Islam: The Future

by Naml ‘ibn Raimund al-Haddad ‘abd al-’Abru

IT Was one of the wise who in the middle of the short (l9l4-l989)  twentieth century observed that on psychic facts islam’s future only now is opening wide before it.  C G Jung (pbuh) as I recall, ‘inshAllah, even went so far as to state that the next five hundred years will mark the great and long-awaited, final, flowering of this grand last spiritual conception of humankind.  Five hundred years was the time-span of the modern age that ended in l989 with the communism-collapse and pulling down of the Berlin wall; and, the next five hundred years will mark the golden age of islam. However, as historian John Lukacs (mAgha) cautions us, nostalgic memory is often a swindle and trap.  Certainly this has been the case for those of my fellow muslims who are ‘arab and who long for the thirteenth century.  That long-ago time is reckoned to have been a glorious high-point, and so it is preserved in passionate but too-selective remembrance; yet, how easily we muslims all forget the mongolian murder-rides of those hideous days that wrecked arabian islam.  Alas, really, there are no truly ‘golden ages’ in history except for the few, and the very few, in the phrase of Sir Winston Churchill (pbuh):      For the majority living in any epoch life is a brutish affair. This applies certainly to the physical agonies inflicted by american cluster-bombs on the bodies of palestinians and iraqi ‘arab.  Especially hideous are the maimings of small children by the warriors of a late-historical civilisation-form so ridden by sexual excess that it cannot even drum up a convincing and effective spiritual (the only!) defence against child-pornography.  Our stalwartly heterosexual young in their co-ed companies ‘kill the vans’, one after another, full of ‘arab in Iraq; their debased uncles and elder male cousins, some of these the fathers of our troops, rape babies in Bangkok.  This sort of amok materielism, taken together with the semi-conscious worry about not if, but WHEN, the frequent-flyer miles from the euro-american debit-card party will run out, weighs the mind (sic) of the West.  Not inappositely, the adjective brutish qualifies equally well this dreadful mental burden for westerners, for the uncultured hyper-credentialled, of intangible and vague, neurotic, presentiments and half-formed terrors. Neurosis, whether personal or collective, is a brutal affair.  It can produce only wickedness, betrayal, violence, murder of relationships, whether these be individual friendships and marriages, or sacred treaties and covenants among nations.  You reading this, especially if you are not religious in an organised way, need only to reflect on the selfish yelling brutalities of our commonly nasty domestic lives here in America.  The european case is no better; and,  everyone, everywhere, has their own room and yells for more stuff to tuck away in it.  Therefore it need come as no surprise to anyone that the collective thought of the wealthy irreligious in the world, that notably of americans and zionists and europeans, is haggard, tormented: as are said to be the faces of masturbators in the supposedly discredited old-time modern hygiene-literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And yet all of this happens to postmodern westerners for a reason paradoxically that is full of hope, pointing toward the future!  Time is ever-running, ceaseless, and that is the whole source of the terror we feel bodily as creatures knowingly sentenced to physical death.  Our irreligious and nationalistic, postmodern, projections onto our larger biological structures, namely society and history, themselves menaced by clock-horror, offer no comprehensive mind-peace, except to a certain statistical-class of temperamentally rational sensualists. Whereas this minority, composed of characters to a degree bovine not to say bullheaded, in the unconscious manner of a Wolfowitz (gwrh) or Mr Rumsfeld (gwrh), may in fact be neurologically deficient in an arguably personally beneficial manner.  Everyone else, of course, suffers from the crunching under bare feet of broken china and violated principles.  Therefore, muslims such as myself have nowhere to look but to al-Mostaqabel (‘the future’, ie), the so-called ‘hundredth name’ of Allah, now becoming clear for ever more of us daily. We in the West, and now in the beginning of the postmodern age, are living in one of those belated and exhausting, late-civilisational, fulfillment-phases first described byOswald Spengler (pbuh).  He wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, which you will remember was truncated at both ends; (pbuh) Spengler’s Decline of the West appeared in German, in Germany, in l9l7, at the height of the blockade and starvation of Germany in what proved to be, alas, only the first phase of a twentieth-century Thirty Year War.  The Decline of the West, thus, was proclaimed at the decisive beginning of the end of the modern age (which ending had roots reaching back to l870), and he correctly describes from a host of instances how elaborate civilisations behave at the end of their days.  The originating cultural impulse is long-since expended.  The whole civilisational task now proceeds only on a waning past impulse.  All operations consist henceforward of but secondary form-elaboration.  I, myself, have written elsewhere and at length about the symptomatic emergence of an uncultured and hyper-credentialled, ‘professional’ or supervisory, class; these era-personalities neither sow nor do they reap.  Still less do they dare introduce any new ideas.  Any idea that is truly new means after all the reduction of presently fixed emoluments and privilege; protagonists must be proscribed. At the beginning of the modern, or european, age, Machiavelli (pbuh) first described in so many words, and from a close study of history, the laws of political power.  