What's a "Biomass"?

Fury over abstract terms is an online Muslim specialty

This past week a good friend of mine, pseudonymous poster Ibn Maghreb, inadvertently started a storm on X after his commentary on recent events in Pakistan where a Muslim was burned alive by a bomb for alleged blasphemy. This was done before any official investigation or judgment by the government or declarations by any clergy — in other words, we wouldn’t have known about it had we not seen the video of the man being murdered by the mob:

Just like when arguing with an insane woman, what mattered to the many on Muslim Twitter (MT) wasn’t what Ibn Maghreb was saying, but how he said it. It was outrageous to them that he dared use the term “biomass” as an abstract description, thus provoking an emotional reaction that yielded zero reflection instead of arguing against any of the points he was making. That majority however wasn’t what disappointed me, it was those who tried to engage with IM’s point but failed due to either their own functional illiteracy or a more subtle emotional narcissism that, in their own heads, puts their madrassa credentialism or Dawah Inc. social connections as giving their opinions more worth than that of anonymous posters despite the former’s failing track record.

Here is a more formal explanation of the whole “biomass” argument, since its definition as it's used by IM, others, and me is wildly different from how most Muslims online interpreted it. The same kind of misuse of terms happened when things like “redpill” and “incel” were discovered by MT, usually driven by online “bints” who don’t understand the meanings of words and only understand language in sequences of TikToks and Instagram reels, which is then reinforced by orbiting mid-level male accounts agreeing with them, who are taken more seriously in Dawah scenes due to their own real life activism holding feel-good halaqas or previous online writing about the Fiqh of raising a chihuahua in your one bedroom apartment in Dearborn. It’s mini-Mufti Menks consoling the hurt feelings of undulating puffy-lipped sistahs in an infinite feedback loop, that no one other than a small number of intelligent Muslims online (and it’s always men) seem to crack through. Please pray for the singularity.

An example to illustrate what I mean — when the term incel became popular and spilled into the MT media market sometime after 2019, the definition of it, unlike “biomass”, wasn’t inherently vague at all. You could google it in three seconds. It plainly meant “frustrated young man who wants to have sex but can’t due to the rejection of women.” Most of the hysterical Muslims online who became aware of it however, despite probably reading that definition and many associated 4chan memes and green text, didn’t absorb it as is; and in clear tribalistic fashion interpreted it on their own solely based on the posts of their friends. They don’t know how to just read text, it had to instead go through the Muslamic hivemind filter in order to derive any meaning. The resulting definition of “incel” then became the following: man who is critical of liberal politics and modernized, female-centric gender roles — AKA, if you’re an evil meanie man. It didn’t matter if you were a fellow sex-haver, whether you were married with kids — Muslims online kept throwing the term “incel” at anyone as if the real meaning didn’t exist. Genghis Khan was an incel. Donald Trump is the king of incels. The local Imam with great grandchildren who scolds female masjid goers to stop wearing those abayas with corset waistbands is an incel. Hordes of diaspora with pointless college degrees, conditioned by leftist professors to believe that words don’t actually mean what they do but instead whatever you want reinforced this behavior.

As such, the same happens to any other controversial internet term, not just “biomass.” In this case many interpreted it to mean “elitist” Muslims making fun of the poor or those with generally simple and unenterprising lives (which, in those terms, is something even most normie Muslims will agree applies to the vast majority of the modern Muslim world), and it makes sense why they’d see it that way considering their interpretation of what an “elite” class consists of is also distorted, influenced by pinko jargon and a fundamentally racially communist background also grown in academia. The problem is when you interpret it that way, you’re then allowed to say that every point in history had “biomass,” as the majority of humanity in any culture have never been involved in creating mentionable history or performing overturning political acts that change the lives of millions in short order, because “biomass” in its true definition aren’t capable of serious political action. It’s precisely the denial of this reality of human nature and history that’s led to the horrors of mass democracy, liberalism, and all other derivative viruses like feminism and such that are mistakenly diagnosed as causes instead of symptoms. The spiritual state that is “biomass” is also a symptom of what is ultimately the modern project.

Biomass, put plainly, describes the unnatural and inflated state of third world human populations that are in a position of near total economic, social, and in most cases spiritual slavery; rendering lives that are not only useless in the grand scheme of politics and history, but the misery of which grows exponentially as time goes on. It’s a set of assumptions based on the fact that many nations across the third world, which includes much of the Muslim world, have their large populations and fragile socio-political cohesion upheld solely through foreign (Western) interest-based machinations. It’s all fake. Pakistan and Egypt, two popular examples, hold the most debt to the IMF in all of Asia and Africa respectively, and each receive billions in both military aid and economic assistance yearly from the United States and the EU. Even critics of the “biomass” concept will agree to the insanity of this and its implications.

To put it plainly: say a village in a third world nation has five hundred starving people. You give them $50,000 in aid so that those five hundred people don’t starve anymore. They’re fed, but once the money is spent they’re not in any better position to be self-sustaining — they’re just well enough now temporarily to have more kids as a result of upheld cultural dogmas that encourage family-building no matter the circumstance — the result? Years pass and now those five hundred are a thousand, but they’re all hungry again. Muslim English-speaker narcissism likes to pretend that because certain nations are Muslim, that they’re above this calculus by virtue of things like the incredible personal faith of the poor in God, their consistent practice of Islam, or how much they value “family,” which, again, comes from an inherently commie-based view of the “virtue” of peasantry and the poor.

