*Written in 2007 --- Below is the Second Formulation of anarca-Islam (as an Undergraduate thesis) before it was rewritten as an MAthesis at Queen's University (Third Formulation) available here: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mohamed-jean-veneuse-anarca-islam.
*The MA-thesis is due for publication and release as a book in 2019 through AKpress/Minor Compositions.
War of Dreams: Becoming(s) of a Redeemed Circle A with an Eye
and a Redeemed Eye with a Circle A
Written By
Mohamed Jean
Veneuse
Acknowledgments:
To every being mentioned & never mentioned with a name: How can one speak
of Acknowledgments? How can one pretend to summarize lives and their effects on
I? How am I to deliver Eulogy after Eulogy in the fake gesture that in such
deliveries, in such work on work that has already been given and appropriated
by me, someway and somehow, that I absurdly could be regarded as returning a
payment, even if partial, of the debt that I owe others? Somehow I am expected
to hierarchically do this, to act as this authority figure calculating whom and
whom not to acknowledge, who and whom are relevant?! No! The energy that I
could spend in lying and deceiving others and myself leaves me abandoned, left
only with one possession: my intentions. Intentions that if I could I would
name those met, those never met, those I will meet and those whom I shall never
meet. But how can I? There is infinite debt here at work, more than one can
fathom and mention. An infinite debt, in admiration for those, who in my mind,
have given and entrusted parts of themselves to me; I have forfeited my
infinite debts to God because you have all left me trembling.
For how can I
not be left trembling if “I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my
other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don't
know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even
more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or
sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to my fellow citizens, to
those who don't speak my language and to whom I neither speak or respond, to
each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address
myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this is for the
so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus
also to those I love in private, my own, my family” (Derrida).
To I: Do you
see a reason for yourself? Yes. I am told that like Bartleby I am too smooth
for anyone to be able to hand any particularity on me. I am no one. I am told
that I do nothing but take walks, yet am capable of taking them anywhere, and
without moving. I am told that I neither refuse nor accept advances; that I
advance only to withdraw upon advancing, barely exposing myself in the retreat
and advance. I was informed that my formula is such that I do not permit roots
to grow or crops to carve out a kind of domestic space for others and me to
reside in. Perhaps because they, these domestic spaces, these tills of land,
continue declaring and proclaiming themselves, at least in my perception,
rightly or wrongly, as foreign. Perhaps I have said everything, exhausting
language in the process and so I wander. Perhaps the intensity of domestication
is insufficient to hold me down, or that I see my duty merely to introduce and
be introduced to foreign language constantly; a pure outsider of sorts, to whom
no social position could be attributed. But perhaps, just perhaps, that a
reason behind my distancing myself from everything else, save my sporadic
insurrectionary disruptions in the lives of others, is not that I lack a
commitment to others. Rather that I know now how often parts of myself have
betrayed and continue to betray other parts of myself. And so it is that I have
come to the realization relatively recently that I only came here, lived and
will die to affirm and testify, to whomever chooses to see, not for my name,
for I am no one, but that I had, throughout my whole life and throughout all of
my voyages, but a single possession; good intentions. This resurgence of
Islam(s) - my faith- denoted a leap forward… & was never a return to the
supposedly primitive cube house- the Ka’ba…
To Anarchists,
Muslims/Muslimas, past, present & future: I never journeyed here to
pledge allegiance to either of you. I also never journeyed here to
assimilate/integrate. I came here to negotiate, on behalf of myself, for a
tactical and hence organic treatise to begin. But any treatise requires ethics
because, and without deceiving ourselves, differences, within and without, will
arise; in fact, they already have. Those differences without come from mutual
enemies and thus require that we unceasingly attempt to minimize our
stereotyping of one another, such that we may become more of a force in facing
such enemies. Those within come from our own selves and require that we
unceasingly and tirelessly negotiate with our own selves and rely on good
intents. We will never foresee from where we stand now what lies ahead and all
that there is; But again we don’t need to, because together and only together
will we be able to always discover, construct and hence catch a glimpse of it…
Ila Rabe’e: haqab qa’d Ishtaqa
Ghiyabee ilayk. Asaloa’ka a’n tuyasr Le Amri Wa’intchroha Le Saa’dri
Wa’nthlol Uqdatan Min Lesani ky Ya’Fqahu Le Qawle’e.
laqa Alhamd Walaqa Al’shukr qat.
Table of
Contents
Preface……………………………………………………………………………………5
Introduction:
The Rhizome, Processes of
Becoming(s) and Faith…………………………………10
Chapter One:
Kapital’s Wet Dream: Islam(s) &
Post-Anarchisms..………………………...........25
Chapter Two:
Pedagogical Judicial Orders:
Decentralized & Anti-Authoritarian……………...54
Chapter Three:
Nous..................................................................................................................................70
Chapter Four:
Infinite Thoughts as The End becomes a Beginning becoming
an End…………...83
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………90
You will permit me for I am more than revolted…more than
outraged…
For I wanted fresh work
One that would make contact with
certain
Organic points of life, a work
in which one feels one’s whole illuminated as if by a miner’s cap-lamp with vibrations…
But that is only possible if nothing
in the spoken text happens to shock, happens to damage this desire for glory…
And so this might infringe
on taste, morals, good manners, and honorable intentions or furthermore
that might exude boredom, familiarity and routine but the duty of the
writer, of the poet, is not to shut himself and/or herself up like a coward in
a text, a book, a magazine from which s/he never comes out but on the
contrary to
go into the world to jolt, to attack the mind of the public,
otherwise what use is s/he? And why was s/he born?
Thus I had a vision
of this in the afternoon…
There are some who eat too much,
words…
Others whom never eat, words, at
all, and others…who can no longer eat words without spitting; parts
of themselves betray themselves…
…The concepts that will
come to pass here…that were given a voice are not particularly nor strictly due
to the supposed creativity of an individual ego or even two – ( I am no
one)…’rather’ like Deleuze I believe that there is a privileged role
unaccounted for; whose testament to is currently lacking in the world today…the
role due to every creation around this I (& everyone)…that which always
resists the present…it is due to all that which was created around me that
Islamic Anarchism(s) was started up…the thought… this open declaration of the
infinite responsibility I have for any and every ‘other’…this open declaration
that I am an Anarcho Anarcha Muslim(s) & Muslima(s)…& this open deceleration
that I am always an other to everyone including myself.
…
As for what formerly happened here?
A mediation of magic…
And,
“it is by magic that the abominable institutions which enclose us: country,
family, society, mind, concept, perception, sensation, affect, heart, soul,
science, law, justice, right, religion, notions, verb, language, don’t
correspond to anything real”…they no longer mean shit… as for those who propose
to be descendants of literary intellectual tribes that conjured these
institutions…you are all rubbish-mongers… I prefer humbleness and organized
anarchy.
