In a time where the coaching space has become a theater of cringe—dominated by grifters, yapping podcasters, and weirdos—Fahim Faruk stands out as the real deal. I’ve known Fahim for a while now, and his work is what I hoped the “Muslim red pill” space would become: grounded, and spiritually anchored. This conversation dives deep into the mindset behind the Green Pill movement, the trials of modern manhood, and how Muslim men can move from dysfunction to leadership—not just in their homes, but in the Ummah at large:
Abdullah Yousef
It’s always a pleasure to interview a good friend. I’m a big fan of what you do, to me your work is what I wished the “Muslim red pill” would end up as when I foresaw what was coming as more and more young Muslim men found out there were alternate sources for rebuilding themselves unmonitored by homosexuals and middle-aged women in academia. Instead, it became a cesspool of grifters, streamers, and Dawah Inc. parodies who do nothing but embarrass us whenever they get the spotlight for fifteen minutes. Unlike many of these guys, you have a system that works and interlinks a genuine community together, so my first question is related to this exact clientele you work with up close: what brings these men to you? What is the overarching theme of young Muslim guys seeking the Green Pill?
Fahim Faruk
Allahumma salli wa sallim ‘ala Sayyidina Muhammad.
Allahumma salli wa sallim ‘ala Sayyidina Muhammad.
Allahumma salli wa sallim ‘ala Sayyidina Muhammad.
Jazak Allahu khayran for the opportunity to share my mission with you and your audience. Alhamdulilah, I’ve been a fan of your platform too, and I’m happy we’ve connected as bros with so many shared values.
I began my journey in what’s often referred to as ‘men’s work’ in the manosphere around 2012, during my first year at Wilfrid Laurier University, known for its liberal environment and the contentious Lindsey Shepherd case. At that time, I witnessed the culture wars unfold, especially within the Muslim Students Association, which had shifted from its Hizbul Tahrir roots to a more progressive stance.
I was grappling with my identity as a Muslim man in this gynocentric atmosphere. Many of my peers felt silenced and hesitant to express their true selves due to fear of rejection. As I found clarity in my own beliefs, I started sharing insights and challenging the prevailing narratives, which initially intimidated some brothers who worried about backlash from sisters.
A few opened up about their struggles, leading me to form a small coaching group, which I aimed to develop into a full practice after completing my education in clinical counseling. My experience as a youth mentor in the Bengali community laid the groundwork for this.
As my work grew, even those who had previously sided with feminist views began to reach out, sharing their pain from crippling marriages that left them sexless, and feeling disrespected and powerless. Others found me through my podcast interviews, discussing issues like addiction, confusion over gender roles in Islam, social anxiety and depression, men’s fitness, and the trauma of betrayal in divorce proceedings and custody battles.
These men recognized that Islam wasn’t being pre-sented honestly in their communities and struggled with the effects of gynocentric da’wah in their lives. Many felt lost, lacking assertiveness and boundaries, often embodying the ‘nice guy’ archetype—kind-hearted but without authority.
They wanted a robust and clear understanding of masculinity in Islam, along with the training necessary to shed their past programming and develop into more functional men capable of leading.
Abdullah Yousef
Very good — I’m sure you’re aware of how much of a meme “alpha male coaching” groups are. These guys are waterboarding each other and screaming about their childhoods, it’s ridiculous. How do you avoid the cringe to make your group stand out?
Fahim Faruk
Alhamdulilah bro, I’ve been blessed with enough self-awareness and excellent teachers and mentors, to have realized years ago not to air out my dysfunctions as a “nafsy” marketing tactic…I came face to face with my own fallibility and slavehood through some painful personal losses and many trials and tribulations. But, I also witnessed tremendous beauty in various relationships, and places I was exposed to growing up.
These fueled my focus on actually trying to work on my own imbalances, before even assuming leadership or public roles. I’m light years away from perfection, and my mentor Shaykh Mostafa Azzam advised me early on to never lean on my own virtues even if people think I’m great since the bar is so low out there. Instead, he said I shouldn’t believe any hype about myself, and lean on the greatness of Rasul Allāh ﷺ.
