INTERVIEW: DR. NAOKI YAMAMOTO

Transcript

Disclaimer: the following is a transcript of an 80-minute conversation recorded in early May. The result is that the interview ended up much longer than I expected, though very much worth it. Another note is that in many places I filled in for myself information I forgot while live in conversation with Dr. Yamamoto and did my best to edit this interview cutting the least number of words possible whilst keeping our speech grammatically correct on paper. Any additions of words or phrases are purely for grammatical/context purposes for the reader’s sake.

Thank you so much for doing this with me. For the past few years now, it’s been quite the struggle to get Muslims to talk about fiction or media or anything to do with introducing Muslims into alternate forms of –– and I hate using this word –– entertainment, because from the get-go it seems like something unserious, whereas this pursuit that I’m seeing you take head on and what I’ve been very interested in for the past few years is actually very serious, because as you know since you beat me by many years of experience, Mashallah, that these entertainment formats have very deep cutting cultural consequences.

There’s something [related to this] about East Asian societies that a lot of people are not understanding, especially the past few years. I have a friend who was in Shanghai recently and coinciding with that there was a viral video of an American traveler walking through there describing the changes he’s seen in the past five years, countering the stereotypes that have been around for a long time that Chinese cities were filled with pollution and general disgust and incivility, and a kind of strange, communal, congested living that Westerners just couldn’t relate to. Half the cars there are electric, cities are entirely changed with everything cashless, the skies are cleaned up and the air is cleaner, etc., all done in a short period of time.

Whereas you look at Western societies, and it seems like we can’t make any rapid changes like this, and when you try and interrogate as to why that is you instantly hear that it’s due to totalitarianism. We have liberal western freedom, and they don’t, so somehow, we’re morally better yet factually sloven by comparison.

I find that to be a very strange argument and wanted to get your perspective on that. Since as we know in a traditional, pre-modern Islamic society; and this is usually thrown out as an accusation, that you’re given just a few options. Either you become a Muslim, belong to a marginalized group, or just leave and you’re mechanically pushed to take one of those three routes as opposed to the unnatural liberal democracy option of just do what your heart tells you is best. The way my friend who was in Shanghai put it, it seems many of these East Asian cities who are following this “Japan model” are replicating this in a secular way, which of course brings its own set of problems. How accurate do you find this?

Well, I don’t think this is an exceptional case that’s just in East Asia. I’ve seen it in every country now, experiencing this so-called hyper-normalization. Everywhere you go, all [cities] looks the same. I still remember visiting Washington DC six or seven years ago, and I was so surprised, it looked like Tokyo. I felt so recoverable, and of course not in a positive way, but in a negative way. I know how to live in DC because of the background philosophy of the architecture and planning that made this city. The “philosophy of the city.” I had experiences like this when I lived in a big city in Japan, London, or in France, Germany, or even in the Muslim world as well, like in Istanbul.

I have known Istanbul for the past 15 years. But I miss the old version of Istanbul, even though I’m still like 34 years old. I’m not that young, but I’m still young.

I’m now based in the Asian side of Istanbul, Üsküdar. But the Üsküdar I see right now is different from the one I moved into. It’s “Tokyo-izing” and becoming more and more like Washington D.C., with the nice modern style cafes, and people are drinking these Starbucks style drinks even though they’re boycotting Starbucks; but they’re consuming almost the same product. This is the result that secularism brought to our societies. Secularism is just the irreligious version of the corpus Christianum, the body of Jesus Christ, which is how it was conceived in pre-modern Western civilization.

Meaning, they’re trying to transform the older, ornate city into the manifestation of the “one body.” In the past [before secularism], this body was the manifested shadow of Christianity. But now, as you know, it’s lost this religious background, and eventually transformed into something colorless. A lifeless body, a superficial, engineered mindset.

So, my first answer is what you described is not only in East Asia, but if you live in East Asia, especially in Japan or Korea I think our societies have become ridiculously individualistic. Do you know the word hikikomori? Never going out and just watching anime, YouTube, TikTok?

Yes, I know it. When I found out about it, I thought it was strange that it was marketed as if it was a specifically Japanese thing. It joins a lot of the stereotypes about Japanese men being very weak and pale, never going out, being addicted gamers, etc. But you look around anywhere, really, and you see this exact stereotype in all cultures starting to prop up. There are shut-ins everywhere.