Antonin
Artaud & I
Preface
An Abode & The Three Witnesses
Muslims/Muslimas, claim or allege that the prophetic narrations, The Sunnah,
or varying texts of The Sunnah is/are dead. Others,
Muslims/Muslimas as well, have spoken distinguishing themselves, complaining
that The Sunnah, or varying texts of it, has been in the past and shall
remain through endless eternity alive. I am not interested here in becoming
consumed with exactly the reasons behind such ‘talk’, such an allegiance, the
lack of it or even an abidance to varying degrees of The Sunnah or not.
Why would I? Why should I, as some Muslims/Muslimas believe it to be, exercise
a necessary desire to put to end such variations, I ask? And for what
purpose would an engagement in a discussion of such ‘talk’ carry
in weight and importance to the discussion here? I answer: Abstractly
nothing, for such ‘talk’ would merely signify a reflection, a testimony whose
testimony testifies to the absence of attestation that there is a lack of
consensus as to the Authenticity throughout Islams of The Sunnah.
Nonetheless such talk attains to I a degree of pure testimony. There is a
Pure Testimony namely to the triumphant spirit and fanatical jubilation of such
differing testimonies. As for The Holy Koran it remains consensually
Authentic amongst Muslims and Muslimas. The Holy Koran, is believed
to be protected by its first Witness-Author, God: “Verily We [God] ourselves
have sent down this exhortation [The Holy Koran], and most surely will
be its Guardian” (Qurran, Chapter 15: Verse 10).
Associate then what I address and proclaim here, in this economy of a paper, to
belong to and through The Holy Koran and interpretations longing and
belonging to its verses as I put away The Sunnah without delay,
obligations to it or even talk of it here.
Around her: Between Our Vows of Abstinence & Transgression
When I address you, when I speak to you here, each time, twice, it will be
through two narratives.
The first narrative is a transgressing narrative wrapped around and
engaged with an idea signified as becoming. This narrative touches,
divides, shares and co-appears with, yet is distanced from the second
narrative, an abstaining narrative. The abstaining narrative is a
body of thought addressing both Muslims/Muslimas and Anarchists.
Patience. For before I begin, there is a matter that demands attention. This is
the matter of clarifying terms, clarifying names. After all who are these Anarchists
of whom I speak? So let me tell you this: The Anarchists I will be
and do refer to are those whose practice and hence theoretical conceptions of Anarchisms
operate from European political/social specimens of the aggregate Anarchism.
After all the world - and Anarchism is no exception
to this world as it is grounded in relating to this world - is a collection, a
work, heterogeneous and multiple in its essence, and in its derivatives; that
is, in its parts. These parts like the European specimens of Anarchism,
I referred to above, constitute merely fragmented pieces of a puzzle,
Anarchism. These pieces if taken together with other specimens could and would
constitute a possible totality, and hence the aggregate Anarchism. But note the
conditional ‘if’. It is only upon the fulfillment of this conditional ‘if’ that
the puzzle hangs in the balance; it is ‘if’ and only ‘if’ all the pieces
belonging to this puzzle could be traced that the puzzle and Anarchism would
become tranquil, peaceful as if they both have become conquered totalities. But
often is the case, if not in every case, that these totalities are disturbed
from the ‘outside’ like the economy of a paper I offer here and even from the
‘inside’; for example, the mere fact that other specimens belonging to
Anarchisms, are not so easily traceable.
And so it is that these fragments, Eurocentric
Anarchisms, of an autonomous socialism span periods of known discourses
starting with what is often referred to these days as Classical Anarchisms.
Classical Anarchisms signify a problematic and totalizing interpretation
of Anarchism up-until the advent of the new social movements.
Then there are the more recent Post-Anarchisms, a fragile marriage of Post-structuralism
and previous incarnations of Anarchisms. Therefore, and here is where I
am obliged to make a confession: While in this tract I address those Anarchists
who have grappled with Post-structuralism and escaped bruised by an
understanding of Poststructuralist conceptions of force relations, I am
aware that many such Anarchists do not refer to their Anarchisms as
Post. Therefore, in a world of Anarchisms, like any other
discourse, which cannot be neatly wrapped-up with a bow for consumption, I find
the subject of my treatise elusive. What’s in a name? Apparently
everything. This economy of a paper then becomes respectively written as a
critique of some Anarchist practices. I am aware that Anarchisms make
a beautiful composition, and that indeed there are religious and
religious-friendly Anarchists (many Post, many not). But there is
also a strong silent majority of Anarchists who are dismissive of those
who choose to believe in God at best, and hostile at worst. I call upon another
‘name’ to refer to these Anarchists. They are Anti-Religious
Anarchists of Classical Anarchisms; those who have chosen to remain
attached to essentialist identity politics, “hold finite philosophical views
of the nature of power relations” and presumably have killed God (Haberle,
2005: 28). They desire to consolidate and reconcile the irreconcilable.
That is, they see themselves as belonging to one identity and not any
other, thereby secluding themselves from the potential of there existing any
creative differences beyond their own selves and which they may learn from.
Such politics, I believe, arise out of a fear of what they do not and seek not
to know particularly regarding anything that goes beyond their own selves, as
if somehow their state of ‘purity’ will be contaminated by anything outside it.
This economy of a paper is written with these Anti-Religious Anarchists
in mind—not so much as an address to them, but as a distant call to
them and a beckoning desire for them and those Anarchists
aware of the hegemonic exclusionary politics that these Anti-Religious
Anarchists practice, based upon dogmatic understandings of Religions, to speak
and reflect with these Anti-Religious Anarchists regarding
what I have to say here. Two matters, speaking and reflecting, because in
this economy of a paper, in this prison of a paper, I am bound; I am unable to
do either. There is an implicit consent contained in silence and that ought
and deserves to be disturbed, not for a cemented totalizable Anarchism
to be revealed but for an organically totalizable Anarchism to be realized and
actualized.
As for
when I address Post-Anarchists (my own strawpersons constructed for
descriptive convenience) here, I mean to address all those Anarchists
who have embedded Post-structuralism into their practice, but who are
still ambivalent towards religions. With much confidence and tranquility I
say: This is not my plea for your attention, but a cautionary tale of
your irrelevance.
And so it is
that the purpose of the existence of the transgressing narrative then is
to contaminate intentionally what supposedly is the sacred event and the state
of purity assumed by Muslims/Muslimas and Anti-religious Classical
Anarchists in the abstaining narrative and who certainly constitute a
majority.
As
the end becomes the beginning becoming an End (Chapter Four), these heavy,
twisted and morbid thoughts, just expressed, will touch You and You inevitably
will feel embarrassed that, the touch, transgressed your body’s sacred
space, brushed against it, without your knowing, without You noticing.