I’ll never forget one of his epistles that my star student has now ingrained into his own psyche; he embodies it better than anyone else I know: our gifts are received, not achieved. This grounded me in the correct frame of reference for my own development as a man and as a coach: my relationship with Allāh and His Messenger ﷺ. It also allowed me to understand what humility and confidence means in a balanced and congruent way.
That helped me avoid falling prey to the ego games of many other wannabe “alpha male” coaches.
Abdullah Yousef
When we originally wanted to get this going, we started talking about why you started the Green Pill — why you got into the intimidating project of trying to help improve other Muslim men’s lives. You’re coming into something that’s already kind of been inflated — not a genuine market inflation where the need is already being fulfilled, but a sort of fake one where the market’s been inflated by a bunch of fakes, lunatics, grifters, and perverts. As a result, it makes it much harder for genuine guys like you to show up and prove that you’re not like them and here to make a real impact. I think it’s obvious from your stuff at first glance that its nothing similar.
You and I are both married, and sure, we have plenty to say in general about the failures of most in this area (since it’s beyond the point of just being anecdotal at this point,) but we have plenty now who are the polar opposite to the concern trolls, where they try to pretend that everything is fine, “you’re just being an incel online lunatic,” if you try and pretend that it’s not, but clearly something is in fact very wrong with the current status quo of traditional marriages. The most concerning question to me when this comes up is, really, how do you reach a higher level of production as a man in this role? In my case for example, I have Qawwam, I have my novels, I do all this stuff that’s exclusively my own separate from my family matters — and when I look at anything else in my life, like my marriage, my family, how I balance it with my day job — I see that this always involves the input and cooperation of others. It’s a two-way street, I can put in as much effort as I want, but if there’s no cooperation, then it’s pointless. But with my personal projects like these, it’s almost entirely based off my own efforts. I know Qawwam isn’t really a one-man team, I do rely on the collaboration and submissions from lots of brothers, but, as you know, whenever you try and organize anything, whether it’s a podcast or collaboration of any sort, there needs to be some pushing on your side.
That always feels to me to be completely different than just the mundane family stuff, specifically, because I want to leave something behind after I’m gone from this world that at least puts a dent, however small, into the global situation that all of us are in. I think if you’re a believing Muslim man and you don’t feel this impending sense of crisis, thinking “what dent are you going to put into our degenerate status quo,” So you can die knowing that at least you contributed to the breaking of the stagnation that the Ummah is in right now. If you don’t feel that then there’s something missing inside you, I think, even if you do have a happy marriage and family or make a lot of money. Even if you have all, I genuinely believe if, you know, I’m not just, I’m pretty sure I’m not just speaking for myself here.
So how do you balance that desire with managing the basics of life like family and making a proper living?
Fahim Faruk
SubhanAllah. That’s a very multilayered question. I think the key is to bring it back to the foundations of being a Muslim man, a comprehension of tawhid, surrendering before Allah into a state of utter slavehood and clinging to Him and His Messenger ﷺ as your qibla. If that is your foundation as a Muslim man, then you’re going to do your utmost to meld your nafs into your higher objective, which is to serve Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, seek their pleasure, and have the rest of your life shaped by that. It comes back to your Fard Ayn, your individually obligatory matters as a Muslim man. There’s going to be a general area that’s standardized for all Muslim men, and then there are areas that will be customized to each Muslim man based on their situation. So, for example, as a men’s coach, there are certain things that are incumbent upon me to know regarding the Shariah and the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, unique to me, because of the work I do with men. I need to know certain things about fiqh most aren’t aware of. I need to know certain things about aqeedah most don’t bother with. The fiqh of marriage and modern marriage problems, and how they are supposed to be addressed correctly by the Shariah and the Sunnah as applied today. So given all this, if a Muslim man has this qibla intact in his own heart, he’s going to strive to likewise be the qibla in his family dynamics.