Yes, so I think to some extent, this is not a stereotype, even this is the reality of the Japanese who are not even hikikomori –– those working in companies or studying in university –– they live in small, one room apartments, they have zero interaction with friends, their only relationships are those on Instagram or TikTok.

So, I think the Japanese are not exceptional in that regard, they are also one of the many victims of modernity. But as a Muslim, I always try to see the better side of society and practice Husn al-Dhun rather than Su’ al-Dhun when comparing Muslim countries or European countries. There is however an interesting case in Japanese society preserving two cultures –– the first being traditional culture, and second the popular culture, like Mangas or anime.

I’ve been practicing the tea ceremony for seven years, and Japanese swordsmanship for two years. I’ve grown up in Japan, my house is in Okayama, the next city of Hiroshima. It’s a small city, but there are hundreds of tea ceremony classes and martial arts classes. It’s a haven for the tea ceremony and martial arts masters who are trying to preserve that traditional culture and build trust in the younger generations.

Japanese swordsmanship and the tea ceremony have more than 500 years of history, the former developing in the Japanese Warring States period, in the 14th century and 15th centuries. But many westerners think that these kinds of cultural artifacts are unique to Japanese societies, but it’s not. I’m now studying the martial arts tradition in the Islamic Mamluk period. And I have found that Islamic civilization also has their own traditional martial arts culture.

Yes. Are you familiar with Imam al-Suyuti’s book, Al -Musara’a ila al -Mussara’a?

Yeah, there’s an English translation of it called Prophetic Grappling. There’s also the art of Mamluk lancing and spearing. It developed during the Mongol invasions; they practiced these martial arts to fight back against the infidels.

So, they had to revolutionize their traditional combat styles to counter this new foe that was fighting in an entirely new style?

Yes, and in the traditional Muslim cities like Baghdad, Damascus, or Cairo, there were many martial arts lodges, also used by Sufi dervishes, practicing these martial arts not only for the purpose of war, but also for spiritual education. This spiritual education was called Futuwwa. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, student of Ibn Taymiya, wrote a book called Kitab al Furussiya, the Book of Horsemanship, and in that book, he said there are two types of Furussiya. The first is the Furussiya of ‘Ilm wal Bayan, of knowledge; and the second is the Furussiya of rami wal ta’n, archery and the spear. To Ibn Qayyim, the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), and the Sahaba embodied these two paths simultaneously.

So, this Furussiya tradition is one of the oldest traditions of Islamic civilization, which existed since the time of the Prophet (SAW) and the Sahaba until the present. But now when we look at the situation of Muslim countries, or even European, or Muslim diaspora living in Europe, I see that martial arts has become some kind of trend among the Muslim youth. I know many Muslim friends, both brothers and sisters, who study Taekwondo, MMA, BJJ, etc.

These are Asian martial arts, and I’m happy to see many Muslims engaging in Asian martial arts, but as a Muslim I think, why don’t we just revive, for example, the tradition of the Mamluk Lancer?

Exactly. That was a native revolutionizing force that came out of their own culture.

Yes. Why don’t we practice Mamluk Lancing, or Turkish Archery, or the swordsmanship Ibn Taymiya practiced? There’s even a fatwa issued by Ibn Taymiya to a guy saying it was permissible to switch masters if they wanted to study another kind of martial arts. Plenty of historical evidence that it was a big trend among Muslims [for centuries].

I don’t know if you saw, in the last issue of Qawwam, we a had someone, Isa Martel, he wrote an article about his project Bayt al-Asad where he teaches medieval Islamic martial arts and investigate everything you just talked about, from the Mamluk era, the Safavid era, he goes deep into it. He showed his Ottoman suit of armor in his article, and described how he looks through ancient manuscripts, there was one ancient Persian manuscript actually he was telling me about that involved different techniques of sword fighting that was very specific to their time. It was incredibly fascinating, and I’m very glad to hear you talk about it as well.

Yes, so what I would say is that there are so many cool stuff in Islamic cultures and we need to create the momentum to establish a new connection in the Ummah, for example, this martial arts exchange.

In Malaysia, there is a martial art called Silat, also performed by Naqshbandi Sufis in Indonesia. Related to it is a philosophy called the philosophy of rice, which says that the aim of the Silat is the more you study the Silat the more you become aware of the importance of other martial arts, and the humbler you will get. Just as rice, when the grain grows, the rice plant will bend. This represents the humbleness, the Tawadu’, which must manifest. Also in China, there is a beautiful tradition in Hui martial arts, called Fui Wushu, the Fui Wushu in the Xinyi trend, or Baji trend –– I think there are ten in total. And these are developed by Muslim martial arts masters.