They’ve
Made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve
Stolen my body!
I believe and testify that Islam betrays
itself. Islam bears a signature without which it remains inaudible or weakly
perceptible; a signature begetting permanent difference. Such betrayal
testifies that Islam remains indeed alive through the multiplicity of its
interpretations where each interpretation is ahead of another, advancing
upon another, towards one another, away from one another and such.
A monolithic Islam is a memory of beatitude and in its memory I begin speaking
of it no longer in the singular form. Rather I speak of it as plural, as an
aggregate, as Islams. There is no singular monolith and thus never more Islam.
Such a statement however would yet bear false testimony to my intents here.
Thus, I tell you this: Considering that there are a pluralistic series of
traditions, perspectives and discourses radiating from Islams – they, Islams,
are not all anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist. Respectively I become bound
to address the topic at hand here using the signifier Islam(s) to refer to a
particular reading of Islams that highlights their anti-authoritarian and
anti-capitalist possibilities. And so it is, that Islam(s) then scurry like
vermin, grope like a blind person, or run like a lunatic: desert travelers and
nomads (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 150). In other words, they are fixated
upon a moving instant, as a Bedouin upon a camel, experiencing movement, but
un-experienced in movement. ‘Islam’ has through an incessant process of renewal
succeeded in taking the structured organized organism that is itself as an
enemy. Islam’s essence and its undying desire belongs to its encounter with the
temples of interpretive difference; its organs; Islams. Islam if
there is such an idea, such a thought, such a way of life, does not permit
itself to experiment in peace, it won’t allow itself to ‘be’ just Islam because
Islam is in combat with Islams; with its own selves giving me now and here
Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Authoritarian Islam(s). But again its seems
Anarchism(s) shares a similar trait; a similar desire for its organs to engage
in combat.
I ask for your
pardon for having things go on so long. Let You and I now go a little further.
Question
of l’ Étranger
I am in mourning of
all my tears. I am unable to participate in performing the rites of my
mourning. I admit without self-delusion that\ speaking to God appears still an
impossibility. A God whose absence remains for me, I am certain, forever
unthinkable. Yet I am at a loss, unable to find public words for what is
happening to us. I desire interrupting moments of my impossibility to break the
silence of my absence from Nous. I desire to participate in the rites of my mourning.
I am about to shift tone.
“This is “Pigshit! All writing is Pigshit [save what
are proclaimed to be Holy Scriptures and certainly this is not one of them]! No
more masterpieces, no more masters (forget Hegel!)…Why? Because our innermost feelings
are untranslatable and linguistically inexpressible”(Perez, 1990: 42). Would
you like another reason? Proposed “literary masterpieces are established by
repetition. That is to say, it is the repetition of reading and performance
that establishes the Text as a fixed expression...So why repeat what has
already been said as though one could recapture the freshness of the initial
expression? An expression does not have the same value twice; does not live two
lives” (Perez, 1990: 45). This paper, this scene of writing and its body
of letters, words, sentences and phrases has but one life and is paralyzed by
its own economy. Respectively, it is my intention that the specificities
entailed in the discussion of this economy of a paper are to be expressed through
writing once. For now and at this moment, sitting down, I tell you of a few
matters.
As Antonin Artaud, I am
insurrectionally in opposition to the rhetoric of written texts. A rhetoric
soldered in repetitive asylums and thus is engaged in the betrayal of
creativity as well as any possibilities of involution. Written texts whose
bodies of paper have a bodily hold on you and I, confiscating our every sense
and their every fantasy. Written texts whose failure in capturing the freshness
of spontaneous expressions cuts across and violently replaces your non-coded
gestures, as well as mine, with those “meaningless repetitions of the Text”
(Perez, 1990: 46). I have to say this too swiftly but venture to maintain this
firmly: “Texts [at best] are to be read or performed once and then burnt
[including this one]” (Perez, 1990: 45).
Instead of the written
text and if I had matters in my own hands, my senses, fantasies and body would
come alive in your midst and no longer become mourned. We would welcome my
becoming as director and not an author/creator. A “director who has become a
kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies. And the material on
which [I] work, the themes [I] bring to throbbing life are derived not from
[me] but from” God (Perez, 1990: 36). I would be a shaman, not a Creator or
hierarchal figure-but merely the mediator of magic. That said. Forget the
theatre. You here have a factory and its economy in the theatre’s stead.
All that is left here then
is the ushering instead and the offering of an interpretation…
Introduction: The Rhizome, Processes of Becoming(s) and Faith
I think she moved away, still with the feeling of lightness
This economy of a paper does not begin with an alliance or a fluid contract,
neither a familiarity nor a fictional friendship, between Muslims/Muslimas and
Anarchists informed by poststructuralist political philosophy. Rather this
paper signals the arrival of an interpretation that seeks to usher an alliance,
a familiarity and a non-fictional friendship between these parties. I ‘speak’
here and now and at this instant and say the character of my speech is
signified as Islamic Anarchistic Becomings.
She found herself in a distant
forest, named Bois des Bruyères
In
Anti-Religious Classical Anarchisms’ insurrections against ‘the’ theological
authority, God, You – a former Classical Anarchist and now a self-proclaimed
Post-Anarchist -- became, through mere processes of re-inscription, God’s
replacement, a demagogue, a master and a new form of authority. This occurred
because You engaged in an un-statutory process, since the birth of Anarchisms,
where You claimed to have murdered God, while in fact You left the actual place
of the divine intact (Newman, 2001: 119). Relatively recently Your deliberate
outbursts conveyed that Conventional Classical Anarchisms have exhibited
fragility. A fragility emanating from Classical Anarchisms being linked and
attached to as well as emerging from Euro-centric metaphysics. Euro-centric
metaphysics’ conceptions and “concepts of human subjectivity and human
rationality…are implicitly bourgeois and statist; it is [rightly noted, as You
have,] therefore [that it is] extremely difficult, if not theoretically
impossible, for such [Classical] Anarchism[s] to transcend the sociopolitical
order” which they purported to challenge (Call, 2002: 33). You thus announced,
created and invited Post-Anarchisms as a substitute. More easily You claimed that
Post-Anarchisms affirm the importance of difference. You deliberately bless
yourself by complimenting yourself on Post-Anarchisms’ understanding of “the
need to draw together different strands of radical thinking-anarchist,
feminist, postcolonial, and so on - into provisional tactical alliances” (Call,
2002: 42-43). But despite your claim the ‘dead’ Classical Anarchisms still
belong to You and the ‘newly born’ Post-Anarchisms still remain deprived from
offering hospitality, thereby distancing itself and hence yourself, yet again
from Religion. I believe that this has occurred because You, as a
Post-modernist Anarchist, have sought to find your dwelling place not in the
past but rather in the future and though You have reconsidered your stance on
various elements pertaining to Classical Anarchisms You did not offer the same
courtesy regarding religions (Call, 2002: 42-43). You, a Post-Anarchist, are
yet still trying to escape a selective and inherited past, performing a partial
excavation, as fast as possible, rather than returning faithfully to the past
in order to move forward; Sankofa[1]. Religion(s) continue(s) to be exiled, deported,
expelled and deprived from your excavation(s). Throughout Anti-Religious
Classical Anarchisms and continuing through Post-Anarchisms, religion to You,
has always been equated with everything that is manipulative and parasitic and
this needs to be reconsidered. Your stance on religions stems from the
perception that “God [and God’s fettered religion hold]… promises…[that
according to You are] null and void, since they can only be fulfilled by
‘man’s’ subordination” (Goldman, 1969: 5-7). But such a stance only illustrates
that You are uncommitted to disarming, as You yourself desire and admit to be,
“centuries of engrained Euro-centrism” that have yet to acquire and require
overcoming(s) (Adams, 2003: 1). In principle it certainly seems that “the
importance of [your Classical and Post] Anarchism[s] …[lies] in its exposing
the authoritarianism[s] within [Classical] Marxism[s], and the unmasking of the
place of power within the state” (Newman, 2001: 159). But in paying attention
to and combating Classical Marxisms, they, Anarchisms, Classical, Post and You,
neglected themselves and yourself, and You both became ‘blind’, consciously and
unconsciously, to the “authoritarian tendencies” within Anarchisms through your
exclusion of ‘a non-Eurocentric other’ (Newman, 2001: 159). This
‘non-Eurocentric other’ I am referring to are Islam(s).