To avoid proscription, protagonists of novelties must first of all cultivate allies among the political class and then abduct the bureaucracy.  Even so, as Spengler (pbuh) shows, in the late phase the only goal on behalf of which all this sturm und drang can take place is expansive war.  It is all vampirism at such a point; and, the hideous figure of Mr Rumsfeld (gwrh), at least to those whose intuitive development has kept pace with their capacity for objective thought, is a beautifully filthy incarnation of humanism (!) in the full reek of senectuous manhood.  He is a person of seventy-some years who plainly lacks a certain cortical development, inasmuch he is obviously and indecently unaware of his own death.  A certain degree of developed perceptivity reveals it to be more likely than not that the north american War Secretary in fact doses himself regularly with illegal pineal-glandular extractions from the bodies of south american orphans.  Which assertion means simply that the gentleman would do if he could.  Hence the mad and dionysian, essentially sociopathic, excitement he clearly derives from an indulged power-habit; the atrocious old vampire draws all of his life’s blood from the mid-life manhood-crisis going on among the everywhere-flawed males, these universal not-men, of MY aging and obnoxious, baby-boom baby-bombing, generation. All of this festive stuff, whilst gratifying no doubt to the exiguities of certain souls and non-sexual obsession-forms, simply cannot stop history; and, it is of itself productive of no results. For now, in essence, we are living beyond our means.  This is aptly symbolised in the absurd burdens of public and private debt running throughout the global economy.  This debt is so vast that it indeed stands for value; and, the seventy-odd per cent serviceable is deemed equitable!  Equally, and with more emphatic implications, this sort of phantastical over-extension is the case with the newly-proclaimed doctrine (sic) of Unilateral Pre-Emptive War.  Simply and loudly and clearly, we are declaring for all who have ears to hear that we are now following our fears, precisely in the same sense that these ‘Fox’ network-directed ratbag mahometan terrorists on TeeVee traipse after their Allah.  The result is that we are living beyond our psychic as well as fiscal means.  When any leadership forgets the true condition of the statistical mass of the population as badly as have done american state-liberalists, that leadership is no longer with ‘god’, it has no longer any serious claim whatsoever on the future, and it is within an ace of a beneficial comeuppance. That comeuppance, of course, is the looming collision of the twenty-first century.  With China.  Muhammed (pbuh) is attested to have commanded persons with religious psychologies (muslims, ie) to ‘look even as far as China for enlightenment’. I have written elsewhere about the importance of Far Asia and China to the fully human future.  For it is indeed so that islam is the last religion; and, as noted above, religion as such is but another tool utilised by the future, Allah, as we are called into being.  After religion has played its part, as it will continue for five centuries yet to do, humanity must, will, once and for all grow up.  Among other reasons why islam will persist and indeed prosper for the next five hundred years, as the final religion of humankind on the threshold of becoming more than itself, is because the future, Allah, is quite well aware of what ‘he’ is doing; and, you reading this may be sure that we who are consciously muslim more fully know than the rest of suffering humanity how lost and terrified are these miserable and pornographic, apprentice, postmodernists. We who are authentically religious in the West, whether jew, christian or muslim—and, islam today more than ever is western!–embody thirteenth century psychologies at their finest.  The developed thirteenth century religious temperament in fact is privy to insights about human character and destiny that only with the depth psychology and theoretical number-studies of the twentieth century began to be re-discovered.  To the extent that you are postmodern, we who are not  behold your anguish with, I admit it, revulsion; and, with an immense profound sympathy.  Your catastrophe, in itself not lighted by even a star of hope, is as bleak and terrible as that of any napoleonic or german army in winter Russia.  In a special and tragic sense you have been sent on ahead so to speak, a first attempt at irreligious human being.  Because, after all, one day intelligence in the universe must inevitably grow up, come of age.  Irreligious euro-americans are but a very first experiment by the evolving laws of Allah’s nature; and, alas, they are neither goal nor an end in themselves. In all of this, when once one becomes clear in ones thought, the obvious focal-point of the human mid-term future is Far Asia and China.  Beware, oh reader, I am proclaiming no ‘golden age’, no, not yet.  If you think that, you both underestimate the enduring part yet to be played by our agonising and yet often delightful, utterly human, stupidity; and, the nature of the birth-battle that all emerging consciousness wages in moving out of its primary molecular embodiment.  As some sufis among the wise teach us, the creaturely and human  struggle is everywhere universally the same, and that struggle is with:      Anger, fear, greed and lust. Muhammed (pbuh) declared indeed that islam was the last great religious revelation to be given to humankind in aid of that struggle; and, as I have demonstrated above, perhaps the final of the seven corollaries of this statement is that for once and for all human beings will simply have to grow up.  