And what is tragic is that, yeah, jiu jitsu is cool, MMA is cool, kickboxing is cool, everyone wants to become the next Khabib or Andrew Tate.

Look at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, it comes from traditional Japanese martial arts. But one Jiu Jitsu master immigrated to the Americas, seeking asylum in Brazil, he accepted some Brazilian disciples, among them those who taught the Gracie family who made BJJ as popular as it is now. They inherited a Japanese art, and they developed it into their own art. So, I must ask, why can’t Muslims also imagine doing similar things? Why don’t we Muslims re-introduce Mamluk lancing, or Turkish archery, or Arab horsemanship to Western countries, or Japan and Korea, or Africa, and develop new forms of Islamic martial arts.

I’m sorry, I’m getting off topic.

Don’t worry, this does indeed relate to the beginning question. Please continue.

The reason I’m trying to show initiative in practicing martial arts as a Muslim is because I saw one video, I’m sure you know, from Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, the president of Zaytuna college. I respect him a lot, he’s one of the great scholars in the history of Islam, but in this video, he’s talking about the militant tradition of Islam, and he makes a remark that “Unfortunately, Islam has a militant tradition, like the samurai,” not wanting to “romanticize violence,” and I was just so shocked. As a Muslim first, I’m shocked that he used the word “unfortunately,” and second as a Japanese man that he used the samurai as an example of romanticizing violence. If you read literature written by the samurai you do see some philosophy romanticizing violence, but for the most part it’s an acknowledgement of the brutality of humanity and fatality of nature. I still remember when my master gave me permission to hold a real katana sword, I was so scared to carry the sword, because I realized I held the swift power to kill someone.

Quite a while ago, I had a few rants on Twitter about something very similar, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the works of Homer –– the Iliad and the Odyssey. This was basically the Bible of the ancient Greeks, and when you look at something like the Iliad, it’s very clear to any rational, unbiased reader that this is one of the bloodiest, most brutal books of all time. You have these incredibly gruesome, lurid descriptions of soldiers dying in battle, yet the way that modern professors teach the Iliad is that Homer is lamenting war and violence, of men dying and leaving behind their families and so on.

But I did not understand it that way at all. To me, it seems like a glorification of war and violence, but not in an excessive manner as if done for the sake of it, but more so as a spiritual meditation on the reality of violence. I ended up writing an article for IM1776 about this, and my goal was to describe that deep misunderstanding, not just of say, the professors who are teaching ancient literature and dismissing pre-modern forms of warfare and understanding of nature, but a very misconstrued understanding of the reality of what men are interested in generally.

There’s a horrible misunderstanding of why men like violence, to be precise. For example, they’ll look at guys like Andrew Tate, or guys who are into martial arts, and everything that you just described, and they think “Oh, yeah, this is because men are brash and violent monsters, and they inherently want to cause destruction in the world or whatever. You hear this all the time from liberal feminist intellectuals, when in reality –– not just as a guy, but if you investigate the groups that want to bring back different forms of ancient martial arts –– what’s meaningful to these guys is the brotherhood. The actual engaging with the violence in a spiritual and controlled manner. The way that I wanted to tie this back into that beginning question, because we started talking about the fact that a lot of these East Asian countries are the way they are because their governments are trying to hyper-modernize their cities and Japanify things, but they’re doing it in a very secular manner. And because they’re doing it in a secular manner, they’re not solving the atomization problem, which would be solved by the martial arts brotherhoods we’re discussing.

I think that’s the main difference when it comes to the Islamic model, it gives you these limited options to ingrain yourself in society. The contract in Islamic society is, yes, we’re not giving you liberal freedom, but we’re going to give your life meaning instead.

Yes, it’s true. But now, instead of any of that, we have these so-called online madrasas, and hundreds of international conferences where they talk about how to be minorities, or they try to decipher the “hypocrisy of Western civilizations.” I’m a university lecturer myself, but I see so many professors, academics, who talk constantly about where Western civilization went wrong, and why Islamic civilization is the only solution, but when I go back to Ibn Qayyim, I realize that all we have now is the Furussiya of knowledge without the half. They’re just talking and talking, but what I want to see are tangible results.

Exactly. Thank you.