Because
of such exclusion, Your “[Classical] Anarchisms’ pure place of resistance
against power, its uncontaminated point of departure…was [and remains yet with
Post-Anarchisms and You, un-strangely] somewhat impure, and contaminated with
power” (Newman, 2001: 159). This exclusion not only has the implication of
affecting the theoretical aspects of Post-Anarchisms but has its effects on the
constitution of the Anarchist subject, You, as well. After all, “the identity
of the anarchist subject [your identity] is actually constituted through its
subordinated other - the power that it claims to eschew” over me (Newman, 2001:
119). Respectively, You and “Anarchism(s) [, Classical and Post, ought to
be]…forced to reflect on the authoritarian possibilities within [your] own
discourses, and develop appropriate strategies of resistance” to your Micro-Fascism(s)
(Newman, 2001: 119). In contesting and disarming such authority, your
authority, rather than submitting to its basic and limited jurisdiction, I
engage in ‘super-seeing’; seeing in the ‘blind’ place of the ‘blind’
Anarchisms, Classical and Post, not to mention the ‘blind’ You.
She remained sheltered by trees she
never knew well
One of Your and Post-Anarchisms’ avowed promises to Yourself and others
includes the absolute disarmament of your abstractions. Ignoring such a promise
has left You and Post-Anarchisms respectively infinitely vulnerable due to your
exclusion of Islam(s) and their different strands without knowing much if
anything about them.
You have classified heterogeneous religions under the same name and hence your
abstractly extracted view of them is that they are all the same. Your farce
remains, it just changed sides; from Classical to Post and back again to
Classical. You, now, a Post-Anarchist have followed and still follow Classical
Anarchisms’ trajectory towards religion. You have yet to come to realize, as
well, that in choosing such a re-inscription and the political representation
that accompanies it that You have delegated “our” supposedly deceased God’s
power to yourself. Respectively You run the risk of exploiting, if You have not
done so already, and perpetuating that oppression [formerly a type of theological
oppression, now a Post-Anarchistic oppression] onto other groups or
individuals; Islam(s) and I respectively (May, 1994: 47).
“How [do You, a now self-proclaimed Post-Anarchist] talk religion, talk Islam?
Of religion, of Islams? Singularity of religion, singularity of Islams today?
How dare [You] speak of [them] in the singular without fear and trembling, this
very day? And so briefly and so quickly?” (Derrida, 1996: 1). The aggregate
Islams is not Islamism and You should not forget that the latter operates in
the name of the former and thus emerges the grave question of the names of
Islam(s) that I have come here to unravel. As for I such names of Islam(s)
emerge out of recognizing that “the ‘hyper-orthodox’ & the ulemocracy cannot...reduce
[them] to a hegemonistic/universalistic ideology…to rule out divergent forms of
‘sacred politics’ informed by Sufism [e.g. the Naqshabandis], ‘radical’
Shia-ism [e.g. Ali Shariati], Ismailism, Islamic Humanism, Sunni-ism, the
‘Green Path’ of Col. Qadafi (part neo-Sufism, part anarcho-syndicalism)…the
‘cosmopolitan Islam of Bosnia…there is and will not be a single ‘monolith’ of
Islam” (Bey, 1996: 7). Furthermore, these names emerge because “the Qur’an by
means of its pulverization of human language, is…Avant-garde...Post-modern…In
its structure, its allusiveness, its ambiguities, its imagery, and its poetry”
(Cheethan, 2005: 122). “The Qurran reveals human language crushed by the power
of the divine word; God’s word unmakes all human meanings, all the proud
constructions of civilization, of high culture, and returns all the luxuriant
cosmic, imagery back to the lowly and the oppressed, so that in their
imaginations it can be made anew” (Cheethan, 2005: 122). Made anew through Ijtihad.
Islam(s) offer Muslims/Muslimas this Ijtihad, a kind of wandering in the
vertigo of the past, present and future. Ijtihad translates to an
Islamic right and duty to track, identify, intercept, pick up, translate,
interpret and re-interpret Islamic principles and values to meet the social
conditions of the past, present and future (Esposito, 2002: 159). This Ijtihad
allows for “the Islamic imagination, [as] Massignon has written, [to
testify to difference and] should not be seen as a desperate regression
back to the primitive, the eternal pagan substrate of all religions-that
proteiform cubehouse, the Ka’ba- as well as to a primitive pre-Mosaic
monotheism of Abraham…The Dome is built upon the Rock’” (Cheethan, 2005: 122).
The meaning of this is that “whatever our relation to religion may be, and to
this or that religion, we are not priests bound by a ministry, nor theologians,
nor qualified, competent representatives of religion…as such, in the sense the
certain so called Enlightenment philosophers are thought to have been”, but we
simply seek Ijtihad (Derrida, 1996: 7). I believe that it is through
this Ijtihad therefore that the world must be imaginalized, must be
interpreted along with the soul. After all, if the balance between the visible
and invisible worlds and if the balance between the material and the spiritual
is tragically lost, caught in an instant of death, creativity dies. Religion
needs to be conceptualized as a spiritual bond, “a reflecting faith…[and]
opposed to dogmatic faith…in so far as the latter claims to know and thereby
ignores the difference between faith and knowledge” (Derrida, 1996: 10). And
for this to happen not only should interpretation be allowed, but rather these
interpretations should be encouraged and embraced as opposed to Post and Classical
Anarchisms’ assumptions that all there is to know regarding the aggregate
Islams is that they are supposedly all dogmatic, authoritarian and capitalist.