A lot of guys today get married and fall completely into the frame of their wife. Meaning, she becomes the magnetic pull, the one calling the shots, “wearing the pants,” if you will, even though we know the fitra of women –– they don’t actually want that. So, he doesn’t know how to organize his other ambitions around his family life, because he’s orbiting around his wife, he’s orbiting around his kids, he’s orbiting around other family members. And his ambitions are weak. The fact that he’s allowed himself to orbit like that means he’s going to have weaker ambitions instead of those that pull him to have the correct arrangement and life desires. So if a Muslim man focuses on getting his foundation correct, having his own qibla correct, he can be the qibla of his family and he’ll know how to manage his life and relationships so that he’s able to fulfill the rights of the people in his life, his wife, his children, his parents, but he’ll also know that there are other higher obligations calling him.
If you become too occupied with the wrong frame of reference for how you make decisions, for example you think “I just care about making money and pleasing my family,” that type of guy is not going to care about what you described, making a dent in the world order for the sake of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, because he’s not going to see any worldly value in that if it doesn’t come with a lot of money; it might not please his family, he’s not getting the approval or media gratification that the shallow dunya-focused materialistic type of guy wants. Instead you have to be a Muslim man who understands his priorities, holistically, and steps into them through an organized approach. That’s not easy, because we’re in a time where distractions are rampant. But he must at least have that mental framework in place, so that he even has the chance at trying to move in this direction.
Abdullah Yousef
Do you think then that a lot of the anxiety that young single guys have about getting married stems from that? That they’re very worried about wanting to accomplish higher ambitions and feel like getting married and starting a family would interfere with that.
Fahim Faruk
I can see why they’re afraid of it, especially given the fact that they’re in a time where many people, men and women alike, don’t even know their proper role in marriage. And so these young guys are worried they’re going to find wives who don’t know their proper place in marriage and far from being their helpmates and support, are going to become a fitna in terms of taking away their time, not understanding what is their right versus what’s an unrealistic demand for excessive attention, excessive wealth being thrown at them, wanting all this vacation time, etc. So, they’re anxious that that’s going to happen.
But the reality is, if you choose a righteous wife, and you yourself are a man who knows how to exercise your authority in a healthy way, you’re going to have a more efficient life, you’re going to have the right pressures to perform well to actually manage your time properly, because the force of necessity is in your life. You got to take care of a family, right? You have these indicators of time passing, you’re getting older, you’re seeing your wife getting older, if you have children they’re getting older. You have more immediate pressure to take your limited time seriously.
And on top of that, if you have a good wife who you’re taking care of, she’s going to take care of you. And if you know how to coach her to appreciate how your life works, she can become a very good support for you that frees you of a lot of obligations that you’d otherwise have in terms of maintaining your home, having your meals prepped, even little things like cleaning up your bedroom — it really saves time, man. You get the peace of a clean home that allows you to be more productive, versus a chaotic environment.
Imam al-Ghazali (RA) once cited a story of a sheikh who was asked by other ascetics who were celibate why he got married. Isn’t it a waste of time when he could be studying, they asked? He tells them, don’t you feel your natural urges, and when you feel them, doesn’t that distract you from your studies? Well, when I feel it, I spend time with my wife, take care of that urge, then I can come back to studying without feeling distracted. So it’s a net positive. The time that you’re spending with your wife within companionship through intimacy, through relaxation, will help you recharge so that you come back stronger when it’s time to work and hustle. If you do marriage right it will boost your productivity, because it gives you the right incentives. I think the data is clear that married men tend to earn more than unmarried men, at least in North America.
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, that’s true. That’s another myth that young Muslims looking to get married are told, especially if they’re in college. Putting aside the financial restrictions, a lot of the objections towards young people getting married is, “It’s going to distract you,” but meanwhile look at the Muslims studying medicine –– they’ll tell them you have to get through school first at least, but also look at the statistics, I forgot where I saw this, but the rates of infidelity with nurses and doctors, especially in hospitals, is absurdly high. Why would you want a Muslim man or woman who’s getting into that field not to get their base urges taken care of early? It’s completely absurd.
Fahim Faruk
Yeah, and I think these people forget the metaphysical aspect of Baraka that if you marry with the right intentions, then your marriage will bring you more blessings in your everyday life. There will be more rizq, you’ll be increased in your provisions. That’s exactly what I felt [when I got married].
