The coming American Election, “Muslim-Christian Alliances,” love and hate in the new technocracy, how we view Khilafa, and more with DRAGOMAN:
AY: You came into the online scene through an article you wrote for American Mind over a year ago, “Meet Your New Allies”, which made quite a bit of a splash. It came shortly after hundreds of imams and scholars across the United States made what was probably their most ardent stand against leftist political dogma in recent history, and it seemed to many (both among those cheering it on and those screeching in horror about it) that Muslims were starting to align themselves in a more “rightist” direction. I recall many right-wing pundits, some of whom would become active political participants in recent campaigns vying for the Republican presidential nomination during that summer of 2023, who were also warming up to this idea of a “Muslim-Christian alliance” of virtue against the grim, androgynous, grotesque future that leftists have in store for the country.
Then, just that fall on October 7th, the momentum carrying this idea melted away into the ocean, never to be seen again by any of the lone sailors of our niche Muslim corner of the internet. You came back with another article sometime after the genocide in Gaza began expressing an agony we all felt, and a pessimistic prediction (proving more now to be true) that any America First sentiment to avoid continuous demonization of Muslims for Israel’s sake would be snuffed out in favor of Forever Zionism that continues to rot out the American Empire inside out as they give up everything to protect a psychotic frontier ethnostate the size of New Jersey. This sentiment we held became the subject of a lot of mockery — one accelerated now since as I’m writing this, many parts of London and other English cities are facing anti-immigration protests and riots, countered by British Muslims, who to many see their response as a vindication that those pushing a “Muslim-Christian alliance” were ignorant and wrong this whole time.
Taking into account the upcoming American election, failures of the right in the UK and France a few months back, and the looming threat of a large regional war in the Middle East (again) brought about by insane and stupid foreign policy decisions by the current administration towards Gaza, what would your revised take be on the American Muslim desire for a “Coalition of Virtue”? If it no longer exists, what’s the replacement vision?
DM: Thanks for opening this in such a thoughtful way.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the events of the past year have given Muslims around the world severe pause.
Now, when I wrote “Meet Your New Allies,” I was a different Dragoman and America was a different America.
As for myself, I was still living a more or less idyllic suburban American life. America was where I lived, and I didn’t see myself being planted anywhere else at the time. The argument I made at the time was that the excesses of the left’s social agenda had alienated Muslims—a kingmaker block in American politics—and that many of us were willing to be wooed back to the right, should proper concessions be made.
That argument made sense then—in a world before the live-streaming of the wholesale slaughter of around 50,000 people, the vast majority of whom are innocent Muslim Palestinians.
But it doesn’t make sense now.
Not only does it not make sense, but I will proudly own that my argument was dead wrong. But how did I (and so many like me) whiff so badly?
We whiffed because we didn’t realize that the entire post-WW2 world order is premised on the Israeli state being established as an apology for the six gorillion.
The time since Operation: Al-Aqsa Flood has been difficult to watch. But I must thank God for the clarity that it brought.
An entire generation is now realizing that anyone who comes for Israel will be immediately labeled as sub-human to the regime, easily canceled, dispatched, disposed of, and forgotten.
We now know that it isn’t about supporting the Right or the Left. America will not break its suicide pact with Israel, at least not in the near or immediate future.
Is there a replacement vision? It’s harder for me to speak on that. I have decided since October to leave America. I know that everyone may not agree with that decision or, for reasons of circumstance, be able to leave the country as I did.
But, if pressed to advise those Muslims left in the rotting fortress of the West, I would offer some disparate suggestions. With the help of others brighter than myself, they might coalesce into a coherent-ish framework one day….
1. Live near a masjid and community that will challenge and progress you spiritually. And when I say near, I mean, as near as possible. You should be able to walk or drive there in 2-3 minutes, ideally. Getting to such a community may require personal and professional sacrifices. But make them you must. For most people, this should not be a tiny community, unless you are of a pioneering spirit, and have as your companions other true believers who are strong enough to establish a new masjid and new community (most aren’t). The reason why bigger is often better is because a bigger community will afford you the breathing room for you and your family to be themselves. I grew up as an extreme minority in a very small town with a very small masjid. I made it out alive, but it was not fun.
