The Islamic Argument for Competence

Why we need to stop being losers, period

(I’m well aware I have a “makes a part 1 and never continues it award” problem, but I promise to break that curse here. I only had to cut this because it was getting too long.)

Just recently, I had been in Amman, Jordan, after not having been back for exactly a decade. I’d already spent some years there as a child, so I enjoy having the perspective of an American-born diaspora whose parents tried the “Hijra” experience with us, came back to America, and in my case, coming back after many years of proclaimed advancements in this part of the world that I always remembered as a kid as being far behind the material luxuries of the first world. In tune with this were the usual discussions and thoughts I’ve been having for years now with friends of a variety of backgrounds on the current fate of the Muslim world, and what’s in store for the future of our native counterparts. My trip so far has, unfortunately, both confirmed my previously held beliefs about the backwards third worldism holding the Muslims of the world back, as well as given me deeper insights into how “over” it looks thus far.

To give a prime example: many American citizens whose parents or grandparents come from a third-world nation (especially if they’re dual citizens there) will at some point, when they’re back there, get their government affairs in order for either marriage, collecting inheritance from a deceased family member, starting a business, buying property, etc. You get the picture. I went through some ordeals at government offices recently, which I don’t want to specify, but I’ll describe what I saw.

You get there, and just on the short walk from the unpaved, dirt car park to the door you’re borderline assaulted beggar-style by dozens of men, both young and old, coming out of encampments who all at once promise to take passport photos for you, fill out your applications, make copies of anything, get translations of foreign documents, and all related things. They do perform these jobs in earnest, but often screw up with needless mistakes or drag you along if they think they can scam you. You get inside the government office itself, and the layout of the area is literally meant to maximize the number of people they can hire to perform every individual step of any process you need entirely on their own. There’s an entire separate human being whose job all day is merely taking QR code receipts to collect cash for processing fees, another who looks over your request and stamps papers, and another dozen or so working in the inside offices processing each step of producing a marriage certificate or a passport on their own, like the most basic automatons whose duty is perform the same set of movements repeatedly in a factory.

This isn’t strange or outrageous to anyone from the Global South; it's the standard here. In basic economics, it's “make-work” or Disguised Unemployment, where all forms of systemic infrastructure, various forms of automation, and industrial advancement are halted for the sake of keeping millions of uneducated (or rather, highly educated but unemployed for other reasons, which I’ll also get to) citizens employed doing garbage made-up jobs. If this sounds familiar even though you reading this might be a total first worlder, its because in recent years the right wing in the Anglosphere has argued repeatedly that this was a phenomenon infecting their societies as of recent, where minorities and immigrants are kept employed doing pointless, easily automated email jobs for the government (DMV, social services) as a form of welfare by other means. In the Muslim world, though, this is still the standard on a level that’s keeping various populations held back compared to the West by at least thirty years.

During my ordeals at these offices, I had to, at one point, go from one location in Amman (Place A) to another office across town (Place B), which would take forty minutes at least in the urban traffic hellscape that exists there now (a whole different topic). I was insistent on asking about every step of the process, so one employee at Place A told me I could finish everything up at Place B instead of coming back after getting some meaningless stamp that can only be done at Place B. So I go there, get the stamp, and ask the officer there where I can finish up. He says I have to go back to Place A. I say, why? Guy at Place A said I don’t need to go back. He shrugs and says, “I don’t know, figure it out.”

I go outside and ask a random bloke about it, and he confirms I just have to go around the corner to a little area with more workers behind windows tented with sheet metal to finish my specific business. I go and do so. I’m then left wondering why this particular officer instinctively felt he had to lie to me instead of just easily making my life easier that day.

This attitude exists everywhere in the third world, especially in nearly all civil affairs in Muslim nations, where the Western civility culture we diaspora take for granted doesn’t exist. Everyone just sheepishly goes through life being mindlessly unhelpful (even antagonistic) to everyone around them, viewing everything as a zero-sum game or one of exploitation, which runs contrary to any Islamic doctrine you might refer to as a layman that supposedly is meant to inform you what the background of our people is.

