WORDS: MU KHAN
The desperate state of our affairs can most easily be observed in those mechanical behemoths, roaring across skies, raining fire and metal over our most coveted and sacred lands. Our enemies are keen to betray their Adamic disposition and to fully transmogrify into otherworldly monstrosities, bio-horrors of their own making. Advanced war technologies informed by godlessness and baptized in the profane ravage the Islamicate. The riptide of modernity and the development of a new kind of being, the post-Adamite, the Android, seeks to besiege the fītri disposition. The antichristic forces of our enemies have forced our hand, necessitating that we look to our histories and reconsider our options, to envision future ends justified by monstrous means, to unleash horrors of our own. The mission of the Prophet ﷺ is being realized by a burgeoning spiritual elite, in the hearts and minds of thousands of mujahideen across the opportunity zones of the Islamicate in a final struggle for civilizational dominance. Envisioning an Islamicate futurology requires that we ask ourselves who, or what, will come to define the End of History.
Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being a symptom and not the real disease— but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.1
Sayyid Qutb’s prognosis of Global Jahiliya as the ever-advancing, totalizing and cancerous force of the end times rings no less true today than when it was written, as the onslaught of modernity and its modernizing processes inch us closer towards catalyzing events driven by war technologies and techno-centric ideologies. As the beneficiaries of modernity seek to reign-in the last remaining illiberal societies and usher in a decisive victory for liberalism, i.e., a Fukuyaman victory, anti-systemic and anti-modern actors in the Islamicate are forced to abandon the old -isms of political Islamism and nation-statism in favor of Messianism and technocratic Jihad in order to compete with bloated tech-military alliances and carve spaces for themselves as pragmatic non-state entities in an increasingly multi-polar world order. We must identify the stages of our eschatological revolution and strategize accordingly.
The centuries of humiliation for the Old Islamicate, with its bloated metropoles and seemingly unending periods of historical stagnancy and irrationality under the weight of modernity, must be understood through the Prophetic framework. Indeed, the Holy Prophet ﷺ informed us of our present weakness:
You will be numerous at that time: but you will be scum and rubbish like that carried down by a torrent, and Allah will take fear of you from the breasts of your enemy and last enervation into your hearts.2
It is said that “enervation” (wahn) refers to the weakness or feebleness of the Ummatic body as a whole. As Muslims stray from their religion, their civilization, and submission to the sovereignty of God, their enemies shall gain the opportunity to grow bolder. The Prophet ﷺ described this weakness (wahn) as “love of the world and dislike of death.”3 It is precisely under these conditions that we became primed towards backwardness and mob-psychology, devolving into a hivemind of irrationality and obscurity. We unfortunately assumed that our tendency towards groupthink and mob-formation would strengthen our ability to act as one mind, one body, working towards collective efforts, when in fact we have merely structured ourselves as an amorphous blob motivated by petty emotional factors and grievances. Identitarian social engineering, communal hysteria, and tribal pathologies now inform much of the structure and form of politics and socialization in the Islamicate.
The fear of death and the love of this world have crippled our ability to meaningfully calculate risk and operate strategically. The nation-states of the Old Islamicate today form the largest buffer zone for imperial actors and major players, ensuring that our societies continue to remain locked in political hibernation and historical stagnation to allow for the preservation of the global technocratic regime. We find that the militaries, governments, and civil societies across the many nation-states of the Old Islamicate are joined at the hip, yet they constitute total dead weight, unable to exert any sort of pressure on the unipolar system, presently existing at the mercy of global finance institutions and NGO-complexes.
One may argue that the finding of comfort in stagnancy and the unwillingness to act undertaken by these nations is perhaps a form of self-preservation, but it is a self-preservation motivated by weakness and subservience to other than God. This only confirms our assertion that the froth of the Islamicate, its governments, leaders, institutions, and even significant portions of its highly sedated population, exist and are empowered to exist, for the sole purpose of preventing any sort of change from occurring within the liberal world order.