2. Set your intention with Allah. No matter what your personal or professional circumstances, your niyyah is something between you and Allah. If you’re going to be in the West, then in my view the only justifiable intentions are for da’wah and/ or jihad (intellectually, spiritually, etc). If you have neither of these intentions, yet are still intent on having you and your future generations live in a place like America, you are deluded.
3. Encourage our best and brightest youth to enter into fields like policy, history, literary criticism, political science, engineering, arms, and defense… the list goes on. We have enough doctors.
4. Start using secure messaging platforms, especially when discussing politics or other sensitive subjects. Based on some friends who are deep experts in cybersecurity, Session.org is probably the most secure. But given its frequent updates and sometimes lost messages, it may be impractical for most. My same contacts tell me that Signal is still pretty decent, despite some shady reports I’ve seen. (https://christopherrufo.com/p/signals-katherine-maher-problem)
5. If you can afford it, travel to a Muslim-majority country that you love. Go somewhere where the people remind you of Allah and you feel like a fish back in water. Go there and rejuvenate and remember what human beings are supposed to be like. Do this at least once if not several times a year.
6. Create a family. Become that family’s rock, in every dimension. Make sure that you, your wife(s), and your kids do not give bay’ah to the state as Americans, Canadians, Brits, etc first. Their allegiance is to Allah and His Messenger first. Then their allegiance is to the members of the family and the broader tribe you are forming. If you have older kids, get them married early to someone from a family that shares the same values as you do.
7. Learn Arabic. My decision to take 8 semesters of Arabic throughout college was one of the best investments I ever made. It pays dividends for me every day. By learning Arabic, you can at any time connect yourself to God directly through His pre-eternal speech and greatest handhold, the Qur’an. By virtue of this connection, you will be able to ground yourself in True categories and concepts and spirituality, and this will stop you from adopting deviant ideas that lead to deviant actions. If you can’t invest in Arabic, try and learn at least one of the traditional ‘Ajami languages of the Muslims: Farsi, Urdu, Bengali, Bahasa, whatever. The fact that these languages have been steeped in the values and habits of the Muslims gives them their unique flavors and strengths. In short, having the right words will make you less susceptible to the bad and the ugly, and more receptive and aware of the good and the beautiful.
8. Ask Allah to light the torch of yaqin in your heart. What I mean by this is that your belief in Islam must be powered by an inner light, one that doesn’t require more and more cerebral study of the tradition. In my view, one needs to go through one or more key spiritual experiences that light the heart’s candle. For some people, it could be a near-death experience. It could be a dream. It could be the tears born of a sincere repentance from sin. Everything is through His mercy ultimately. But your chances of Allah casting this light into your heart will increase if you remove the filth from your life inwardly and outwardly and prepare your heart to receive illumination by adorning it with good deeds and constant beseeching of Allah to give you the light of yaqin. When this light comes, you will be able to weather almost any storm.
AY: I relate to this sentiment plenty, and your advice should be taken to the letter — many of my right-wing friends understood my accelerated vehemence towards anti-Islamic agitation propaganda and Israel (that is to say, it is far more than what it casually was before when most people weren’t talking about Israel and Zionists all the time), but many in higher places, particularly those close to the technocrat circles who are openly a part of Trump’s coalition now, just couldn’t help themselves when expressing their overnight opposition to me and my brand when they were quite friendly and promoting it beforehand. I don’t think this is because they’re outright believers in the Zionist project, rather it’s for a much more pathetic reason — that the new, younger right-wing that proclaims itself to be the coalition of truth that won’t supposedly stand for subversion is so saturated with Zionists that they’re forced to pretend the Israel question doesn’t have obvious answers to protect their grifts. They were never really opposed to Advanced Gay Civilization, they were just an annoying, benign mass on it that eventually got reabsorbed by that vicious organism on October 7th, wrecking hell on anything and anyone God-fearing.
Elon Musk has aligned himself explicitly with Zionism, the new right, and its related personalities. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, is an inductee in the technocrat circle of the right — anyone associated with Peter Theil and his friends — with Trump and his coalition to get him back in American office not minding at all these associations being known. How do you interpret this shift to Republicans embracing full-on machine-god worship?
DM: If there was any genuine political sentiment in American politics that championed “small government”, it was snuffed out in the wake of 9/11. It’s all been lip service ever since. Now add in the growth of the internet, smartphones, enhanced communication technology, and COVID, everyone—whether consciously or unconsciously—is doing their part to midwife the birth of the machine-god.