“We need to move back to Muslim lands, brother.”

One of the most annoying parts of the whole “Hijra” argument to me, on both a personal and intellectual level, is when its taken far from the basic “preservation of Deen and Family” aspect and the interlocutor tries to argue that in addition to this, we need to go back to our native Muslim homelands because we have a responsibility as more privileged Muslims (in academia, tech, philanthropy, etc.) with Western degrees and sufficient supply of USD capital to “improve the conditions of the Ummah.”

I always found this line of reasoning absurd and hysterical, and even more so upon going through the above in addition to a variety of other experiences over the years. It might seem dramatic to you that I’m drawing this from a few bad experiences at government offices (as you might believe everyone has trouble in those places anywhere in the world), but I wouldn’t have taken it so personally if I didn’t see the same behavior as part and parcel of every aspect of life there, except of course when gathering and doing anything with family and friends, in which case you all suffer these things together in laughter and harmony.

Just look at the culture of dialogue itself. American society, for the better part of the last fifty years, has better selected for educated ethnics, who easily perform the "higher class" feature of being able to ruminate and explore ideas in a public forum without sentimentality for the sake of some intellectual goal. This is generally a Western feature, but in America, it’s far more easily the norm due to its ultra-classical-liberal founding.

The UK and much of Europe haven't been able to select or assimilate Muslim ethnics into adapting this, pretty much leaving them to retain the same third-world method of having intellectual/religious discourse as their native counterparts, because many of them just don't come from the same class backgrounds as those who end up in America. Allow me to further explain this at the risk of digressing: in daily life in much of the third world, especially the Arab and South Asian world, there's no such thing as a civil conversation done for objective, unemotional, detached purposes. Every single topic is interpreted as having some ulterior motive or signalling behind opening it up in conversation, and with it the assumption that you're fully endorsing whatever ideas you're bringing out in the open. You are always expected to perform an eastern “Song and Dance” to express yourself as a matter of decorum instead of just politely and directly saying how you feel.

This sounds incredibly backward and almost feminine, but it is very much the norm with large masses of any third-world nation. Every diaspora Arab or Desi who's spent a decent time back in their land of origin knows exactly what I'm talking about.

If you're one of them, you've likely believed on many occasions that you were just too autistic to deal with your own people back home because you just couldn't keep up with the Song and Dance: the ridiculous amount of social cues and indications of whether someone likes, dislikes, or wants something from you in just a simple conversation. This is also why many of us get scammed in these countries.

When this is the norm in daily life with practically no separation, it makes intellectual exploration and debate nearly impossible. Other than the fact that the highly educated, high-IQ minority of these countries are motivated by merely this to run from their native lands in search of careers and education where their more “elite” potential can be fulfilled, it makes any prospect for diaspora to return absolutely insufferable. Why would anyone willingly subject themselves and their families to this after growing up in the Anglosphere, having permanently adopted this “Anglo-Protestant” ethic of civil culture?

The economic situation is also worth noting. Education, first and foremost, in Jordan is of a very high level — tens of thousands of very intelligent, very talented minds graduate from high schools and colleges every year here who, barring language barriers, excel in math and science subjects in ways that would put many US states to shame. Lots of Arab nations, like Syria, have outcomes like this.

However, due to ridiculous corruption, laws barring organic entry into many industries, and a general lack of industrial and tech advancement, regardless, these highly educated graduates are left with nowhere to work. This is another overtold third world story, but it gets worse — for some odd reason, the mindset of those developing the education system here is stuck in this cruel loop where they think the reason Jordan is still suffering materially and falling behind is that they need more and better educated Jordanians (not even taking into account the cultural aspect where every family sees education, and not actually accomplishing anything of worth or improving daily ethics, as the key to upward social mobility) because it would be too hard for them to accept that the real reason is a stagnant, intentionally halted jobs market (because it would push out hundreds of thousands of managerial boomers and Gen Xers who are less educated, less intelligent, etc. who know an influx of young intelligent workers would spell their end).