I attended many classes about how to deal with shubuhat, you know, your inner doubts or how to deal with atheism, but as a Muslim convert, and I have been Muslim for fifteen years, I have faced so many difficulties; and I reached a point where I wanted to leave these Muslim communities and return to my usual Japanese daily life. But I never had any shubuhat about existence, thankfully.

It does seem that there is a big problem in Western civilization with these arguments, but in Japan we have a different context, a different problem. And this problem cannot be solved by merely an ‘aqli tradition, like argumentation, the constant philosophizing of things. When I attended one archery class in Turkey, the instructor told me when shooting the arrow in the Ottoman tradition, you say “Ya Haqq”, Oh Truthful One. And when I shot the arrow, my spiritual agony just disappeared. I was making Dhikr. I saw the manifestation of the Haqq when I shot my arrow. Right then I made tawba and thought Subhan Allah, this is what I have been looking for.

I even did a talk once in the past where I said I thought that there is no strong spirituality that existed [today] in the Muslim community. There actually is. It was just my ignorance. I just didn’t know that all I needed was to attend a local archery class and recite “Ya Haqq.”

See, that goes into my second question about your own your own background coming into your own as a Japanese Muslim. You’ve sort of partially answered the question already, the fight of finding that “click” because I’ve noticed with the many different converts I’ve met from all over the world that for each of them they all have to find a kind of cultural click to reach that point of spiritual synergy of “Yes, I can be a representative of Islam,” as a German, a White American, a Spaniard, etc.

I have a friend named Robert who runs Islam for Europeans, he’s very active on Twitter and his site and main project is forming more tight knit European Muslim communities made up of converts, and one of the things I discussed with him ad-infinitum is that some people accept Islam and as they make their journey and learn more they feel this kind of shame of their own culture. They get this idea in their head, and usually, it’s other people giving them this idea, that “you come from a kafir culture, so you must now shed all aspects of it if you want to be a true Muslim,” which is completely insane and destructive rhetoric. It’s always applied as a kind of performative “Oh yes, I must cleanse myself in order to reach this abstract idea of what a real Muslim is.”

It’s usually converts on the Salafi track who find themselves acting this way, but I’ve also seen it from people in all other disciplines. There needs to be a middle ground where you realize, for example: I’m an Englishman who accepts Islam, I can still have afternoon tea, dress like an Englishman, respect my history and literature that I loved all my life that makes up my identity as an Englishman, and this isn’t something that compromises my Islam. Rather, my Islam is something that’s injected into my cultural identity and forms something unique and special that isn’t just meant for my local Muslim community to relate to, but also meant to show other Englishmen that, yes, being Muslim isn’t something that’s going to tear you from your roots, rather it’s something that cleanses and purifies your roots. How would you say Islam changed your perspective on your history and roots as a Japanese man?

I spoke on a similar topic in a different interview, but for example, when I became Muslim, I thought embracing Islam was embracing Arab culture, or Malay culture, or Persian culture; because we’re Japanese, we don’t have our own distinct way of practicing the Islam, and I thought everything comes from outside of us, that it still didn’t feel right to be practicing as a Japanese person.

And I still remember, I think it was during Eid or some program I did, I wore a Japanese kimono, and a Muslim brother, who I’m sure didn’t have bad intentions, said not to wear “kaffir clothes.” But the kimono is not “kaffir clothes,” it’s just clothes. This isn’t Kim Kardashian underwear; this is traditional Japanese wear, and if it fits Islamic etiquette, all clothes can be “Islamic clothes,” even Western suits. Shalwar Kamis, Malaysian clothes, Japanese clothes, it’s all the same.

For the past two years, I have been initiating the Japanese Islamic project, a culture that I’m trying to create; a good, new, Japanese tradition, inspired by Islamic ideas. I’m designing a traditional tea container, a traditional Tenugui handkerchief which has Futuwwa calligraphy, and so on. I’m also designing a traditional hanging sprawl, where I use Japanese calligraphy to write Surat al-Fatiha.

I haven’t talked about this in the other interview, but I want to emphasize that when people try to advocate the importance of reviving Islamic spirituality in local communities, they always criticize, for example, the Salafi mindset of trying to standardize Islam. But this is not the problem of Salafism, this is the problem of the nation-state. The hypothesis of the nation state is that within an area there is only one nation, one culture, and one language, and every nation has their own way of pursuing their own vision.

But what we have, the true result of the nation state, is that this thinking can’t guarantee the diversity of cultures in this dunya. The nation state is the real enemy of the diversity of cultures, and it’s the Khilafah which guarantees the preservation of the diversity of cultures.