This is an example of what I call the toothpaste effect. Just like you can’t unsqueeze toothpaste back into the tube once you’ve squeezed it, neither can we expect government powers or technology to be rolled back. All we can do is respond to the new realities in hopefully productive ways.
Unless there’s grand election theft, I fully expect Trump to return to office come November. It is said that Peter Thiel will have free rein to place appointees across the new Trump administration en masse. My guess is there will be a fair amount of ex-Palantir among them. There are similarly spooky figures on the Dem side as well, however.
So in my view, it doesn’t matter much whether the blue suit wins or the red suit wins. The toothpaste is being squeezed out en masse; I believe the elites in society love the idea of controlling addictive and pervasive technologies through which most of our sensory experiences will be mediated. The world they are creating is vile and disgusting—clear signs of the Devil’s intimate involvement.
AY: And what about the hopes of many (who I honestly find delusional) of a multipolar world or “Axis of Resistance” giving the Muslim world some reprieve? I find a range of opinions among the most popular proponents of this — those who believe that any hopes in Iran, Turkey, Russia, and China, are entirely pointless and idiotic, to those who think that they’ll be able to lessen American Empire power and influence at least such that Sunnis can build a bloc of their own, to retard heretical fans of morons like Imran Hosein who think Putin is some reincarnated Roman Emperor who will help save Islam. I expect a more level-headed take out there that many of those who discuss this topic in particular aren’t seeing. What do you think?
DM: This is a very contentious issue these days. Some are full-on murids of multipolarism, others find it passé and cringe and nothing worth getting excited over, the “nothing ever happens” guys.
My armchair psychoanalysis is that many in our circles can be described as having a kind of edgy philosopher temperament. They like the feeling of contrarianism, of not following the crowd, of critical inquiry—I know because I too am usually one of these kinds of people. But critical inquiry itself must also sometimes be subject to critical inquiry. What I mean to say is that sometimes you actually do have to take positions of things and, ideally, you should put some skin in the game.
Analysis on such topics from terminally online Muslims who rarely leave the comforts of the West isn’t worth much to me.
I have left the West, at least geographically. Also, I have in the time since visited Russia and observed its culture, touched its grass, etc.
Yes, globalist corporations, institutions, etc indeed play a defining role in almost every jurisdiction east and west. And that yes, it is also true that the Chinese and Russian models have their own problems which present challenges to the Muslim way of life.
But with all of the above caveats, I still believe that the kind of fashioning imposed upon the human subject is qualitatively different in many other societies outside of America and Western Europe, i.e. the geographic West The “rest” is often defined by several alternate spheres of influence, such as the Sinosophere, the Russo-sphere, the Islamosphere, etc. These are still very different civilizations from the West (by which I mean America and Western Europe), despite each one of them imbibing several elements of the West into itself. Said otherwise, the world is not the same everywhere, even after all these years of globalization. And what I genuinely believe now is that— warts and all—I find more humanity now outside of the West than I do within it.
This leads me to support the competition and tension that new emerging blocs like BRICS will inevitably bring to geopolitics. Does that mean I have Dugin as my lock screen wallpaper? No. I just think that there’s something positive about the development of such rival blocs without also assigning them some kind of God-like savior role for Muslim liberation and sovereignty.
Ultimately, only Allah will change our condition—we must look inwardly and find the strength to rectify our faults and be given the wisdom to deal with a rapidly changing world in each specific instance of that change. The best timeline is one in which the Muslim civilization is a strong lantern for humanity lost in darkness—not one where the West, China, Russia, or anyone else is running the show. But as we work towards the realization of that timeline, there will be realpolitik decisions to be made, oftentimes in the form of alliances of convenience.
In that sense, you could say I am an idealist in the long term, but a hard realist in the short-term. But definitely not a smug nothing-ever-happens guy.
AY: Some time ago, a good friend of ours, Ibn Maghreb, caught a lot of heat for his commentary on the recent burning of a man in Pakistan over alleged blasphemy charges that were yet to be trialed by the authorities — particularly for his usage of the word “biomass” as an abstract term to explain the fact that most Muslim-majority populations are civilizational losers whose most identifiable traits are economic despair, political chaos, and an obsession with applying Islamic law in a ham-handed, brutal way unbecoming of the tradition. This is a fact undeniable at this point (and I believe you had an X post implying this when describing your visit to Egypt) by anyone, yet whenever it’s brought up, by a Muslim or otherwise, it’s met with incredible amounts of hubris, nationalism, and denial. How do you balance bringing this topic up without coming off as a pure contrarian or eternal “blackpiller” who just demoralizes Muslims about our future prospects as a civilization?