So the result is they constantly add to and overhaul the education system with pointless subjects for posterity, or subjects the rest of the world wouldn’t ever put in a last-year high school curriculum and reserve for the collegiate level. All this does now is cut off a large number of students from the job market, unable to mentally take on this material bloat that punishes specialization, who would otherwise be productive and above-average workers, but don’t make the cutoffs compared to the top 5%. And for those who do make it, they have no choice but to try as much as they can to emigrate to a Western nation, ideally the USA or the Arab Gulf, where they have the opportunity to be useful in their fields and earn a humane living instead of driving Uber or selling assortments of Chinese wares in flea markets downtown. This exact situation also happens in Syria, where thousands of master’s degree, PhD, and medical degree holders became relegated to impoverishment in a stale dictatorship stuck in an olden past, all having worked harder for their degrees and lost more years of their youth than most in the first world, purely out of the spiteful stupidity of those once in charge of their country.

When I look at all this, it’s so incredibly difficult for me to accept this argument that we as diaspora (assuming you mean diaspora who are “Ummah Conscious” in the first place) need to toss ourselves into this mindlessly. At the very least, you need a really good plan before you subject yourself to all I described, as well as hundreds of ethnic family connections in high places to get anything done, because otherwise you’re going to throw yourself and your family for a trip of being disheartened and traumatized every step of the way. These attitudes aren’t just contrary to ideal Islamic doctrines of treating and caring for your fellow Muslims; they're an anti-spiritual weapon that actively disenchants and takes you out of your faith in “the Ummah” over time. This requires some further explanation, so bear with me.

On a basic level in terms of essential Islamic practice, yes, Muslim nations largely show “outward” Islamic behavior by filling the mosques on Friday, giving decent amounts of charity, having halal food as the standard, and gatekeeping their societies and culture from the familiar ills, now rampant in the Anglosphere, that lead to transvestite priests and homosexual government representatives on TV lecturing you about your moral responsibility to respect your autistic son’s choice to shag a toaster. Family ties are generally strong, positive, heartwarming cultural traditions that have been built up through their forefathers’ integration with Prophetically guided (SAW) ethics over centuries. But outside of this, or on a deeper, underground level, there’s nothing else to speak of. The Muslims of these nations still live in such a state of inertia and a “crab in the bucket” mentality that there’s zero motivation for the smartest, most talented Muslims among them to stay and waste their lives trying to change things as opposed to leaving for America or Canada and making something out of themselves. Upon reading this, I already know you’re either espousing or thinking about the criticism of this inherent “colonized” or “Western” desire of the educated and “privileged.” Bear with me.

“The Ummah Deserves Better”

I want you to think about this sentence. What does it truly mean to “deserve” something? Every time you hear this line or one of its variants, that the Ummah needs X or will win in Y in the near future, do you see that energy reflected in reality? Or are you just being injected with another dose of copium from the X pages of slop posters (who I won’t name)? The implication from these people is always that, because of the inherent religiosity of the Muslim world that they’ve supposedly maintained until now, they deserve and will attain some physical or material victory in the future against the West (or more commonly spoken of, Israel).

I’m going to just come out and say it — no, that doesn’t necessarily mean Muslims deserve victory at all. In some ways, it's completely irrelevant. There absolutely is an inherent Islamic argument for competence in all technological, industrial, and infrastructure affairs, even if it means temporarily deferring the implementation of outward Islamic lawmaking or “Dawah,” the latter of which, contrary to popular belief, is becoming increasingly overrated and a useless endeavor in many places in the world.

See the X post below:

I don’t know Jaan Islam, and before my opposition to this post of his back in May had never interacted with him. He’s probably a good brother and well-intentioned, and none of this is aimed at him; I’m merely using this as an example of the mentality I’m describing.