So, I hope I’m making it clear, but the attempt to be re-rooted in the local community and becoming sincere to local traditions is the Khilafah system.

And now we see the tragedy of Muslim communities not knowing this cultural aspect of Khilafah, they only see it as a radical, political philosophy.

It’s recognizable to most now as a domineering authoritarian system.

Yes, and when you speak to any Muslim in academia, when they use the word Khilafah people criticize them for being “too radical to bring up this topic” or treat it like an outdated philosophy, but do you think this is at all “radical” compared to what we’ve seen in the past five to six months?

What happened in Palestine didn’t happen under a Khilafah. It’s the nation state system that enabled one country to kill more than 50,000+ people in a tiny district. This is the reality we must face. When you visit Malaysia, the masajid are in Malay style, they practice Silat, they have their own Madrasas, traditions, textbooks; and when you visit a Chinese Muslim community –– they are not under a Khilafah, they’re under a Chinese Empire, but they still have the intellectual connection with the Khilafah with Chinese martial arts, masajid, and Islamic books in the Chinese languages. It’s the same in Turkey and many parts of Africa as well.

So, what I want to emphasize here is that, as you said, imagining the vernacular of Islamic culture must not compromise with the nation state agenda. When we imagine our local Islamic culture, it must act as an art of resilience and resistance against modernity. When I wear a kimono, it’s not some superficial manifestation of my Japanese nationalism, to me this is an art of resilience. I’m criticizing modernity. When I perform Japanese swordsmanship, this is also out of resilience to show the counterculture against the superficial manifestation of trendy MMA red pill masculinity.

I want to revive the art of spirituality that we know from Islamic civilization.

This might seem funny to readers when I bring this up next: you also talk a lot about anime and manga, and I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot of criticism for this for actually advocating for this even from the angle that you’ve been doing it from, and I’ve gotten similar criticism as well with my novel, basically our attempt at introducing Muslims into alternate forms of media real “Islamicate” fiction, not the trash that they’re trying to bring in now, that’s just American Empire monoculture with an Islamic skin-suit wrapped around it.

I don’t want to use this as a way to promote my own stuff, this is your interview, but when I wrote my novel, Blood of the Levant, people told me after the fact that it was “Islamicate fiction,” even though I didn’t feel that it was at the time, but realized later on what they meant. Islamic characters and themes are a major part of the book and storyline. It’s not just a secular story with Muslim characters where they’re constantly humiliated and thrown as if their faith doesn’t matter. I’m trying to fight against that and go for the opposite. We’re very much in agreement on that goal.

There’s another aspect of it I find isn’t discussed as well: the novel format, for example, has a lot of deep roots in the formation of Western civilization, and how Westerners express themselves through their own stories, even though all cultures obviously have different storytelling formats. But the novel is something that you don’t find popularly, for example, in pre-modern Islamic cultures. We tend to use different art forms to express the ideas and feelings that many novels would.

From a deeper cultural perspective, why do you think manga and anime turned out the way it did [from Japanese culture]? And why do you think it breaks barriers across the world so easily?

Oh yes, first, I wanted to start with your problem that even the great Muslim scholars in our time, they underestimate the power of fiction, they don’t know how the story holds a kind of soft power. I was shocked that even Sheikh Hasan Spiker seemed that he never watched anime before.

But when we look at the history of Islamic civilization, the traditional anecdote is one of the strongest inspirational sources which Islamic civilization had. The opera, Turandot, was inspired by a story from A Thousand and One Nights.

Turandot is an Islamicate opera, inspired by the story narrative, which is imagined in an Islamic State civilization, and if you see the history of Western culture, with plays, operas, music, or poetry, you can see a lot of Islamic influence. Before the modernization, Islamic civilization was the center of artistic inspiration and sources.

Somehow, this power completely disappeared, and now we have it that even traditional Muslim scholars understand things like fiction, or writing fictional stories, or imagining a fictional character as superficial entertainment, which doesn’t have any grounding in our tradition. If you’re really into metaphysics and philosophy, fiction is the core of the power of the nation state today.

For example, are you an American citizen?

Yes, I’m from New York.

Then you have an American passport, and I have a Japanese passport. The number of countries I can enter without a visa compared to the number of countries you can enter without a visa is different. Why? It’s because of fiction.