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, same here. Even more than that though, I felt so much in my life that was now more organized in a natural way, such that I could focus much more at the things I love doing (my work included) and understanding the work that I was doing at a much deeper level.
A lot of people only refer to this in the context of sexual lust. It’s not just the sexual aspect that you’re relieved from, it’s the anxiety about the future. It’s the worry that lots of men have but will never admit thinking that they’ll never end up with a companion before they get too old to enjoy the fruits of marriage young. To be honest with you, I think those prolonged negative emotions are much more destructive to a young man than just sexual lust.
I do want to get to another part of this, which I think is related, which is the failures of Muslim communities in Western nations. They’re all centered around one or two masajid in their area, and it’s always the same kind of system that develops around itself. Somebody could write like a PhD thesis on this, on how they end up this particular way (the cretinous manner in which they become self-sustaining donation centers as their children slip away from the community) and why and the effect it has on second and third generation Muslims. A lot of the guys who started these communities in the first place –– they’re getting very old. My father is one of these guys who was very involved in growing a big masjid community in the area that he immigrated to, but he eventually realized it just wasn’t in his interest anymore to keep up the masjid uncle bit and checked out.
Meanwhile, it’s the main interest of a lot of other guys, many who are his age even, and they have longer tenures running these masajid than the boomers in congress. Once those guys are gone, what do you see to be the future of these places, of the way these communities are organized? Do you think the younger generations [Gen X, Millennial] will actually take the mantle and run things?
Fahim Faruk
This is where as much as I believe in optimism, there’s a lot of doomer in me brother. You know, just by seeing how things have unfolded in my community recently, and I know you know some of the details, but just seeing how atrociously low the bar has fallen in terms of normal Muslims who constitute a very large percentage of the people around us, it’s dawned on me that the vast majority of Muslims in the diaspora don’t really know their Fard Ayn well at all. Maybe a fifth of it at most. They know things on a very superficial level, but they wouldn’t be able to explain many aspects of foundational, very basic aqeedah correctly.
Loads of people have adopted a modernist, so called pragmatic lens mixed with a bunch of liberal culturing and secularization. And that’s convoluted further even by their ethnic culture. It’s a hodgepodge of contradictory influences that take them away from a proper understanding and practice of Sunni Islam. And I see this just getting worse and worse, through each generation, with a few exceptions. There are pockets of younger people who are waking up, like, for example, you and I were. I’m one of those last millennials, and you’re Gen Z, right?
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, I’m a Zoomer.
Fahim Faruk
Yet we came to these conclusions that even a lot of these white collar boomers, secularized with bits of Islam here and there, didn’t come to.
Abdullah Yousef
Many people think they’re “based,” but they’re some of the most blue-pilled, blind people you’ll ever meet in your life.
Fahim Faruk
Yeah, some of them in my community, (we’re talking Bengali uncles with PhDs) go on about education saving the home, yet some of their daughters are marrying Kuffar. They’re cool with that and willfully ignore why that’s a big deal. Deep down I can say they do know at some level there’s there’s issues with that, there is guilt there, but they’re trying to make a show of it as being “fine.” So looking at that I’m at least encouraged by the pockets of young people who have woken up. They’ve made a return to Islam holistically and upgraded their understanding and practice. They are more well positioned to navigate modernity than their fathers and mothers ever were.
We found each other online and we formed these communities by virtue of the internet, but if you look at your immediate neighborhoods or cities you will probably struggle to find people who understand these issues the ways we do, so based on that I’m not very optimistic about the direction of most of these institutions, but think that if enough people who are properly “pilled” and hold certain positions they might be able to make a dent, or better yet they may be able to establish their own and be lighthouses in the middle of this chaotic ocean in a storm that is the diaspora. We can pull them ashore and get them prepared for what lies ahead. The ultimate goal, though, is to build our ark and get the heck out of here. That’s how I see it. It’s a project of preserving and transmitting Islam to those who are receptive amongst the youth, creating proper spaces for that inculcation — we still give dawah to non-Muslims obviously, but we prioritize our people who are most receptive to rebuilding the foundation, and with the question in mind of where can we go for Hijra? In the long run It doesn’t necessarily have to even be a Hijra to a whole different country, it might even be to a different community that has more like-minded people.