DM: In my view, there needs to be self-awareness for those of us discoursing that a corner space has been created, a zawiya. Who is in this zawiya, and how do they identify? Some of us may have proper madrasa training, but a fair amount of us (I count myself in this camp) are not proper ‘ulama. We are better categorized as mufakkirin, thinkers, and intellectuals.
There is not much out there on the proper role of the mufakkir vis-a-vis the ulama and vis-a-vis the reader (or, as we might term it today, the content consumer). I have made mashawara with the ulama on this issue, and there are a few salient points I want to address before diving into your question.
First: a mufakkir’s role is to lend Muslim discourse a degree of dynamism and vibrancy to the discourse while not undercutting or undermining the ulama as the inheritors and custodians of nubuwwah and its proper fahm, its proper understanding. Regardless of your training and background, Muslims acting as Muslims must have a shared conception (mafhum) of how Islam properly functions and operates. This is unfortunately very much lacking at the moment, but it is not an insurmountable problem. Everyone in this space should have this wahdatul fahm, this unity in Islam’s fundamental conceptualizations— regardless of how they are trying to articulate and address any given problem.
I also believe that the Muslim mufakkirin should be different and better than other intellectual communities. Their discourse should feel and be different. When you look at the punditocracy or professional critics in other communities, one thing you’ll notice is how muckraky it is. And to a degree, that is fine and understandable. We need a space to levy fair critique, otherwise we’ll only create smug echo chambers.
At the same time, I have never seen the true people of Allah get so critical that they begin to black-pill those around them. On the contrary: the Prophet -s- was the greatest whitepiller in history, upon him be perfect blessing and peace. The Qur’an warns against ya’s, of despairing in the mercy of Allah.
Let us take the “biomass” episode you mentioned. Yes, it is true that much of the unwashed masses in the Muslim world lead lives which to us may seem trifling, almost useless. But it can also be simultaneously true that such people—who are almost always socioeconomically disadvantaged— possess deep faith and thus deep power, the kind of power which brings answered du’as. There are going be grandmas who are extremely pokey and unaware of how the world is changing. We may write them off as out-of-the-loop, but it is also quite likely that many of these same people have an intimate audience with Allah.
What the biomass feels like is a gateway to a larger discussion about how we—largely affluent thinkers and writers—conceive of the destitute, the underclass, and those “beneath.” It is a test of how populist or anti-populist we are. It is a topic that needs more writing. But it seems obvious to me that the Prophet loved and perhaps even largely preferred the company of the poor, and famously made du’a to be resurrected alongside the destitute, the masakin.
We need to better the condition of the masses in Muslim countries, most of whom in my opinion have been purposely held back by the ruling government from developing physically, mentally, and economically. Simpletons are easier to control, after all.
In my view, then, there is no way for a Muslim to defend the denigration of “simple” people, no matter how dopey and biomass-y. (This is why wahdat-ul fahm is so important).
The responsibility of the mufakkir in issues like this is to be honest about the problems in front of us, while also lovingly pursuing the betterment of the poor everywhere we go. We need to leave our readers with a strong whitepill. After all, what is a better white pill than knowing the Truth, having yaqin in Allah and His Messengers, and then spending your life growing in faith, calling to Islam, etc? We can be honest about the problems without despairing. I am done despairing.
AY: Your emphasis on a mutual understanding, though I agree with, might come off as cliche to readers in the religious sense — we hear so much about the need to “unite” as Muslims, whether on creed, legislative matters, sect, etc. — yet there’s various understandings that sometimes directly clash when it comes to this discussion that I have found myself waiving in favor of just doing my own work while not alienating anyone I perceive as a well-meaning and intelligent Sunni. I have friends who are outright Najdis as well as those who are borderline fanatical Sufis, and I’ve been mindful not to alienate either in my efforts to build up my projects aimed at keeping the Online Muslim Zawiya rolling. How far should our tolerance go when it comes to this?
