Coherencing my incoherence .. a new year resolution

Coherence-ing my Incoherence

I witnessed major interventions this year in what will undoubtedly shape my way of thinking… until I reach a new intersection probably.

At some point, you realize as a human being, that there is something in you that stops becoming “just about you,“ even though it is still strictly visually all yours. But it becomes the universe. Something in you becomes bigger than what you hold in as a single person, and a fantastic merge takes place, between you and the world and you become one.

Is it a state of narcissism, arrogance or vein? No. It is a state may be of reconciliation between the “you” that lives inside your body and limited surrounding, and the “you” that makes the single “you” what it is and more importantly why is it here.

A journey that starts so much within to launch you out like a rocket inside the big universe.

Romanticizing an individual state of mind isn’t the way to solve major life issues I assume … however; personalizing life makes life friendlier and easier to live. A certain harmony is set between you the individual and you in the universe, and suddenly what happens in the world starts to matter to you personally.

It should be a greater state of mind …

Being mindful …

Aware …

Cautious…

And caring …

Being more decent and honest about what it means to be brought to live in this particular life here and now.

My lesson in the expedition of this year brought me into questioning, and hopefully starting to change in my way and capability the way we are raised, in my case the way I intend to continue raising my children, and hence generations of young people who are taking this torch we lighted for them. I hope to be able to hand in a flashlight that has a real light for a better meaning of what life besets for.

This year witnessed a significant backlash in the concept of Islam. With the fall of Islamic movements from regimes, such as the Ikhwan, and others, and the rise of Nusra and Da’esh and other. Admittedly, I realize, it is not about these groups. It is about how we are raised to become.

I spent the whole year trying to defy al-Ghazali in his standpoint on women, using the woman issue maybe as an alibi to dignify how societies go backward with their treatment to women. Real successful organizations have always been societies with the ladies living equally in their original roles. Living equally not inequality nor co-existence. Residing in the role they were created to perform, sometimes lesser, sometimes higher than that of man’s. But it is the role that made creation. Made life starts through a man and a woman.

I still insist on being against anyone or any norm that seeks equality for females. We don’t need justice. The universe needs those setups of equality for its balance. Not for women.

Somehow how those scholars thought of women reflects their input on the society and the universe at large.

I was fighting the concept of al-Ghazali in what he represents as an alleged moderate Islam. This whole idea of average versus strict and stringent made Muslims squeeze inside two notions that made Islamic teaching exclusively theirs.

You don’t have a choice except for this version of thought or the other. Al-Ghazali or Ibn Taymiya. You only have two roads to choose from, names could change, but the concepts are the same. As al-Ghazali represents a larger school that is defended namely Asharites, and from that school emerges the Azhar in Cairo. And Ibn Taymiya’s Thahiri school that the Wahhabi’s in Saudi Arabia emerged from drives the other road. One school produces the Islamic Brotherhood, and the other school produced al Qaeda…. And whatever we know today from the new branches that we live in.

As Muslims, we are first taught that Islam is a great religion that delivered peace and saved the universe from the darkness. Islam is a religion of moderation and openness. Islam is a religion of adaptation and inclusiveness. All true and real. So much engraved inside our hearts as we grow up, but somehow suddenly, it comes through books, or inherited traditions and norms, I cannot actually catch, but somehow, there is this synergy between the society and its educational system as well as its political one that drives you inside only one designated route of choice between two given ones with no third option. A way you need to choose that is not related, you realize, as you enter it, to what was initially engraved in your heart. With notions of peace and love and moderation, you find yourself part of exclusivity in notions to only what you believe in and where you belong. Suddenly you realize that Islam, the all-loving religion is surrounded by conspiracies and plots from the enemies of it. The enemies are all those who don’t take your route. You slowly start realizing that anyone who is not a Muslim is a kafir (infidel). Anyone who doesn’t believe your way is a lost soul. Regardless of how limited your religious teaching directly from a school or a sheik, there is something that miraculously enters inside your veins like blood flow. You just start making exemptions and expulsions to anyone who is not like you.

And yet, you continue to repeat the same old notions that you actually believe in.

We wonder at the end why Da’esh emerged.

When Al Qaeda came out, it was easy to understand, the oppression of nations. There was a real war between the east and west, the Soviets, the Americans later. It was a plight, even though under religious meaning and jihad notion, that has this bigger scenery that wasn’t personal. You could understand why would people from all over Islamic countries go and join for a plight they believed it was a difficult situation for the fight for Islam. Regardless of what we know today … regardless to that another proof that it is not about liberating anyone, it is about interests of individual groups. Somehow the USA representing a group and Qaida serving another … prove to us how little, or nothing humans mean. But yet, always used to declare wars and to kill more.

Today’s Da’esh sudden rise, regardless of who may have been behind it and how. Da’esh proved that it is inside our homes that we raise this Da’esh that is out there killing anyone …anyone who is not Da’esh.

The crime that those who represented Islam in the following centuries after the prophet, assigning themselves as the exact word of God through what they only understand from the message. Created a state of Islam that we live in today.

It created a state where knowledge of faith in God is only exclusively delivered through them. You are given two choices with no sense of understanding or grasping anything different.

Choosing one over the other makes you disillusioned and caught up in only one single reality, in which your choice in your mind is what should be the best fro you.

If you choose the “moderate” teaching then you are not strict, then you are on the right path. After all, you are not a fundamentalist freak. Just to realize. If you ever allow yourself to such a wake-up call. To see what lies outside that route. That this “moderate” teaching is nothing but a way to control you from thinking and reasoning …

And if you are only aware of those two routes, you will choose to take the “extreme” course ..that became Da’esh today…

Thinking and reasoning … a word that Islam started its message with … and Muslim “Preachers” decided centuries ago, and we followed, that it is only they who should think and reason, and we track the outcome of what their heads have poured…

Tragically … their heads flooded the Da’esh situation we are living in today …

What is my message for tomorrow?

Continue to break the restraints and chains that locked our minds and hearts. Mine and my children’s and my nephews and nieces (they are many) and I have some young cousins I can “brainwash” hopefully. And each time I can…