Abdullah Yousef
Like EPIC city? [laughing].
Fahim Faruk
Bro, we got to create Qawwam City.
Abdullah Yousef
I think a Qawwam city would be a Spartan-like nightmare — especially for any women looking from the outside in, but let’s not get into that. See, I love your answer, but I have to say that a common counter to what you said about lots of the diaspora having subpar knowledge when it comes to the basics of Islam would be “well for most of history, much of the awwam have been ignorant to a certain degree, so it doesn’t matter. You know, you go to the hinterlands, not necessarily the cities because the norm for Islamic civilization pre-modernity was that the strong orthodox Islam was always in the cities, but when you go out into the hinterlands and the desert you find nightmares beyond your imagination.
What would you say to somebody that brings that objection of “You should be able to solve these problems without necessarily educating them at this deeper level.” I personally know some people in my community who are like this, they’re very involved in political activism, and they think that you can magically improve the situation or improve the way things are done without reaching the foundations in this way.
Fahim Faruk
This is a very common objection. I’ve seen it in many places, both offline and online. Interestingly, I often hear this from people who themselves are more confident than they should be in their knowledge of Fard Ayn. Regarding what you said, today it seems to be the opposite where the strongholds of Sunni orthodoxy seem to now be in the more rural areas of many Muslim lands as opposed to the metropolitan areas, whereas before it was the other way around. I’ve noticed this from my own my own travels to places like Morocco, Turkey, Malaysia, even in Medina.
While it’s true, even to this day, that there may be people who lack formal knowledge in Muslim lands, especially in areas where you have less of an impact of modernity or globalization –– and the people there may not be able to cite technical details of every text in a formal syllabus, they have a culture that inculcates an Islamic character and fundamentals that are light years beyond what people in the diaspora are getting, just by virtue of the environment difference.
For example, if I go to a rickshaw puller in the streets of Dhaka, a complete miskeen, uneducated dude from the village hustling all day, and I say to him, can a Muslim girl marry a Christian guy? He’ll just look at me like, what the hell? In contrast, uncles who are STEM educated here living middle class in Canada; their daughters are doing exactly that. The environment alone plays such a huge role in shaping people. We know this from everything Islam teaches us, that even though you don’t necessarily need the deepest formal knowledge, you do need a certain type of conditioning. And even in terms of knowledge, there’s a wisdom, or rather a loyalty to Islam that I noticed in people like my grandmother, in certain cities in Bangladesh, where things are at least somewhat more semi-traditional. She may not know the details of Kalam, but the idea of rizq, she could appreciate that in an embodied way, she feels calm and trust every day that Allah is going to provide for her.
There’s also a big difference between being able to shape people when you have control over their land with real hegemony, versus when you are in the belly of the beast as a minority with no institutional power. That’s our situation. You can’t really shape anyone without starting from a grassroots level and trying to build them from the bottom up. If we have power as sultans, with technological prowess and powerful militaries at our disposal, maybe we could get by without deepening the knowledge of everyone around us that much. We just focus on a few people, the people who are the shapers and movers, and that would be enough. But we don’t have that. So, we must work with what we can access, which is the people around us, that’s the only actual capital we have, social capital, trying to shape the people around us to hit a critical mass, and then push for deeper changes.
Abdullah Yousef
One of the most common discussions online now downstream from the relationships and marriage stuff is the fertility crisis worldwide. There’s a lot of Muslims that love to meme online and say that Muslims are going to take over because we have more children per capita or whatever, but when you look at the data broadly, it’s clear that even the Islamic world is starting to suffer from this, starting to having less than two kids per woman and such. Do you think this is something that a Muslim needs to consider and price in to their thinking and their view of what the future might be like? If it is, then why do you think it’s happening even to Muslims when it used to be the stereotype that we didn’t have this issue before?