As everyone knows — back in December, Syria, a Muslim nation essential to the Muslim conscious, finally rid itself of a decades long tyrannical Alawite dynasty, the regime of which from top to bottom was a rotten collection of dictatorial suck-up filth who even before slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in Syria and displacing millions of them, had kept the Syrian people behind in nearly all fields of development since the 1970s. My father was there recently and couldn’t stop telling me how it felt like taking a time machine to an older world. I also still remember as a child noticing the difference in how far behind much of Syria’s basic amenities were in the 00s, compared to Jordan, even. Nostalgia after the war’s destruction of the country eliminated this feeling at the time, however, and the rest is history, but once the Assad regime had been ousted, the Muslim world saw for once an opportunity for one of its nations to have a fresh start in governance and development.

Of course, this was met with natural opposition and skepticism, specifically when it came to the Israel question, carrying over a myriad of conspiracy theories from the time the Assad regime had dealt the rebels a serious blow between 2015-2017 with Russia’s heavy assistance, forcing them to regroup and eventually form the coalition under Al-Sharaa (known as Al-Jolani at the time) that would topple the regime last year. These discussions are usually reasoned and well thought, but what ticked me off the most were those who seemed stunned by the fact that when Al-Sharaa took command, his main concern was first and foremost the geopolitical stability of his nation and starting work on its most basic infrastructure and institutions as opposed to a variety of incredibly stupid suggestions that he should have turned Syria into another third world, psuedo-theocratic, militia-run slum.

It’s clear by now that they were led on to think things would be otherwise by his alleged past positions and fantastical history as a Salafi Jihadist who survived the GWOT unscathed, unlike many of his “colleagues,” who were all killed within short order of the USA diving headfirst into the Middle East militarily. To be honest, the fact that “otherwise” didn’t happen was a very pleasant surprise to me and my friends. We didn’t expect him to immediately mend a variety of foreign relations, even unexpected ones, keep diplomatic channels open for the rest, and overall be the kind of leader whose striking deals first and foremost to get Syria to be a country that keeps the lights on and has functioning infrastructure as opposed to immediately chimping on the Syrian people with mandatory niqab laws, banning women’s education, and declaring eternal war on the US and Israel.

This didn’t sit well with many, though. They seem to be infected with this political form of “Jinn Brain” where they think that as long as you pray Fajr and two extra units sunnah that God will grant your ragtag militia that’s out of bullets, has no aerial defense systems, and consuming nothing but scraps of kaak and goat cheese instant victory over Israel in a direct confrontation.

Also, just to quickly address this: enough with this “Greater Israel” bullshyte. It’s not happening. Imagine you’re sitting in your living room and a chef with a collection of maids is bringing your food to you, and you decide to send them all home one day so you can go to the kitchen and cook for yourself. That’s what the “Greater Israel” theory is. Just shut up.

Again, I hate that I have to clarify this, but I am in no way mocking true religious piety and dedication. Members of the new Syrian government themselves, for example, appear even in the most outward terms to be religiously dedicated and mixing with the general public that’s in and out of Quran classes and nightly halaqas, and that’s great for any Muslim country’s morale.

But, there’s a point many of these critics have reached that’s beyond the point of insanity. It's a known goal of the Sharia that prioritizing life itself overrides outward implementation of the religion when the former is under threat. None of us seem to gain any rational explanation from this class of hectoring academics (and many Imams, sadly) as to why they expect a Muslim nation that’s been stuck in 1970 for 30 years and a bloody revolution for 10 years to commit political and physical suicide at worst, or become a pariah Axis of Retards proxy like Iran at best, as opposed to bringing their nation to some semblance of social and political stability where buildings are livable and workable, doctors always have medicine for the sick, and clean running water is always available.