Imagine my nation state. It’s clear apartheid. Is it because I’m yellow? If you’re born in America, you’re told that Western civilization has guaranteed human rights and equality of human beings. It’s hypocrisy.

It’s all because of the cultural power that America has exerted over the past 40 years.

Yes, so actually, we are living in a fairy tale, which is the current violence of Western modernity. We are fictional characters, and our attributes are imagined by the modernists. But to understand this fiction of modernity, we must engage in the process of being fictional writers ourselves. Do you know Jujutsu Kaisen?

Yes.

You know the inner magic, like domain expansion they do? They manifest their understanding of the dunya and expand it as the only way to fight back against the enemy. So, imagine the concept of passports, citizenship, or a so-called nation, these are all domain expansions, like the Jujutsu Kaisen of the nation state. To fight against these nation states, we need to have our own Jujutsu Kaisen domain expansion.

And with the novel that you wrote, it’s the only tool that you can fight with against modernity. When writing a novel, you’re like a Muslim fairy in the book of the modernity. What really makes me sad is that, even though so-called traditionalist scholars show great respect to the various groups making up the Islamic tradition, it seems they don’t think they have to show the same amount of respect for East Asian cultures.

I agree with that, yes.

I’m a humble person. I’m a weeb little Pikachu. But I have been Muslim for fifteen years in Muslim communities, and I still see this strange Western centrism and the invisibility of the East Asian, not just in Western civilization, but even within Muslim communities as well. So that’s why I have decided that I will become an annoying uncle. Like, when I see some kind of uncomfortable statement about East Asian traditions and culture, I won’t hesitate to talk about the beauty or creativity of our cultures and how Muslims can learn from our tradition.

And coming back to the question, and why I think these Japanese manga or anime have potential to introduce Islamic spirituality to the Muslim youth; I have studied some classical Islamic knowledge in the traditional madrasa system, and I still have connections with sincere Muslim brothers seeking ’ilm, but in general, I see so few Muslim youth are going to madrasas and studying Islamic classical Islamic knowledge. However, there are many Muslim youth who watch Japanese anime and read manga. So, if we can use this medium to show not just the superficial coolness of Muslims or Islam, but to also introduce the spiritual profoundness of the Islamic tradition, then it might not be like teaching the tradition directly, but it might be the least we can do.

It’s much better than just watching Ms. Marvel or Dune and criticizing the misrepresentation of Muslims. If we can produce our own Islamic fiction or Islamic stories, narratives, it at least will be much better than Western entertainment who are trying to reduce Islam to ethnicities.

And even when we watch Japanese anime or manga, we can develop our Islamic way of interpretating it. There are so many lessons we can learn from Japanese anime. Attack on Titan is a good example. It’s a great anime. When we see the story of Attack on Titan, it’s just like what’s happening in Palestine. The dehumanization of local people and stealing their history, the issue of apartheid –– all elements that make up Attack on Titan.

The problem is, why are there no Muslims who could imagine a story like Attack on Titan? Like, what is the popular culture, initiated by the Muslims, that’s like Attack on Titan, or Rurouni Kenshin, or Golden Kamuy? Stories that encourage Muslim audiences to reflect upon our past, to reflect on our situation, reflect on the modernity that we are facing. One of my favorite anime is Rurouni Kenshin. It’s about the life of the samurai who lived through modernization in Japan. It traces the hypocrisy of modernity, and the importance of preserving tradition. It also talks about the philosophy of honor and the samurai, the reality of the nature of violence, humanity, etc.

And we also have enough ingredients for something like this in Islamic history as well. Why there is no single Muslim who wrote a manga or anime about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? Why not an anime featuring Abdullah Quilliam?

Do you know Peaky Blinders?

Yes, I watched that show.

Yeah, it’s about a gang in Birmingham, but the story was so creative. It was good because they talk about the problems of British society after the First World War. And what is creative about it is that it’s not featuring the elite of British society, but the Irish and gypsy minority ethnic backgrounds. This British artist can imagine such a story just featuring a gang in Birmingham, so why can’t a Muslim create a story featuring Abdullah Quilliam, or the Mamluks, or a Muslim struggling through Asian modernization?

Also, there is one book, do you know Lord of the Rings?

I was just going to mention Lord of the Rings.

Who wrote Lord of the Rings? A university lecturer. Meanwhile these Muslim professors are just organizing international conferences or initiating summer retreat camps in Istanbul or Al-Andalus.

They take their students on children’s summer camps with “Islamic education” as an excuse.