For how else can they, Classical and Post-Anarchists, continue to be silent or
not have reconsidered their stance regarding religions? I deny thus that “there
is any a priori reality to the signifier: words, and specifically certain
words, are nothing more than elements within an established semiotic field, and
thus we repeat” (Perez, 1990: 116). And it is because of this denial that I can
follow through and say that “there is no universal structure of the mind, of
relationships, of sexuality, etc. any more than there is an eternal essence of
Woman-or Man. In the end we together say: we are becoming…Woman…Man…Animal…all.”
(Perez, 1990: 119).
She was never bound to death by my
surreptitious friendship
As a consequence of
all this it is easy to see how You, now a Post-Anarchist, may understand my
skepticism regarding any gesture of friendship from You. It is because You have
not given the Islam(s) I am about to unleash here infinitely respectful
attention in the past. Even if your friendship and attention came here now, I
am skeptical that it is merely premised on the intention that we may
hypothetically have the same enemies. You ask of my friendship? My friendship
came here in the knowing that the differences between us would never leave
anything else for us but friendship. Such friendship further differs in that it
is premised in infidelities that occurred prior to us trying to relate here, if
that is at all a possibility. My friendships with others were and are premised
on open theatres outside this economy of a paper. Open theatres are where the
written text is replaced with the body. After all is the theater, the real
world that is beyond the pages of these written words, not “the only place in
the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice?”
The theater is the only place where one can escape the violence of inscription
which kills the human spirit” (Perez, 1990: 47). Subsequently I ask You: How
many Muslims/Muslimas have you befriended or at least did you strive to know,
without first assuming that you know everything there is to know about them, in
the open theatre?
Unlike Your
unfounded views regarding Islam(s) I am not going to pretend to know You fully.
What I propose to know about You becomes this though. In more ways than one,
You are a Post-Anarchist and a Muslim/Muslima. You are both? Yes you. Why? You
know neither. Even had You ascertained knowledge of both You forget that “any
claim to a universal structure of the mind stems from the reactive desire to
make life mathematical, calculable and simple, as in a story with a necessary
beginning and a necessary end” (Perez, 1990: 112). It is easy to claim that
I know everything there is to know or need to know about the way someone else
chooses to live their life, but in reality relationships between human
beings are a lot richer than that. “There are as many kinds of relationships as
there are individuals.” (Perez, 1990: 112). Henceforth if You seek not the
richness of knowing about Islam(s) and Muslims/Muslimas and hence Yourself then
perhaps You do not belong here.
At the moment when the shooting was
no longer, but to come…
This economy of a paper is
built through language. Language whose “essence is friendship and hospitality”
(Derrida, 2000: 98). But language “is political [as well], and while it can
participate in political domination, it can also be used as a tool against it”,
like against your jurisdiction(s) upon my religion(s), my faith(s), my Islam(s)
(Newman, 2001: 106). My intention is then to use Your language, that of
Post-Anarchisms, and introduce to You some of the concepts in Islams’ language
such that we can relate to one another. The points where we are able to relate
and which I create here signify points of resistance; resistance to us engaging
in stereotyping one another any further. However this resistance always comes
with the realization that one can never destroy stereotyping, but merely seek
to minimize it (Sajida & Irrit interview conducted in Brooklyn). And
thus we can begin the processes of getting to know one another from these
grounded points of resistance that I offer here. For this to happen,
though, it is necessary that Post-Anarchisms liberate themselves from their own
self-ascribed authority, from their own Micro-Fascism(s). This authority
and “power must respectively take into account the kind of resistance that is
being engaged in [here, in my economy of a paper], on pain of repeating that
which it is trying to escape”; its authoritarian position regarding Islams in
general and Islam(s) in particular (May, 2004: 73). And…
In the dense forest, suddenly, after how
much time, she and I rediscovered a
Sense of the real
So I take it upon
myself, here in this economy of a paper, to invoke and draw new contours of
what You perceive as illicit and impossible but fear admitting publicly for if
you did you would be engaged in othering me further than I already am; Islamic
Anarchistic Becomings. There are three nodes of congruence between Islam(s)
and Post-Anarchisms and, respectively, three plateaus or chapters that are
unveiled here. I speak of plateaus that unfold here all three reasoning(s) one
might insist that one can be a Muslim/Muslima and a Post-Anarchist: Anti-Capitalist
Islamic Anarchistic Becomings; Anti-Authoritarian Islamic Anarchistic
Becomings; and Islamic Anarchistic Becomings of Nous. Here, with
instances on every plateau, I open and teach You of Islam(s). The first two
plateaus consist of two sacred enemies we, You and I, are averse to; Capitalism
and Authority.
The first enemy then, your enemy and my enemy is Eurocentric
Capitalism (Chapter One). Here I argue that Islam(s) share Classical
and Post-Anarchisms’ stance towards Capitalism and that Islam(s) are Anti-Capitalist.
In general, we can say that Eurocentric Capitalism’s capability belongs
to its residual strength, in that it is always adding a new axiom to the
previous ones as it appropriates whatever it finds to be a threat (Perez, 1990:
56). And right now Eurocentric Capitalism is seeking to appropriate the
aggregate Islams and thus my writing here is an attempt at re-appropriating
part of that aggregate, specifically Islam(s), that are in the process of being
appropriated. As You can see Islam(s) are already about to ‘start’ betraying
Islams, through my combat against Capitalism and Authority and my
struggle as a writer here to free Islam(s) before they fall prey to Capitalism
and Authority’s vampiric forces. It, Eurocentric Capitalism, always
works and makes others work “by inscribing, coding and re-directing the flow of
desire so that they may correspond with the flows of capital at the stock
market” (Perez, 1990: 56). Thus, it seeks to establish an arborescent
hierarchical structure, coding our every intent, our every relationship and our
every desire, into relationships and desires with a material essence, through
processes of “de-territorialization (degrounding) and territorialization
(grounding)” (Perez, 1990: 56). And so You ask what would a relationship
without a material essence be like? Would it be 'material' but not have an
'essence'? To which I reply briefly, that we, You and I, would have to talk
more about the ‘nature’ of such an essence but that I would picture it void of
materialism and whose vacuum ought to be replaced and filled with obviously
something else instead. That something else, in my eyes, is a form of communal
jurisprudence. We, You and I, Muslims/Muslimas and Anarchists as well as anyone
espousing a similar socio-political commitment, would operate and invite/create
jurisprudence, such that in each case, in each situation We, as a collectivity,
are not abstractly fighting for the ‘rights of man’ or an all encompassing
abstract impossible global form of ‘justice’ but something that is more
situational, circumstantial and hence more ‘real’.