Fahim Faruk
I definitely need to research this more in depth, but Muslim men should keep in mind that these trends are happening because they signal very serious social transformations that affect us all. They affect the very heart of society, the nature of the family in the Muslim world. Is that family even existing? And if so, how is it changing, and what is it producing? Are we having a lot of children and a lineage that’s preserving and transmitting Islam or are we having fewer children and or divorcing and fragmenting. Something’s clearly wrong here. Muslim men should know this for their own sake so that they can make the right moves for their own descendants. And, from a more visionary point of view, so that they can try to contribute to solutions for the Ummah. I think that some of these problems are clearly related to post-industrial and post-technological economic shifts where more and more women in the Muslim world are getting into post-industrial jobs, including the stereotype of HR office jobs. And we saw certain trends in, I can’t remember which country, but there was an increase in the number of women demanding divorce as more of them went into employment, which is interesting. We see this trend cross-culturally.
Abdullah Yousef
This happens with lottery winners too. I don’t know if you saw this, when men win the lottery, they tend to spend a lot on their families, and if they’re single, they tend to get married and start a family. When women win the lottery however, they divorce more.
Fahim Faruk
And that can be interpreted in different ways, but one is clearly that this so-called financial freedom –– which is not truly freedom, it’s tied to a whole new form of slavery –– doesn’t help them preserve relationships or marriages but rather leads to them breaking. Some people might argue that just means the men they were with suck, and it was a ticket for them to finally leave. But what does it mean to suck? And how sure are the people who say that they sucked? It could be that the women are hardwired to simply want more if they perceive themselves as being above the men, even if its artificial. We call this financial hypergamy.
Abdullah Yousef
A lot of people might flatly interpret that as meaning “I guess we just have to have less women in education and higher-level jobs.” I just think though that culturally we need to stop prioritizing it so much as if it’s the end all be all for a young woman. My wife likes to tell me about the trash she sees on Facebook and Instagram from Arab women across the cultural and age spectrum, a lot of stories about these women who will publicly contemplate a question such as “I have an opportunity to marry this great guy, but I’m in the middle of school, what do I do?” and the comments are filled with women old enough to be that girl’s mother telling her “No! It’s not worth it for you to forsake your future, GIRL!”
Fahim Faruk
Setting her up for misery. There are some rare exceptions [where financial hypergamy doesn’t matter], including men who are actually out earned by their wife, but who still feel confident and connect with their wife in other ways. That’s very exceptional and rare, there are studies that show that men whose wives earn more than them suffer from dips in testosterone or erectile dysfunction.
Abdullah Yousef
A lot of it too is health. One of the biggest markets now is feeding on male physical insecurity, the two most common being for sexual performance and hair loss. When it comes to the erectile dysfunction stuff, I’m seeing like these companies marketing to guys in their twenties and thirties, which is nuts. You shouldn’t even know what these problems are when you’re at that age range. And they’re not just suffering from these issues in terms of performance, but fertility wise. It’s ridiculous. So much of it is obesity and smoking though. Maybe a guy fifty or a hundred years ago could live the way these guys lived with the eating terribly and the smoking and still have five kids, but he didn’t live in a time with the mass levels of ecological poisoning we have now in the environment and in foods. So, by necessity, if you want to get to the normal baseline, you must take care of yourself even more than your grandparents did.
Fahim Faruk
And the lifestyles are different. Those old guys were getting exercise by virtue of their normal activities, walking to the masjid –– walking all the time really depending on the kind of country. Hiking too.
Your question about the fertility crisis reminded me of something else, the hadith about the end of times that the Prophet ﷺ foretold of a time where for every 50 women there will be only one man, and I was learning the commentary of this with a teacher, and he said this doesn’t mean just one biological male for every fifty biological women, but it means one functional man who can steward those women. So there will be other biological males, but they won’t be considered socialized into manhood in such a way that they can effectively steward that number of women. There are clearly population shifts that are prophesized, demographic shifts, fertility shifts, and this is one of them, a social shift.
Abdullah Yousef
I think there’s a biological aspect to that as well. I know a lot of mainstream science gets into this, but in the reproduction process with the determination of gender, having boys is physiologically harder than having girls. It’s a little harder for boys to survive in the womb as opposed to girls, miscarriage rates are higher across the board. There’s many factors, different environmental stresses, the different changes to our bodies over the centuries lowering testosterone in men, and that’s leading to less and less boys.