We must accept death + destruction as a necessary stage of a psychosocial, spiritual process within a greater eschatological timeline by which we redefine our existence, rather than as a state of non-being. In doing so, we integrate qadr into our eschatological framework. Understood sociologically, we may begin to observe qadr as a sort of providential form of historical determinism in which the fates of civilizations and of historical peoples are divinely ordained and sealed. The changing of historical tides occurs then, not through ideological efforts, but through providence.
There is a sacred promise to be found in death + destruction. Just as the young seeker is initiated into tasawwuf by his teachers, or a male adolescent initiated into manhood by his father, the martyr is initiated into sainthood and eternal life in death + destruction. It is by the very qadr of those events that allow us to venture into the psychosphere, to live eternally in the planes between time and existence. In fearing death + destruction, we concede power. Understand our most prescient maxim that what is true must be tested with fire.
To understand and observe the temporal location of our death + destruction within the eschatological timeline is to accept that we may only succeed through providence. We must envision a place for ourselves beyond death + destruction and locate a future at the beginning of a new civilizational process. The end of a civilization’s life cycle is merely the first stage in the eschatological process. We must accept that history is neither linear nor cyclical, but a spiral. The helix of time sees the end of a process and the beginning of a new one. A civilization concentrates its developments around the core of its existence, and like a spiral, its course must end and open towards the unknown. As the Holy Prophet ﷺ foretold, our civilizational predicament must end in destruction and may only be medicated by providence. If we fear death + destruction, we lose sight of the future and distance ourselves from the light of providence.
The great civilizational spirit that emboldened Khalid ibn al-Walid and his declaration to the Sassanians that he would “bring men who desire death as ardently as you desire life” can only be materialized in accepting death in its promised form, as a transitory status superior to the present. To envision an Islamicate futurology is then, to confront and accept death + destruction as necessary stages of the eschatological process.
The rising tide of the Islamicate, be it spiritually, technologically, economically, or militarily, does not indicate a breakthrough in the alchemy of ideology. The military success of technocratic Jihadism in Syria, alongside the demonstration of military prowess and political tact by more traditional state actors such as Türkiye and Qatar, and the economic and industrious rise of the ASEAN Islamicate are not the results of pure ideological works. Islamicate civilization is beginning to eclipse the helix of time and is now permitted to venture into unknown territories. The coming end of the life cycle for the Old Islamicate has produced opportunity zones for elite human capital to act. Victory cannot be forced through ideology or even might alone. Tactful use of technology and the cultivation of narrative power are the factors which now inform success. Islamicate futurology must envision beyond itself and pursue a radical break from the familiarity of the past and boldly welcome the unknown. The future is to be located by patiently observing the dissolution of a bloated and stagnant Islamicate as promised and shaped by providence. We must come to realize prophecy as an existent, present, and “felt” thing.
The necessary project of Islamic futurology must foresee the cultivation of Islamicate soft power, the weaponization and operationalization of narrative strength and mystical symbology. Islamicate power can only yield itself into existence by envisioning itself in the light of providence. Prophecy must be “felt”, understood, experienced, as opposed to being observed as an ancient obscurity, a totem of past greatness. The folly of Islamist politics thus far has been to nestle vague ideas and gleams of the future behind the language of democracy, nation-statism, liberalism, and other present political-technology. We can no longer apologize for our displays of strength and cower behind notions of civility in accordance with the expectations of modernity. For too long Islamicate discourses have either been blinded by former glories or embarrassed of the raw barbarism necessary for civilizational formation and statecraft. We have been taught that death + destruction are promised, and they are the gateways to power. Death + destruction must occur to create space for new life. We must utilize all the technologies at our disposal, including the cyberspace, to envision prophecy, to disseminate painful truths and strategic lies so that we may locate the future as presciently envisioned by our spiritual forefathers.
Observe as we have observed…
1 Qutb, Sayyid ([1964] 2006), Milestones, p.14, Maktabah Booksellers and Publishers, Birmingham England.
2 Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4927, Book 39, Hadith 7.
3 Sunan Abī Dāwūd, 4297 (4/515-516), Dārussalām (Eng)
Mu Khan posts on X @yunguantan