Eurocentric
Capitalism tries always to disrupt that ‘real’ as it makes repetition, a
simulacrum, its end, such that everyone and everything is coded over and over,
merely becoming a copy of a copy, as this economy of a paper is in more than
one way a copy of every other paper. What this results in is Eurocentric
Capitalism fulfilling its desire regarding the destruction of meanings by
and through its insatiable appetite for repetitions as it creates myths “to
make people dependent on those myths…[to make] people feel that they lack, and
of course, desire something” (Perez, 1990: 113). It creates these myths by its
engagement with the promotion of its own culture; a culture that basks in the
greed and egoism of money and profits to eclipse and render idolatrous more
authentic concerns, namely, ‘us’ and everything else on earth (Call, 2003: 46).
I speak here then of a Eurocentric Capitalist culture which Islam(s),
harmoniously alongside with Classical and Post-Anarchisms, believe is a cause
and not an effect, not a disease but rather a symptom and which deserves a
resistive response from this alliance I am building here between Islam(s) and
Anarchisms, both Classical and Post (Call, 2003: 127).
The
second enemy represents itself as Eurocentric Authority (Chapter Two).
Here I testify and show that Islam(s) are not only capable of, but rather they
do in fact espouse Anti-Authoritarian principles that go hand in hand
with Post-Anarchisms’ rejection of Non-Eurocentric and Eurocentric
Authority. The former is tactical, hence micro-political and Micro-Fascist,
whereas the latter is strategic, macro-political and Macro-Fascist,
like the Eurocentric-ally conceived State. What I refer to as Micro-political authority
is a type of authority that is not necessarily Eurocentric and whose
power finds its site in the “observation that: power does not operate as many
people believe from the top down” (Call, 2003: 66). It is a power whose form is
“capillary: it is everywhere, it flows through every social relation” (Call,
2003: 66). Micro-political power has both its means and presence in everyone
and everything and is not solely constrained, confined, or shackled to
oppressors but to those who suffer under oppressions as well (Call, 2003: 66).
In other words, power passes through the hands of the mastered no less than
through the hands of the masters. Furthermore it is produced from one moment to
the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another
(Call, 2003: 66). What this means is that there is Micro-political power that
is within You and within I. A Micro-political power that is not utopian or
dialectical in its pursuit(s), as it is always becoming something else, and
neither is it confined or locked in definite relationships or Micro-Fascisms,
but rather is spiraling as it creates and re-creates itself. They are always
there. As a result of this; Micro-Fascisms grow “not, perhaps out of
the fact that…[they] can seize power at the macro-political level; any state
can do that…[but rather they are horrific fascisms that penetrate] the smallest
nooks and crannies of the social organism” (Call, 2003: 52). There is “rural [Micro]
fascism and city or neighborhood [Micro] fascism, [Micro]
fascism of the Left and [Micro] fascism of the Right, [Micro]
fascism of the couple, family, school and office” (Call, 2003: 52). These
Micro-Fascisms rise out of the positions of privilege we often enjoy as
individuals and that we often overlook and take for granted. These Micro-Fascism(s)
require overcoming(s) and resistance on an individual basis through becomings.
I see becoming(s) as connoting and necessitating a “kind of radical personal
responsibility” and permanent revolution against our own selves with every
waking moment of every day in retaliations to these Micro-Fascism(s)
(Guattari and Negri, 1985: 116). After all political “organizing signifies
first, work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective ‘singularity’”
(Guattari and Negri, 1985: 116). If these Micro-Fascisms are not fought
then their presence will provide the necessary breeding ground for the
germination and conditions of thinking which makes the state possible in the
first place (Call, 2003: 51). This is because Micro-Fascism(s) stand on
their own, then “communicate with other [Micro-Fascisms] before
resonating in a great, generalized central black hole” (Call, 2003: 52). The
central black hole is the Macro-Fascism of Eurocentric Capitalism
and intertwined with it the Eurocentric State. The authority subsumed by
and through the modern Eurocentric State and Capitalism, takes on
an abstract and generic form, that is strategic and centered as it is “a
prudent institution [that proclaims that it is for] the protection of
individuals against one another” but at any rate invites the dissolution and
enfeebling of the individuals within it; that is its function (Call, 2003: 50).
As Eurocentric Capitalism attempts to exhaust our every disorderly desire,
not allowing us to even lie down as subjects, the Eurocentric State concurrently
collaborates with it and absurdly proclaims that it is there to order the
disorder. The Eurocentric State is a Macro-Fascist
institution, an organized bureaucracy, whose desire is to enforce the creation
of a homogeneous political culture, eradicating difference as opposed to
liberating it and repeating everything as opposed to creating anything (Call,
2003: 46). It is hierarchical and its eco-political frameworks are set up, put
into place and protected by those who cannot lead or obey it themselves (Perez,
1990: 20). The modern state “is infinitely bound up with [Eurocentric] Capitalism…as
part of the [Eurocentric] Capitalist machine: capital and the
state…[are] a system of signifiers” that exist within every individual and that
shackles the individual through the infinite debt that the individual owes
them (Newman, 2001: 99). They accomplish this hold on us because both Eurocentric
Capitalism and the State, in their most abstract form, are Macro-Fascistic
‘structures’, in the most fluid of senses, that refuse to be addressed in any
names but ’the holy State’ and ‘God-Capital’, till these names, these
signifiers become, if not almost become, “religious signifiers which
individuals are subordinated to” (Newman, 2001: 99).
The third plateau that
will be discussed is written to highlight the necessity for a multiplicitous,
non-fictional and plural Nous, between Muslims/Muslimas and
Post-Anarchists, as a form of resistance to our two common enemies. Despite
Western prejudice that sees Islams, and therefore Islam(s), as necessarily
authoritarian, Islam(s) are committed to their responsibilities towards
the declaration that what they desire is to truly always see ‘any and every
other’ live freely. They, at least theoretically, long not to render ineffective
any beauty belonging to anyone or anything else, and accept that ‘the other’
must declare itself as it desires to be. Islam(s) are required to never insist,
never camouflage, and to never mask the rights belonging to ‘the other’,
whether that ‘other’ is within or without Islam(s). Islam(s) strive, as do
Post-Anarchisms, at least in theory, for Nous; in other words, for a Community.