DM: I understand what you’re getting at. Every healthy intelligentsia has factions and sub-factions. But the amazing thing about Ahl as-Sunnah w’al-Jama’ah (what I just call Islam) is that they historically figured out a way to differ in secondary and tertiary issues without splintering into different sects, as what happened with the Shi’a.
There were periods of harsh inter-madhab rivalry, even killing. But over time, they learned to manage that in just an incredible way, which I’ll briefly explain here (please remember a lot of nuance is being left out)
There is this idea of taswib ( ), which came to connote the idea that, on any given issue, be it fiqhi or kalami or whatever, we each adhere to a position that we deem to be correct with the possibility of being wrong, and that we consider others to be incorrect, with the possibility of being right. This might sound like hair-splitting, but it’s very crucial. It allowed the madhabs of fiqh, kalam, and,
I would argue, even the sufi turuq by and large, to have thick commitments to their specific positions, but in such a way that did not lead to massive schismatics, as is common in pretty much every group outside of ASWJ. (Don’t even get me started on schismatics in other faiths! There’s a new sect every day in Christianity). It’s why I, a Hanafi, can pray behind a Shafi’i without calling him a mubtadi’ after. Our differences are respected, and our pursuit of knowledge according to our differences usually is collegial and mutually edifying. Taswib kept the caravan of ASWJ together. Wahdatul Fahm is just another way of saying that. This is what the intellectuals of the past had, and it was a key driver of their success. They didn’t have to suffer fools the way we have to today. Again, this may seem overly pedantic a thing to get stuck on, but I believe it to be very important. Taswib helped us avoid schismatics and strengthen the idea of institutional knowledge communities, which is exactly what a madhab is: a multi-generational institution of knowledge across people and places.
I would go further and argue that this fundamentally different attitude to managing difference is critical to understanding why it is that Muslims as a civilization did not go down the Western route of liberal pluralism and secularism. Perhaps now it is that approach is in vogue with what the governments in the region are pushing—but it is a completely externally imposed development, nothing that developed indigenously among Muslim thinkers. Where it exists, it had to be forced on the population through the barrel of a gun, or worse.
It is this different mindset towards difference that created the millet system, the institution of jizya, and so much more. It is why these systems were targeted by rival powers. It is also precisely these systems that modernist thinkers, both Muslim and kafir, have been tirelessly working to delegitimize since 9/11. But now that we see the social fabric of Western-style pluralist/multicultural societies tearing apart across the map, it is high time to stick out our tongue and say: we told you so.
Ok, that was a huge digression. What does all that have to do with modern online Muslim discourse? For me, it means that I can’t interlocute seriously with someone who doesn’t understand or perhaps even rejects taswib in tafakkur, in intellectual commentary. Yes, some nice people may be Wahhabi or Sahwi or whatever. If they don’t beat me over the head with it and just keep it to themselves, that’s fine (and I have noticed that many if not most of them have mellowed out). But if they have indeed mellowed out, then at that point, I would argue that they’ve fundamentally become more like ASWJ than a genuine wobbler. Wobblers are known to reject taswib and advocate for tarjih al-madhahib, basically, the idea that everyone who doesn’t agree with them is engaged in bid’a. (Liberal progressives do the same thing by the way, and they often team up with Western states to pressure or even bomb Muslim countries into forcing their views on others—think Afghan expats who cheered on the old decrepit regime).
I think now that there’s more literacy around topics like these that people are moving away from such a destructive mindset which has prevented a genuine Muslim intellectual class from emerging. We can’t unlearn the clear collusion between the geopolitics of oil and Wahhabi da’wa, between liberal reformists and the Western order. Think, too, about how no one can feign ignorance at just how much of a monster Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab was. It’s just out in the open now in the way it just wasn’t before.
So, in sum, what I was getting at with this idea of wahdatul-fahm was not to just replicate tired online debates. The plea for wahdatul-fahm is really a plea for us to just make Sunnism great again. Real, true, grounded, institutional Sunnism which is not confused about fundamentals. If I have to always argue about things that were known to the vast majority of ulama throughout history, it retards our ability to take our thought forward as a self-aware group. I’m just not interested in that at all. I would much rather spend my time building with those who get it.