Yeah, I mean, I haven’t visited Al-Andalus. I only saw it on Google. It looks so beautiful. But for example, they visit Al-Andalus and they’re reminiscing the beautiful past of Islamic civilization and as one of the successful examples of coexistence of the Muslim’s and non-Muslims, but come on, today’s reality is in Birmingham, in Washington D.C. or Wisconsin or Texas. We need to create our own culture, not just retreating somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore.

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, I was going to mention this when you were talking about how anime and manga are disrespected the way it is. It’s funny because a lot of Muslims, both students and scholars, as I found out some time ago, absolutely love Lord of the Rings. Like yeah sure, there’s no problem with that but manga is somehow bad –– I don’t know if you know Sheikh Asrar Rashid from Birmingham. There’s a clip of one of his lectures where he mentioned Harry Potter and immediately started getting weird noises and looks, and he told them “you guys know that reading literature isn’t haram, right?” It’s that bad of an aversion for some Muslims.

We can learn a lot of things from Harry Potter, actually.

I haven’t read it, but I’ve seen the movies.

Even in the movies, the whole story of Harry Potter is a battle between tradition and modernity. Traditionalism vs. Neo-Nazi modernity with Voldemort as the manifestation of this postmodern racism. Where did the last battle occur? In Hogwarts. It didn’t happen in the Ministry of Magic in London; it was in Hogwarts castle in Scotland. We look at what’s happening in America right now, where is the front battle of humanity and the nation state?

In the universities?

Yeah, like University of Columbia, this is what I’m talking about. Like, all these people who underestimate the power of fiction, but good fiction is visionary, and a reflection of the reality that you are living in. And it is quite a tragedy that there are none of us, even including myself, as a university lecturer, who could imagine a narrative like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.

I’m also a big fan of Star Wars. My recent most favorite is the Mandalorian series, and in Japan, there’s one article talking about the Zionism of the Mandalorian. It was so interesting. When you see episode five or six in the old version of Star Wars, the Mandalorian were imagined as a native people like in America or Australia who try to preserve a traditional, militant culture. But when we watch the latest series, this director reinterprets the Mandalorian as a metaphor for Zionism, and the planet Mandalore as Zion, Israel. I think the article’s argument makes sense. Jewish artists use their existing content to promote their ideologies, meanwhile we Muslims are just complaining.

Yes, I 100% agree. Just to move on to the last thing that I want to speak about, are you familiar with the novelist Yukio Mishima?

Yeah.

I’ve never gotten an idea of how popular and relevant he is with Japanese people today, but I’m a big fan of him. I’m currently reading his second novel, Thirst for Love. I’ve read mostly much more popular books that he’s written, like Sun and Steel, Runaway Horses, Sound of Waves, not novels such as this, and one of the things that I find extremely compelling about him, especially when you read interviews about him his life, even with all the controversies that came up –– there’s also that movie, Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters. Have you ever seen it?

Um, I don’t remember doing so.

I forgot the name of the American director, but he, in a very lucrative way, was able to sum up that final day of Mishima before he performed his very ostentatious act of ritual suicide, and showing how that act paralleled the themes of his books, especially when it came to violence and such.

One of my favorite things however is that he doesn’t attack modernity in this very polemic, complaining, whining way. He acknowledges its pleasures and sees why so many people get drawn into it, but at the same time rejects it in a graceful manner. In his biography by Henry Scott Stokes, a close friend of his from England, Mishima was telling him a lot of Westerners, they look at Japan, and they love the chrysanthemum, but they don’t understand the sword, and are terrified of it. It’s the two aspects of Japanese culture; the outward beauty, which is very attractive to Westerners that makes them want to come to Japan.

You can imagine his perspective coming in, but then Mishima talked about the sword, and his novels were primarily trying to get through the reader’s head, what the sword means. So, I wanted to ask you, what your view of him is, not just as a Japanese person, also as a Muslim, what do you think as a Muslim is the most compelling aspect of his writing?

To me personally, in his book Sun and Steel, which you reminded me of when we were talking about how spiritual things just can’t be settled through philosophizing, or argumentation, or specifically logos of just words. Sometimes things need to be settled through the action of the body, experiencing what you described, saying Ya Haqq, as you shot an arrow because that reveals to you a level of understanding that argumentation just doesn’t reveal. Sun and Steel is him detailing his experience as a youth, as being a very anxious boy who loved art and books and such, and not being connected with his body the way that he should to understand things like violence and nature.