To the extent that intelligent life, ourselves, is able to perceive the physical laws of the universe as constituted in this epoch of its existence, we may confidently assert that time is directional, and that time has a destination.  More than that, as physicist Frank Tipler (mAgha) and historian John Lukacs (mAgha) concur, the future, indeed a specific future, is calling us into being as much as we are propelled by a priori causes. Time indeed has a destination–this monotheistic perception is simply right.  But, the excitable among those reading this may rest (sic) assured, there will be lots of interesting steps on the way!  In other writing, I’ve pointed out that in effect America is now engaged in posing a projected series of what I have called display-wars for the edification of Beijing.  How conscious of what they are doing may be Messrs Perle (gwrh), Cheney (gwrh) et al is moot, since structurally the real effect of the ‘terror-war’ hokum is to put China on the qui vive in no uncertain terms.  This fact, taken together with the unprecedented annual growth in the chinese economy of eight per cent or better for the past many years, speaks for itself.  It would perhaps help matters were the current serving-elite in the american national city, and tag-along London, to know what is going on actually, at least to the extent that such a grasp-degree would justify a little the absurdly high pay.  But, it is not necessary to the unfolding of the future, which is firmly in hand in any event; and, we here, muslim and non-muslim alike, are better advised to pay attention to the coming geographical decline of the West. The fact is that if the United (sic) States are going to enjoy any success at all in restricting  the looming restrictions on the to-be-permitted range of the geographical West, we shall need muslim allies, not least to put some backbone into our European cousinry.  The reason I specify muslim allies on the West Asia plains and the south-west asian foreshore is because the israelis in whom we’ve invested so much hope and treasure are, by their own account, victims of the terror of history.  This grim fact makes them unreliable in a word.  Zionists as a class are driven by all the horrors of holocaust and that remembered past.  The last most wicked consequence of being hurt that way, as we now know well, is that victims victimise.  Only behold the grotesque humiliation and sufferings of ghettoised palestinians at the hands of the israeli right-wing, and one will perceive the evil spirit of Adolf Hitler still rules postmodernity in the molecular world. So deep is the evil done by persecution of the jews throughout the West that you, oh reader, will recognise instantly and with no further reflection-need, the truth of the following fact.  Only let any government in the West, heretofore loyally supportive of Israel, dare to make any firm statement in support of equal rights for all in that tormented place (and not in favour anymore of these ridiculous filistini bantustans!), let any government in the West back its democratic (NB) instruction with the withdrawal of treasure and weapons and subvention from the israeli right-wing: And that racist and enraged, victimographic, right-wing will race straightaway into the arms of the Han inner circle, out of motives no more noble than self-pity and low spite and hatred.  Victims victimize, QED; and, the motive at bottom is stark terror, haunted by nightmares which tartly we are assured by an adventitious israeli right-wing no mere may understand, we are confronted by an appalling collective neurosis far more immediately dire than any of our own obscene euro-american hyper-sexualised credential-raptures.  The whole body of semitic culture languishes in a relentlessly deepening agony, as zionists made vicious by the swastika project their nauseated fears upon their ‘arab neighbours.  Indeed, the real inferiority of all semitic societies at this time, and in precisely the sense of Mr Thomas Sowell (mAgha) et al, may be the  starkly emergent primary fact of today on the world political horizon; if by inferiority we mean no capacity left whatsoever in a people to rise beyond themselves and their culture’s share of the universal bad luck of all cultures at one another’s hands. This being so, alas, and with all my sincere apologies to my brothers in faith who are ‘arab, I will go further and state here that what Europe and America soon now will do is to recognise the emergence of Ankara; and, the necessity for the West of pan-turkish hegemony.  Alone such a league, reaching from far Kirghizia and Kazakhstan to Anatolia, can secure the far eastern marches of Hither Uralia.  To be sure, the Old Toork will not miss the point, that we softened post-modernists all must needs depend upon turanian prowess in the coming ‘culture clash’.  Not unreasonably, that Grande Toork will expect a price; and, it will not be unreasonable for what remains of the West to concede a recrudescence of the caliphate.  Nor ought we to be surprised at certain Balkan concessions, which may be required, right up to the south slopes of Carpathia and the Austrian line.  Careful work with Russia shall here be needed, to secure to Serbs an honoured place as territorial, or christian, police of this region; rightly conducted, these negotiations should find broad pan-slavic assent. This all comes about because the plains and deserts of High Asia north of the ranges are the cockpit of the twenty-first century.  It is historian John Lukacs (mAgha) who pointed out first that a major change during the Second World War in longstanding western principles of military power was that the land war was decisive, not the the battles at sea.  