Fahim Faruk
It’s interesting because we’re seeing the complete inversion of that being pushed in Hollywood propaganda, trying to convince us instead that there’s a lack of femininity somehow, with so much occult backing; a lot of feminism has occult origins and conceptions of Iblis that is neither fully male nor fully female, but mixed. In the Star Wars sequels, the savior is always the female.
Abdullah Yousef
Lots of pagan rituals also involve some way or another this kind of vying for the hermaphrodite, the alchemical Rebis…there’s this horrible horror movie that came out a few years ago, I forgot the name of it, but it showed this explicitly.
When you look at how things are going on a macro level for us Muslims our situation sucks. You can point to all the secular factors, but even on a cultural and social level, if Muslims feel that we don’t even have control over our own cultures and traditions, always subject to being infiltrated and invaded in some way by some monocultural poison. How does a Muslim guy hold steadfast in that position? In Zoomer terms, how do you stay in the mindset of “We’re so back” when it feels like “It’s so over?”
Fahim Faruk
SubhanAllah, you know this is a great question because I was feeling this dread when I was inside of Masjid-Nabawi, so close to the Prophet ﷺ, and I was thinking about the contrast I felt being in that safety versus going back to Canada. It gave me shivers, and I was like, if I could just hold on to one of these minarets and die here, Alhamdulillah. That that would be bliss. It dawned on me; why do I feel safe there? Because I’m with the Prophet ﷺ in the Masjid that not even the Dajjal will be able to come close to.
So, if that presence is what made me feel safe and that we are taught to seek that safety, then you can find relief knowing you can receive that presence no matter where you are. The key is to be with the Prophet ﷺ even if not physically close to him.
You can do that, albeit with more challenges when you’re in the lands of Kufr, even though there are people who have that physical proximity, yet they have dark hearts, like some of the guards at Masjid al-Nabawi. You could just see they were full of rancor; they were mocking the pilgrims and visitors. One of them was shoving old men beside me with a twisted sinister smile pointing towards where the golden gates are and he’s like “Go, salaam, salaam” as if it’s a joke that we’re here. You get the honor of being here every day yet you’re full of darkness. Whereas these people come from villages far away, some of them from war-torn countries, but they have love and reverence for the Prophet ﷺ and his people.
Abdullah Yousef
Those guys [bitter masjid guards] are golems.
Fahim Faruk
Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. If we inculcate that love and reverence for Rasulullah ﷺ and hold fast to the Salawat upon him, that will be a great foundation. I remember this shaykh was asked by someone –– do you know what kind of awrad you can do especially if you are short on time? And he said towards the end of times that will be a problem for us –– people are going to be spiritually and materially impoverished, constrained by different fitan, but the one thing that they can hold onto that will carry them is Salawat. Shaykh Muhammad ibn Alawi al-Maliki (RA), the great sage that passed away within our lifetime, said that the Salawat on the Prophet ﷺ is the one prescription you don’t need any ijaza for. You don’t need to be in a tariqah, you don’t need a shaykh to tell you to do it, you’ve been authorized to do it by Allah and his Messenger ﷺ, in the Quran itself. All of your anxieties will be taken care of, your sins will be erased, your connection to the Prophet ﷺ will be solidified, and you’ll be guaranteed the intercession of the Prophet ﷺ and so much more.
Abdullah Yousef
This is what’s always brought me comfort.
On another note, one of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of political discussions, anytime Muslim politics comes up, is there’s so much hubris and obsession behind the idea that Muslims need to take on the suicidal approach when it comes to politics. It’s almost like this Khariji mindset that it’s better to hold on to our specific idea of what the ummah is and for 90% of us to perish than for us to build something safe and operable. I mentioned this in another interview, one of my favorite passages from Gai Eaton’s book, Islam and the Destiny of Man, was when he went over the archetype of the Muslim ruler and the reality that for most of our classical history, the ummah never demanded, after the Rashidun, of course, try, that the ruler be a perfect Muslim in his personal practice. What they required of him was to be competent when it came to keeping the Muslim ummah that was under his domain safe and keeping them in an environment where it was possible for them to worship Allah freely and be as Muslim as they could be.