But when he got into things like weightlifting and boxing, and I relate to this heavily because this is basically my experience, is that it revealed to him truths about art, about nature, about living as a man that just talking never could reveal to him.

So, what do you think about that?

I think it will take years if I talk about all the details; he believed that taking action [as opposed to philosophizing] will cause the recognition of the individual and change the world, but it’s not necessarily about recognition. The action comes first, what you are doing in this process, how we can transform ourselves, and how we tackle the modernity we’re facing. As I said, we Muslim academics are very talkative. We talk about the progress of Western civilization, about modernity, but we have been talking about this for centuries, really.

We keep talking about it as if we are the ones who created the wheel to this civilization. No, the wheel was already invented. What we need is to know how to use that wheel and see what kind of experiences we can take from it.

For example, Mishima practiced bodybuilding and studied Japanese swordsmanship. I’m also practicing the Japanese tea ceremony and swordsmanship, I’m designing Japanese art, and people ask me if I’m sure that my project is going to be successful. And of course I’m not sure. It’s much more likely that my project will fail, because modernity is too strong. I am just an individual. The most important message my Japanese Muslim master reminded me when I became Muslim: the Quran teaches is that that we are living as Muslims to die as Muslims, not to just live as “successful” Muslims.

Even though we are facing calamities, and we are sure that we might fail, or we might lose in the battle, we just have to keep going. If we have just one Muslim, a boy or a girl, who is inspired, or receives a life-giving force for them personally from something like my hijabi ninja character, or an [Islamicate] movie, that’s enough for me.

Yeah, I felt the same way about my novel. I thought that as one young Muslim gets the message out of my book and understands what I’m trying to say, that’s fine for me. I don’t need my novel to be made into a movie or to be taken by a publisher, even though, funnily enough, it did end up being taken by a publisher –– a small Muslim publishing house that’s going to be making a hardcover for it this fall, but that’s beside the point.

I’m not comparing us to Ulama, but it’s like when they teach and their number of students grow and those students go on to create heavy impact in the world, their goal was never to become famous scholars across the lands of Islam.

Yes. So, imagine there’s one Muslim boy who is facing a lot of challenges in public school and such, with depression or thoughts of suicide, or leaving Islam and their Muslim community. But he comes across your novel and feels something special from it and regains iman; he then grows up and goes on to get married and have a child or have disciples of his own.

That’s one survivor, a Muslim survivor, who will testify for you on Yawm al-Qiyamah. You are the wali then. You protected a Muslim.

And this is what we must do –– we don’t have to build a big political party or be president. We don’t have to re-establish the Khilafah or something like that to matter at the end of the day. This one small step is important. The most important thing is to fight against modernity, to re-establish the real Khilafah again, a real Muslim community. So, what I am advising Muslim artists, fictional writers, or even Muslim scholars, is we don’t have to be [materially] successful.

We don’t have to be heroes. It’s enough to die as a loser with honor, and hoping the next generation is inspired by it. And this is enough.

Do you think that Mishima felt the same way when he went out the way he did?

I don’t know, Allahu ‘Alam

[We both laughed, hard]

This was amazing. Thank you very much. I guess that’s the real message in the end, just wait and hope, and it’s much better for you to go out with honor, no matter the result, instead of compromising your Islam for worldly success. One of my favorite anecdotes is that after the Mongol invasions, when cities like Samarkand and Bukhara were completely depopulated and destroyed –– and this is how the Sufi Tariqas got so powerful in the centuries that followed –– Sheikh Sayf al-Din Bakharzi (RH) goes to the Maqam of Imam Bukhari that’s barely left standing and starts reading from his Sahih. Soon enough a few people join him to listen, the group grows from there, and the city was rebuilt that way. It wasn’t rebuilt by him coming up on a few stones and declaring himself king of the wasteland, because his intentions were pure, and the descendants of that group ended up bequeathing something that grew beyond their imagination. So yeah, maybe we’ll get a Muslim Gojo Saturo in the next century. Thank you so much. Assalamu Alaykum.

Thank you very much. Walaykum Alsalam.

Dr. Naoki Qayyim Yamamoto is an artist, translator, and academic who is currently an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Marmara University in Istanbul. He recieved his PhD at Kyoto University in 2018. He’s a student of the Tea Ceremony and Japanese Swordsmanship, and you can find more of him on X @NaokiQYamamoto.