Nous denotes the becomings of a fluid “us” between these two ways of
living, Islam(s) and Post-Anarchisms (Chapter Three). Nous is a
rhizomatic “us” that is unlike trees or their roots. A rhizomatic “us” that
connects any point from You to any other point with I and any point from I to
another point with You (May, 1994: 53). Nous’ attributes are
traits not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature, and therefore are
always attesting to the beauty of difference. Nous brings into play not
units but dimensions, discovered and undiscovered, or rather directions of
motions, of the You and the I, and hence it is always resigned to fluxes of
difference and thus subject to change as it is interpreted and re-interpreted
over and over again. Because its interpretations are infinite, Nous
speaks volumes as it has neither beginnings nor ends, but always a middle from
which it grows and which it overspills (May, 1994: 53). Its overspilling
indicates, albeit even if but temporally, that You and I, have disappeared.
Disappeared not into a colorless and puritanical “one”, rather a hospitable and
friendly multiple. This friendship and hospitality that it offers is made
possible because it is “characterized by a radical openness to an
outside…[as it] embraces four characteristics: connection, heterogeneity,
multiplicity, and rupture…[and whose] purpose…is to allow thought ‘to shake off
its model, makes its grass grow-even locally at the margins, imperceptibly’”
(Newman, 2001: 105). As such Nous, is like the thousand flowers left to
blossom and bloom, without organizational slogans and even less an enlightened
prediction, on the terrains of undermined capitalist and authoritarian
disciplinarian regimes of madness and their machines (Guattari and Negri, 1985:
132). And it is through Nous that the State is compromised because Nous
itself “constitutes an outside to the state…characterized by an absolute
exteriority…[and that is] purely conceptual: it is an image of thought, an idea
without an object…a non-place, a space characterized by pluralities,
multiplicities, difference, and becoming…an assault of the physical place”, the
Eurocentric State (Newman, 2001: 108-109). Its invention becomes a
‘system’, not built upon abstract unifications, but rather new lines of
alliances, new lines of co-operations and new ways of living and thus leads to
the birth of new communities (Guattari and Negri, 1985: 127). It becomes a way
of living, “that rejects binary divisions and hierarchies, does not privilege
one thing over another, [You over I or I over You] and is not governed by a
single unfolding [governing] logic [but rather innocent becoming(s)” and hence
the continual recreation of relationships (Newman, 2001: 105-106). This
is how the story begins, now lets us discover together how it ends…
Chapter One: Kapital’s Wet Dream:
Islam(s) & Post-Anarchisms
No Hospitality
Has it become that easy for you to proclaim that you are
just a Classical/Post-Anarchist? Has it become easy for me to admit that I am
just a Muslim & Muslima? What do you and I know about either? I admit. You
proclaim otherwise. Tell me then, what and who is a Classical/Post-Anarchist?
What and who is a Muslim & Muslima? What “is”? If you are proposing that
these signifiers are something to be taught and just “are”, think again. You
are assuming they can be. Taught by whom, You and I? Defined by whom, You and I
for everyone else? These signifiers, Islam(s) and Classical/Post-Anarchisms, do
not signify theories, they are ways of living, ways of being in the world; attitudes
(Perez, 1990: 67). “Sylvere Lotringer is an an(archist). The Italian
‘autonomists’ are an(archists). And the Rastafarians, with their own language
(patios) and lifestyle, are also an(archsits). An(archy) takes as many forms
as there are individuals” (Perez, 1990: 67). If You choose otherwise then
Your desire, Your yearning is for a solitary identity. Your desire would
traverse few lives. I on the other hand? I desire a taste for the grandeur, a
desire for addressing those who have come before I, those who will come after
I, or are already after I, a desire of promises interrupted, broken all of a
sudden, and yet still indestructible. A desire where the subjectivities of a
“we”, Nous”, the You, the “tu”, and the I, transgress the “is” and race instead,
in haste, with, through, in and out of un-despairing fluxes. Un-despairing
fluxes? Yes, un-despairing fluxes of becoming(s). My movements that I
arrogantly presumed were spoken are now speaking…
The only other thing is the opening attack on Eurocentric Capitalism
Islam(s)
interpret, unlike Eurocentric Capitalism, that “everything
[subject and object] ultimately belongs to God…Human beings are simply Caretakers,
or Vicegerents, for God’s property [subject and object]” (Esposito,
2002: 165). Therefore You and I and every other subject are Caretakers
of ‘ourselves’; You and I and every other subject are Caretakers of one
another; and we are all equally Caretakers of all of God’s objects.
I will begin this Chapter with a section titled Proudhon’s Second Coming:
What is Property, in which I will discuss the difference between
Public and Private conceptions of Property, according to my
interpretation of Islam(s), and compare this to Eurocentric Capitalism.
I will follow this by a discussion, in To become done with the Judgment of
gods: A kind of Deliverance, of how Islam(s) are opposed to not only Eurocentric
Capitalism but to Despotic Eurocentric Socialism as well. This will
be followed by an outline of how Islam(s) envision an alternative economy, and
will consist of three sections: Through an Innocent Child sentenced to death
by drowning, An Individualized Caretaker’s Face wears its emptiness
openly and Almost all the witnesses had a different opinion. But let
me briefly say this: The alternative economy that Islam(s) seek is opposed to
the individualistic accumulation of Wealth and secondly opposed to the Involuntary
Labor Relations that are associated with the accumulation of that Wealth
in Eurocentric Capitalism. Respectively I will be introducing and
discussing three main concepts: The first is that of Caretakers, of
which there are two types: Communal and/or Individual; the second
concept is what is referred to as “small borrowed firms”; finally the
third is Mudarabah/Musharakah. I will then proceed to discuss both
practical and symbolic measures that are forms of Reactive Resistance towards
Eurocentric Capitalism, in the sections titled Rejoice, An Exodus
without Enunciations, Class Struggle already permeates the family and I
sacrificed my nights to your business. Islam(s) use these reactive
resistances to ward off Eurocentric Capitalist Wealth and its
accumulative tentacles: interest, surplus profits not ‘profits’, ground rent,
inheritance and taxation. I will conclude the chapter by highlighting three Active
Resistances in the last three sections, which are again of both symbolic
and practical value, for the active, rather than just reactionary restoration
of any inequalities in income that may arise between individuals within a given
community.
Proudhon’s Second Coming: What is Property
A
Koranic verse emerges to respectively iterate and remind You and I of what this
Chapter proclaimed at the very beginning, that everything ultimately belongs to
God: “O believers, expend of the good things you have earned, and of what We
have produced for you from the earth; and intend not the corruption of it for
your expending, for you would never take it yourselves…Those who expend…night
and day, secretly and in public, their wage awaits them with their Lord, and no
fear shall be on them; neither shall they sorrow” (Qurran: Chapter II,
Verse 269). God creates God’s Property, the object, and
all objects that are of this world are available in abundance and God’s
intention is that such Property, such objects, becomes shared in equity
(Esposito, 1980: 37). Property signifies then abstractly through
Islam(s), unlike through Eurocentric Capitalism, bonds that are
communal, Public, rather than personal, Private. Individuals
according to this interpretation of Islam(s) therefore have claims to at
least that which suffices in creating a decent ‘quality of life’ rather
than just a ‘standard of living’ (Esposito, 1980: 37).