This itself was a sign of the end of the modern and commercial, hence bourgeois and european, age, which ever since Columbus (gwrh) had gone forward over the world on the primacy of sea-power.  The whole history of Europe’s world-presence in the modern age was an extended sea-voyage for centuries by a fleet of hundreds of thousands of vessels, crewed by a score of generations.  Whereas today we face the re-constricting of the West, a return if you will to the confines of our ancestral North Atlantic realm.  Not as bad as all that, you know; it’s where our languages and literature took their modern form. If, deluded by our self-created ‘terrorists’ and our travesty-wars against them, we forget what I have called the ‘historical tension between the centrifugal and the centripetal’, then fatally we shall have lost sight of the fact of to what an extent history is a matter of cultural-gravity.  Thus it is that we, self-adorative ‘helping professionals’ one and all (neither do we sow, nor do we reap!), now confront the imminent contraction of ‘our’ West to within the bounds of a narrow North Atlantic cultural zone.  Unlike S P Huntington (gwrh) et al (“A Clash Of Civilisations,” Foreign Affairs, Summer l993), I am not a fool nor a monodimensional (this of course being the real joy of islam for the inner worker, namely access to the imaginal realm of possibility, ‘alam al-mithal!), not nonplussed by facts al-Hamdulillah; and, I certainly am not dumb enough to think that any of this inevitability means either the end of time OR human being…not at all: Never has the future been forever about any of ‘us’; still less is it going to be forever about the US. Only an ahistorical society (ancient egyptians, notably, or those whom they fascinate, our top-heavy ‘elite’ of status quo-directed state-liberalists) seriously can fear that an asian-centred working onward of confucianism will ‘inevitably’ mean a stagnant and closed circle for humankind.  Such stuff is rank projection, merely, not instructed by any angel.  What is certain, however, as matters now stand, is that the West has fulfilled its historical task.  Inasmuch I’ve encountered no convincing arguments au contraire, we now confront the fascinating question of the shape and bounds of the New West: Clearly, that new reduced region will be confined to the eastern slopes of the Allegheny keel, north from upper Georgia (but also kept inland from the Gullah coasts by a vital and pullulating, ardent, voudon-society); and, north of the Pyrenees, and the south faces of the whole alpine range; and, to the north of the vampire-slopes of South Carpathia.  Present demography flatly means that all of the Mediterranean now enjoys a three-in-five chance of islamicisation, ‘inshAllah.  On the point of any of these plain facts, it is simply a matter of a solid and thorough-going intuition founded upon daily and regular, rigorous, prayer and clear thinking; and, of course, none of this may be simply ‘wished away’.  Islam is supremely a matter of reasonable and humane understanding; and, it is not intended as a tantrum-wallow for enthusiasts, professional victims or any other of the self-pitying.  The pity and the mercy are Allah’s.  The future, in one way or another, is a matter of completed and fulfilled human being, whence awareness shall move forward.  In the meantime, in the reduced western world (subject to slave- and harem-raids, and laboratory-designed epidemics originating, as ‘wildlife-management strategies’ from outside of the euro-caucasian culture-complex), the heirs of once- and future-North Atlantic humankind shall range their ‘Middle World’ to Kazan and West Uralia.  And there, in ice- and fangwolf-bound winter cabins, old and eyeless aunties and creaking one-eared, one-handed, grandfathers will tell ‘Long Ago’ stories:  of the old-time people who had everything and nonetheless killed off the Frog and Turtle, and half the Bird, People; and, to top insolence with stupidity, brought in state-liberalism AND failed to keep up their magical studies (‘science’, ie); and so bungled their way right straight under the iron rule of A Curse. As does the Toork today, and the old Han chinee, our great-grandchildren, too, shall one day bide their next time. Point d’appui: At this point in the physical evolution of intelligence in the universe, we who are the embodiment of that burgeoning awareness, conscious and unconscious muslim alike, are necessarily torn between the yea and the nay of cravings and fear.  These temptations go forward on both the molecular scale of embodied existence, and on the tempting level of electronic imagination with its images of paradisal evasion and escape from body-terror.  Naturally enough, the trend is toward information-density; and, we may confidently expect the colonisation so to speak of the electronic scale of being by the cruder and more loose-bowelled, messy, organic beings that we are now.  The intelligent reader will consult forthwith the works of Fr Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (pbuh).  Whereas that same reader may take certainty in the meantime, that this whole ensemble of future-being indeed already is in existence as a finished ouevre, simply as a consequence of being imagined and proclaimed and reiterated:     

     La Howla wa la quwwata illa billahi.

[THOSE Readers especially who do not yet enjoy the full benefits of a devout and friendly relationship to the truth of reality, and to the polite conventions of its narrative-forms, are courteously invited to await my pending preparation, 'inshAllah, of a short lexicon, whereby such mysteries as al-Hamdulillah and (pbuh) and (mAgha) & cet shall all be made clear, ‘inshAllah.] 

[Emmett R Smith              all rights reserved  28 April 2003]