about what soul work is for us and what it means to decolonize on a soul level. How do we the real work here, the revolution of transforming our spiritual conditons? Over the last few years I’ve really begun to understand that this is what sustains the work, the movement—this is also the future, this is what I think of when I think of what kind of society I want to live in. Aren’t these important questions to ask? So, let me ask you, what does liberation look like to you? And, what exactly are you liberating from?
Friere tells us: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” So this means we have to engage with one another, we have to dialogue and we have to dream. Muslims were all about this, you can see it in our conversations through time, the debating culture that was inspired by the Greeks and Romans. We have lost our sense of conversation and therefore connection but you can’t have revolution without either — you can’t represent the masses if you don’t talk to them. We have to think beyond capitalist categories and we have to do this reimagining ourselves. So what kind of societies do we want to live in, and what work do we need to do to get there?
If you aren’t doing this work then I don’t trust you as an organizer anymore but if you are then I want to know and grow with you and do the revolutionary work required. I am so horny for revolution that I can taste it. I try to embody it more and more everyday with my utopic envisioning that I have been doing for the last few years. In order to protect this Earth we must love her, in order to protect each other we must love each other, too.
This is the work. To love harder. To love ourselves and each other harder. To not turn hard when they force us into the darkness. There’s power in vulnerability and softness and in the ability to care and love those who are around you harder.
I think about my soul a lot. Both the legacy of my soul and what I want to be remembered as to the people who love me when I die but also how I want to feed my soul in this lifetime. I recently finished my last Grief Studies class with some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met and something that I talked about in a class recently was the value of goodness in times of such depravity. We forget that we are spiritual beings who are in spiritual relationship with the world and part of the reason we forget that is because it’s the colonizer’s mission to disconnect you from Earth and God. Never forget that. It’s decolonial to move with the spirit of the Earth and God, to remember that every moment can be activated with this is an important spell. We are the keys to our own liberation, which means the ability to do so already exists within us. What would it mean to operate with the love they had tried to steal and tarnish? What if love is the most powerful resource in the world?
They tried to split the entire world apart but they didn’t succeed. Let’s not let them succeed in splitting our alliances and our r(e)volutionary potential. We need each other. I believe that with my whole heart. Will you join me for this work of r(e)volution? I hope so.
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Also, if you’d like to have more conversations like this I’ll be teaching my Expanding Your Radical Imagination For Collective Liberation this solstice on Saturday. I hope to see you there.
wow wow thank you, this resonated so deeply with so much of what my community has been grappling with lately 🩷
Thank you Fariha. 💜 I especially liked the Paolo Freiere quote.
You always give me so much to think about and feel.