There is nothing, and I repeat, nothing Western, colonized, or contrary to the Islamic ethos about demanding basic competence and humane living from the land you live in, and from those you work for and deal with in daily life as a believing Muslim. The desire to have working roads, clean water and air, an advanced medical system, highly sophisticated defense technologies, is all part and parcel of making it through the world without losing your sanity, and on a macro level, essential to attaining any sort of sovereign recognition and dominance. Again, this seems obvious to state, but relatively recent arguments I had on X (launched by posts similar to the screenshot above) with some “highly respected” Muslim academics show many of them don’t believe this at all, much to my shock at the time.

There are two extremes that many point to. When you look at the UAE, you see the perfect example of a nominally Muslim technocracy that’s prioritized technological advancement, comfort, luxury, and economic prosperity over all forms of religious fundamentalism and piety expressed as political power, and the Muslim educated class by consensus agrees that when they’ve made a grave error in building their nation this way, and that this is something that also reflects in the insane geopolitical ambitions of its rulers in the past decade. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, you have a country like Afghanistan, the relatively new rulers of which sadly decided upon seizing control of the country to piety-max into oblivion with seemingly no plans to assert themselves in a powerful way in the Central Asian sphere, nor provide a bright, prosperous future to the average Afghan.

Just think of all the Afghans in America, Canada, and the UK now who originally fled Afghanistan in the past three decades due to its war and impoverished state. Do you think any of them, in the next three decades, will be motivated at all to ever move back there? Do you think they at all regret their decision to leave, given where Afghanistan is now?

Those who support the current Afghan regime might say: We don’t need them, they’re traitors, etc., but that’s the thing: why don’t you think you do? Why don’t you care about bringing back the most educated and talented of your people to their homeland, opening it up as a haven for investment and growth? None of this seems to be even a remote priority for not just that country, but virtually every other Muslim nation suffering from this brain drain. And we’re all the worse for it.

Faith in “The Ummah”

At the risk of sounding like a cringe philosopher, I’m going to pontificate a bit to make this point. The exoteric and esoteric reasons for what happens in this world are undeniable, and as a Muslim, it’s imperative to believe that the exoteric (dhahir) is a direct manifestation of the esoteric (bațin), neither rendering the other obsolete, always in tune with the divine nature expressed in the Quran and the Sunnah. When one advocates for “secular” material excellence, many a “West critic” makes the mistake of believing that this is something entirely unrelated or contradictory to inward, spiritual excellence in matters of religion that they take pride in as Muslims who lack the former. I’ll hold my tongue on what I think of these fellows in simpler terms and just say they’re wrong.

At so many different times in our fragmented, widespread history, we were led by people who demanded the best from their people of knowledge. They earnestly wanted the best weapons, the best amenities in their cities, the best transportation, and so on; not as a marker of reduced religiosity, but as part and parcel of protecting their share of the Ummah under their protection, regardless of which fitnas they were undergoing at that moment. The Umayyads still revolutionized multicultural governance when faced with the fitna of the Shia and Khawarij. The Abbasids still maintained their frontiers and funded algebra, astronomy, and robotic automatons when dealing with the fitna of the Mutazila and the Buyids. The Ottomans, Mughals, and a multitude of sultanates among the Andalusians, Mamluks, and Ayyubids still fought to advance their weaponry, postal systems, irrigation, and medicine as they were split apart by foreign invasions and intrareligious battles.

It’s only recently that we began to cope with this ridiculous belief that there’s no such thing as Ihsan in matters of making the daily life of the average Muslim more comfortable, prestigious, and enviable, all because we struggle religiously with a number of widespread fitan in the modern day.

Progress must continue regardless of what spiritual ills we’re going through, because having a society of living Muslims who are massive sinners is still better than a society of monk-like Muslims who are slaves. The outward meaning of wanting this material advancement may be things like “comfort,” “luxury,” and “military dominance,” but the inward meaning is that having a group of Muslims who are alive, safe, and economically secure (no matter how much they sin) is better than having a group of Muslims who are spiritually, politically, and economically enslaved even in their own Muslim-majority nations.

(Part 2 soon)