Anas (RA) reports that Rasulullah (SAW) said: ‘Poverty almost leads to disbelief.’ (Musnad Ahmad ibn Mani’, Al-Mu’jamul Awsat, Hadith: 4056)

The idea that the masses of poor people in any nation were capable of “coming together” and making positive political decisions was unheard of in pre-modernity. To believe this is to childishly take the Socialist revolutions of the past at face value when they tell you that they were “for the people,” when the basic history shows that even the most mass-appealing Socialist movements in history ended up being capitalized on by another set of elites who took the reins instead (the Bolsheviks, Iran, etc.) When any kingdom or Empire was healthy, it was the felt responsibility of nobility anywhere to protect and provide for them out of a sense of Noblesse Oblige, but it was never once believed that those masses had anything to do with how a civilized urban culture proceeds with its most known history. Muslims aren’t unique to this split, the equivalent to the modern-day liberal insanity of seeing the poor as having some inherent virtue would be if after the Prophet (SAW) passed on, the Companions (RA) went to the remote Bedouins of Arabia who were trying to send bags of grain half-filled with sand to Madinah as Zakah to consult them about who the next Caliph should be. There’s a reason why once Muslim lands were colonized, the Europeans in charge took great care to promote the syncretic, village style Islam over the sophisticated, urban city style Islam where all the heavyweight scholars of our history kept the scholarly tradition alive and well for that long.

This is the precursor and true story of Kemalism in Turkey, by the way — Mustafa Kemal came from a family of no status or renown, no Islamic intellectual background; the son of some lowly official from Salonica who served as the perfect model of what a “new, Modern Islam” would look like in the newly founded Turkish Republic. As nationalistic for Turkey as he was, he could never escape the shadow of the West’s desires for him as the perfect “private-Muslim-turned-civilized-man.” Even in his case — he didn’t succeed through leading any mass uprising, he succeeded by climbing through a decaying state and becoming part of the new elite class.

Despite its failures, the popularization of Salafism across the post-colonial Middle East post-1970 was carried out for the most part as a reaction to the damage done by this, an attempt to revive urban scholarly Islam in an age where the only choices were either drunken belly dancing in the night clubs of Cairo or this newly founded Biomass Islam that was so revolting it would eventually lead everyone to the former.

There’s also the bit about obsessive communitarianism I mentioned that rubbed everyone the wrong way. I’m reminded of a quote:

“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” - Francis Bacon

In a corrupt third world nation that survives solely by interest-based banking debts, and therefore a state of political and economic slavery towards the lenders, there is little to no inherent virtue in the everyday life of that nation. A post-colonial country with that description is also ruled by a minority irreligious, insecure demographic who serve as middle-men between the colonizers/bankers and the rest of the population (the Alawites in Syria, for example, whose entire history is based on being syncretic savages with extreme resentment towards the long-ruling Sunni majority) — as such, the only way to advance is through your own tribe, connections of close co-ethnic friends, parents, cousins, etc. — no, none of this is to disparage close family relations. The trick is that intuitively you think these arrangements are good, but the reality is this style of daily life actually destroys any genuine sense of belonging in your own family. You’re born into a system where you are forced to appease disingenuous and hateful relatives and in-laws so that the entire rest of your life becomes even mildly manageable. You spend dozens of hours a week in lifeless, effeminate family dramas (often goaded on by your fellow family matriarchs), disgusting disputes over inheritance or ownership of a useless piece of land, and overall a life where you find yourself treating everyone for the sake of one ulterior motive or the other to advance in this corrupt society where making it by your own individual virtue is impossible. This sallow existence continues for fifty, maybe sixty years, then you die of heart disease leaving behind six children who will now go on to live the same life. You sell out not to a big corporation or a Zionist banking system, but to your own family and countrymen to survive.

It’s exactly this feeling, I suspect, that Muslims who are now living in the Western world were trying to subconsciously escape, and are still trying to escape as we speak. Their problems now, however, are entirely different, and aren’t equivalent to what I just described. Just because your local diaspora is less religious or commit X or Y sin doesn’t make them “biomass” too. I also suspect that each time Muslims fell into dire straits, it was because they were domesticated by a similar set of circumstances in a repeating cycle for hundreds of years. The Turanian takeover of Islamic civilization post-Abbasids in the tenth century isn’t so strange when you look at it this way.

There’s also this predictable confusion as to what creates an “elite” class as opposed to the masses. Contrary to accusations, just having money doesn’t make you an “elite.” Even today, there are plenty of top billionaires who hold zero political or social sway just because of their money. At the same time however, having a family on its own doesn't make you “biomass.” You’re not “biomass” just because you’re not a multi-billion-dollar tech tycoon who reads Persian poetry. So what’s the solution? How do you escape it?

Many of you might be sick of me using the 13th Century Mamluks as examples all the time, but it’s worth repeating: when As-Salih Ayyub rose to power as Sultan of Egypt, he became obsessed with filling his army with Turkic slaves. Previous Sultans all used them as soldiers, but he overdid it and it got to the point that by the end of his rule, he had amassed two whole divisions of them with thousands strong. All armed to the teeth, highly trained men without families, educated in the Islamic way by many prominent Imams (Baybars was a direct student of Ibn Arabi when he was still a boy), who knew nothing but brotherhood and war. They didn’t hate their situation — quite the opposite in fact, they thought they were having the time of their lives every day. The Ayyubid Sultan had, by accident, created a rival elite class who overthrew his own after his death, who were elite not by virtue of wealth, political grifting, or family connections. They prevailed by their masculine virtue, complete loyalty to their class, and a heavy swing of their sword arms.

When Ayyubid nobles were mass apostating, allying with local Christians, and ready to bend over for the coming Mongol invaders, the Mamluks were in the perfect position to take the reins. They didn’t just settle for “having a normal life” when the negotiations for such a thing came to them. Maybe it's hard to define for a lay audience what “biomass” is, but I can confidently say that these men were the exact opposite. Make of that what you will.