That comes with an uncomfortable political reality that in many times, our rulers didn’t have the fortitude of balancing the two of being perfectly pious in one area and being the mystical angels that a lot of people mistake them to be but also uphold that political reality. My own theory behind it is deep down, at a spiritual and psychological level, out of fear they thought let me forsake myself and make things as good as possible for the ummah that I’m looking after instead. Like the Prophet ﷺ said in Hadith, where he says there’s going to be times where a lot of people enter Jannah because of a man who ends up in hell. With what you described in keeping a strong connection with the Prophet ﷺ, how do you relate that to keeping with the reality that we have to face, the practical everyday reality?
Fahim Faruk
The way I would frame it is accepting that the dunya is not the measure, but rather Muhammad ﷺ is the measure. So, we may find that as Muslims, we may in the short run incur worldly losses if we maintain integrity and hold true to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, but we win what really counts.
This is a hard pill to swallow because people who are attached to the dunya won’t like that, they want success here before thinking about the importance of success where it counts most in the akhirah. Alhamdulillah, however, I believe there can be many circumstances where you have both, where if you play your cards intelligently whilst maintaining integrity, you can still navigate this world with Barakah and with Allah supporting you and the Prophet SAW that will lead you to make the right moves even politically and still protect yourself from the major sins. Is it possible? I think so, absolutely. Is it very hard? Definitely. Especially when you’re playing in a system that’s as compromised as this one, with a satanic elite at every level in every corner of the world. I personally would never want to be anywhere near such a role and we’re [generally] told to stay far from such roles because of the fitna, others might be suited for navigating that however. I think the example of someone like Sultan Abdul Hamid the second (RA), is a good one. He wasn’t perfect, but I think compared to today’s Muslim rulers, he was saintly. I don’t think any of us could even stand in his shoes for a day and do as good a job as he did.
Abdullah Yousef
He inherited a house on fire and tried his best to save what he could. I personally believe when you keep that integrity, your principles and values, and move with the unshakable belief that the way of the Prophet ﷺ as Allah ordained it is going to win in the end, then you could, in a sense, wing it through life and still get really close to the truth and right decisions.
Fahim Faruk
That’s right.
Abdullah Yousef
Any last statements?
Fahim Faruk
I think that what a lot of guys today should focus on is instead of overly intellectualizing things that are beyond their immediate control, they should ensure that they’re being congruent offline and taking care of business with respect to their family life, their relationships, their fitness, their time spent; and then coming together in an organized way to build platforms that can support each other, like Qawwam, like the Green Pill, and many other projects InshAllah that can actually lead to proper unity built on sound technical knowledge, but also personal and collective excellence in the pursuit of Ihsan. This is preferable to being skinny-fat guys perpetually single and/or porn addicts or whipped in their marriages, but they’re pontificating on Twitter about solving the problems in Turkey and Syria.
Abdullah Yousef
Yeah, especially when it comes to the Caliphate stuff. I’ve gotten over the idea that the caliphate will return in the manner we’re familiar with it being in the past. I think the spirit of the caliphate, its true essence, is going to come up in a different form that might be upsetting to many.
Fahim Faruk
That’s very interesting, and I think there’s a lot to be discussed on that.
Abdullah Yousef
Especially with the digital world, and this is going to tie into the SAIF interview now [laughs], but with the coming of the digital world that’s taking up more and more of people’s lives. I think its going to turn into some kind of come back as something cyber in a way, taking over a form of sovereignty that’s already common in the world. For example, it shouldn’t be so strange to think of something like a corporate caliphate happening if an age were to come where corporations have a higher degree of sovereign control over human subjects than nation states do. A caliph as the CEO, vizier as CTO, Sheikh al-Islam as head in-house counsel, and so on… whatever, this is a great point to end this. Thank you so much for this.
Fahim Faruk
Thanks for having me, bro, it was an honor and many more projects to come.
Fahim Faruk, the Green Pill Coach, can be found on X @GreenPillCoach. Read more about his private group here: skool.com/the-green-pill-school/about