AY: This is a problem with Sunnis today that instead of yielding genuine critical thought has for the most part brought insane hubris and defensiveness without valor. What you describe is very much what I believe the Ottomans discovered very early in their history upon the formation of their empire — one which was, despite the criticisms levied against it, built with a foundation of Sunni Islam — and what led to their great height that spanned longer than when the Arabs and following chaotic emirates were in charge, which brings me to an esoteric matter I must ask you about as well, and we’ll conclude with this. I posted about this earlier on X, and in this issue lies an essay I included on this of a hypothesis I’ve reached (which I’ve been told is actually a deep rabbit hole by those Tullab who more read on it than I am) on the true spiritual nature of “caliphate” that doesn’t just include the meaning of the official office as it exists due to flawed human attempts at compromise with the masses.
In summary, it goes like this: the caliph, in truth, is two personas in one. He is the manager of the secular affairs of the Muslims that entail military orders, taxes, laws, and so forth; but he’s also the spiritual guide who revives and keeps up the religious vigor of the portion of the Ummah he’s shepherd of. This point alone isn’t much disputed — however, I also believe that this spiritual pole of the caliph always passes on, always exists in at least one man as time moves ever since the death of The Chosen One (SAW) regardless of whether a physical office exists with a pledged-to imperial caliph or not. If we’re to accept the hadith that the Caliph is the Shadow of Allah on Earth, then by necessity that shadow is always there as long as Muslims exist. I believe the implications of this span far deeper than just an alternate view of the history of the Islamic caliphate and alter how a typically demotivated Muslim populace views their destiny and role in the fate of mankind. You’re far more studied than I am on this subject — what say you regarding this question?
DM: When Imam Hasan, may Allah be pleased with him, passed; the caliphate essentially split into two. Some call the pair the khilafa dhahira and khilafa batina, another term for the khilafa batina is the khilafa nuraniya. Many ulama’ spoke of this truth — Shah Wali-ullah al-Dehlawi talks about it, contemporaries also like Habib Umar ibn Hafidh and others — there’s a great book on this issue by Waleed Ziad called Hidden Caliphate. The gist of it, in political science language: the external functions of ruling (hudood, policing, taxes, etc.) that we associate in the modern period with governance are all responsibilities of the Sultan in a khilafa dhahira, and the Sultan for most of history fulfilled this role alongside the Qadis and Fuqaha’ and the Ghuzat and those around him using the external sciences. That’s how you understand just the government of the community.
Then you have the khilafa batina which is taken care of by the murabeen (moral rectifiers) of the community, the Sufi mystics, your usual aunties, and uncles who make dua’ for the Muslims in the middle of the night. These people are what Nizam al-Mulk refers to as the Army of the Night which works in tandem with the apparent, physical Army of the Day. Essentially, just as the Islamic community is governed from above by these dhahiri forces, it’s this Army of the Night made up of those seemingly unknown Muslims of incredible faith who govern the Ummah from below and from within, from the batin. That’s what we mean when we say the caliphate is a dual reality, made up of external and internal dimensions.
Caliphate is better understood as stewardship of a concept of world order. Just as we consider the United States as the steward of the post-WW2 liberal order, the Islamic caliphate (when functioning properly with dhahiri and batini elements) is the steward of the Muslim civilizational order. The caliphate isn’t some cartoony HT chicken shop bullshit. It’s really about the caliphate as true stewardship of a civilizational order for both Muslims and non-Muslims. We often forget that for much of history large segments of non-Muslims lived under the caliphate system, and as a result, it developed a very distinct culture that shaped the lives of its non-Muslim population as much as it did its primary Muslim one. There’s what we might call “cultures of the sharia”, and “cultures of tasawwuf”, that permeated those peoples even though they never accepted Islam, just by having the privilege to live under a caliphate. The last implication of what I’m saying is that the caliphate never really ended under this dual conception.
We have plenty of people who say things like “The caliphate ended in 1924” or earlier even if you’re more cynical. That’s all well and good, but I prefer to think the caliphate continues in every one of us. Whenever any one of you supplicates to Allah in the middle of the night, that makes you a part of that Army of the Night that is maintaining a sense of civilizational order. Every one of us plays a role in the caliphate when you see it as the Muslim civilizational order, in its own socio-political category. It of course has its shari’ commandment. It’s an obligation to establish, but we are not cosplayers. We are not aiming to revive some kind of robo-Abbasid aesthetic. That is just a surah, an image of the caliphate, it’s just theatrics. We pray for the return of the reality of Muslim civilizational global stewardship. That is the haqiqa of the Khilafah. Until that time, vestiges of the batini caliphate continued all around us. When the dhahir and the batin are united, we will, by Allah’s grace and tawfiq, be able to bring more of humanity out of the darkness and into the light. To me, this is how the caliphate should be understood, and it is how plenty of ulama’ and men of tasawwuf saw it this way as well.
AY: That just about sums it up for me then. Thank you so much brother, may Allah bless you, and I look forward to seeing you being more active in the space again. Assalamu Alaykum.
DM: Walaykum al-Salam.
Dragoman is an independent consultant and writer. He writes on Substack @themuslim.review and on X @the_dragoman
The Army of the Night
“The vizier Nizam al-Mulk— also commonly known as Khwaja Buzurg (the Persian equivalent of éminence grise)—may Allah Almighty have mercy on him, served as an advisor to Abu al-Fath Malik Shah I, the King of the Seljuk Turks. Nizam had ministered to his father Alp Arslan before him. and established the state in the best of ways. He strengthened its foundations, won over enemies, supported provincial governors, and made use of the competent and highly-skilled. His benevolence extended to friend and foe, hateful and the beloved, far and near, until the people were humbled before his power.
And that which prepared the way for such grand accomplishments—with Allah Almighty’s permission and enabling grace—was that he turned with his attention and focus to caring for the needs of those carriers of the Din (literally meaning, “the religion”, meaning Islam). He built houses of knowledge for the jurists and opened madrasas for scholars and scholarship. Additionally, he established watchtowers on border regions to scan for enemy advances, placing therein those constantly engaged in worship, asceticism, self-rectification, as well as those who are outwardly impoverished, but spiritually rich. He would disburse to them salaries and clothing. Moreover, he would top off the stipends which students walking the path of knowledge would live off of.
Word of Nizam al-Mulk’s generosity spread throughout the land. From Lower Sham (namely, the Holy Sanctum of Jerusalem), to all of Upper Sham, to Diyarbakir, to Iraq, to Khorasan and all of its attendant regions, to Samarqand beyond the River Oxus (a journey of 100 days)—there was no carrier or student of knowledge, no austere worshipper, and no ascetic sitting in his lodge except that he was a beneficiary of the Nizam’s largess, awash in his generosity. It was for such purposes that the Nizam took from the state treasuries an annual budget of 600,000 gold dinars (the equivalent of $165+ million USD today).
Then, disgraceful courtiers whispered lies into Malik Shah’s ears in an attempt to turn his heart against the Nizam, saying: though he claims to be engaged in charitable works here, these funds are actually being taken from the state in order to raise an army for the purpose of attacking Constantinople and splintering off from your kingdom.
This clouded the heart of Malik Shah towards the Nizam. When the Nizam next entered his presence, he inquired of him: “O father of mine!” addressing him in a loving way, as the Nizam had dutifully served his father, Alp Arslan. “It has reached me that you take 600,000 dinars annually from the state treasury and giving to those who neither benefit from it, nor have any need for it.”
Tears began to well in the Nizam’s eyes. He then responded to this inquiry.
“O my son, I am but an elderly foreigner; if I were to be called to spend in charity on a petitioner, I would spend whatever I had, hardly keeping five dinars for myself. You on the other hand, are a young and gallant Turk. Were you to be called to spend on a petitioner, you’d probably withold upwards of 30 dinars for yourself, for you are busied by the seeking of pleasure, engulfed in your desires, and most of that which rises to Allah above from your deeds consists of sin rather than obedience.
And your armies—which you prepare for calamities by day—they gather and fight on your behalf with long swords two cubits in length and an endless shower of arrows with a range of 300 cubits. And yet despite all this power, they are drowning in sin and drunkenness, wasting their time with distractions such as flutes and tambourines.
I have thus raised for you another army, the Army of the Night. Whilst your army sleeps, this army lies awake, standing in ranks before their Lord in prayer. They send forth their tears, engaging their tongues in fervent supplication, extending their palms out to Allah Almighty to grant you and your army victory. By their piety, your army persists. By their supplication, your army sleeps peacefully. By their blessedness are you given rain and provision. Their imploring and entreating of Allah are arrows piercing upwards to the seventh heaven.”
Upon hearing this, Malik Shah began to sob, saying: “Shabash, my father, shabash! On my behalf, increase the strength of this army of yours.”
Translation by @the_dragoman