Public
Objects, through this interpretation of Islam(s), become a collective and
communal concern and access to such objects is a right such that these objects
become divided ‘equally’ amongst the community (Esposito, 1980: 32). “The public
sphere [here then and through Islam(s)]…characterizes the objective nature
of Property” as opposed to the private appropriation of Property
in Eurocentric Capitalism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 451). A
new non-Euro-centric meaning of Property emerges as a result. Property,
through Islam(s) and with this new conception, is absolutely owned by
God and with it a new type of economic relationship: God-Caretaker(s).
Conversely Eurocentric
Capitalism is an idea that appropriates Property solely to suit
the interests and desires belonging to a Master; a capitalist. The capitalist’s
desires, which will be discussed in more detail further in the subsections to
follow, are in a continual quest and thirst for the maximization, hence
quantification, of surplus objects and subjects (Abdul-Rauf,
1978: 17). Islam(s) associate these individualized desires with “selfishness,
cruel individualism, and greed…[and because of that they, these desires, are
always] bound to create an environment of loneliness and isolation”
(Abdul-Rauf, 1978: 17). Subsequently Eurocentric Capitalism has no
regard for the importance of the collective and communal caretaking of Property
as Islam(s) do.
To become done with the Judgments of
gods: A kind of deliverance
Eurocentric
Capitalism is “a decentralized system that provides individuals with…[an]
atmosphere of severe competitiveness [through private appropriations,
unlike Islam(s), and which [are]…bound to lead to deep tension[s] and
depression[s]…[as well as acts of] criminality, corruption on a large scale and
a [birth of a] deep fear of insecurity since there can be no limit” of an
individual’s discard of the communal (Abdul-Rauf, 1978: 17). This has been
rightly noted. There is a dialectically opposed alternative to this Eurocentric
Capitalism. I am speaking of course of Eurocentric Socialism. I am
referring to an unbridled Eurocentric Socialism whose conception of the
communal has no limit in its disregard for the individual, and hence becomes
the opposite of Eurocentric Capitalism. This disregard for the
individual is signified through the forbiddance of desires belonging to that
individual. This forbiddance is born through the complete impossibility of
becoming a ‘borrower’ or ‘caretaker’ of any kind,
ushering in, instead, centralizing and regulating mechanisms where infinite
desire(s) is/are controlled, kept in line and bound to nepotism (Abdul-Raud,
1978: 18-19). This nepotism is a usurpation of an individual’s autonomy,
agency, liberties of economic action(s), desensitizing any potential desires in
the process to innovate, to create, to work, all of which could be done in
moderation and without depriving subjectivities of their dignity, through a
deprivation of their multiple desires. Islam(s) are opposed to Eurocentric
Socialism on these grounds. That is, on the grounds that Eurocentric
Socialism forgets the singular, the unique, the always differential and the
always ‘other’ in favor of the artificial homogeneous pack of ‘oneness’ in the
communal. Eurocentric Socialism then is as destructive as Eurocentric
Capitalism. Islam(s) are in defense of what they perceive to be necessary
individualized desires that ought to be left to flourish so long as these
individualized desires do not sacrifice or jeopardize the community’s
interests. So what Islam(s) perceive an individual as being is a unique entity
whose desires give rise to the communal but at the same time Islam(s) see the
reverse of this as equally important as well (Abdul-Rauf, 1978: 18-19). That
is, the communal gives rise to the individual too. I ‘speak’ then and say that:
“[Eurocentric] Capitalism and [Eurocentric] Socialism
[represent two extremes and they] have only succeeded in…[subjugating] work to
a social mechanism which is logo-centric or paranoid, authoritarian [through
their differential means and in their own ways]…and destructive” (Guattari
& Negri, 1985: 14). Islam(s) suggest, then, a middle path between both
Capitalism and Socialism. This is because Islam(s) believe in
neither the necessity for excess, surplus of subjects and objects, as in
Eurocentric Capitalism, nor the necessity for scarcity, rationing of
subjects and objects, as in Eurocentric Socialism (Abdul-Rauf, 1978:
18-19). As I will continue to illustrate, Islam(s) admit and insist that “the
most important lesson [is that] the construction of healthy communities begins
and ends with unique personalities, that the collective potential is realized
only when a singular is free”, but again never at the expense of the communal
(Guattari & Negri, 1985: 17). But to conceptualize what Islam(s) offer in
response and as an alternative economy to Eurocentric Socialism and Capitalism,
there lies the necessity of creating new Non-Eurocentric concepts, ‘Islamicized’
concepts.
Through an Innocent Child Sentenced
to death by drowning
In this section I create ‘new’ concept(s), through Islams’ conceptions of an
alternative economy. The first is that of the Caretaker. As I mentioned
earlier, s/he has available two types of economic relationships:
Individualized and/or Communal. Abstractly the concept of the Caretaker
implies that s/he is a mere temporary ‘beneficiary’, a ‘trustee’ and a mere
‘borrower’ of God’s Property. Such a Caretaker, as I articulated
before, is a ‘borrower’ and not an ‘absolute owner’; that position of the
‘absolute owner’ is left to God (Esposito, 1980: 36). These Caretakers
are symbolically and practically, in accordance with the interpretation I
provide here, ‘bound’ by new forms of relations, amongst You and I, and with
‘this’ and ‘that’, objects. The Caretaker is not a detached prisoner or
a proletariat, both of whom are concepts and signifiers that are Eurocentrically
conceived and premised upon Eurocentric models. Because in Islam(s) all Property
belongs to God, a dual ownership, partnership or what could be thought
of as ‘in between state’ emerges. It, this dual ownership, is a hybrid,
and though seemingly complex is quite simple. It is comprised and takes shape
or form between two parties. A party comprised of a community, Communal
Caretakers, and the second party, God, whose ownership precludes
everything. Islam(s) then envision that these communities of Caretakers operate
through de-centralized decision-making processes that are premised upon consultation
or what is referred to as Shura. Shura is not derived from
secondary sources of literature but is derived from the Koran (Choudhury, 1997:
107).
Shura
guides these ‘new associations’, this ‘new economy’, that
becomes comprised or composed of “a large number of small
[borrowed] ‘firms’ [through borrowed Property from God]”
(Awan, 1983: 30). These associations or ‘small borrowed firms’ have an
essence that utterly “differ[s] from a traditional [Eurocentric] sense
of Ownership” (Awan, 1983: 30). “What becomes then of the difference(s)
between these ‘small borrowed firms’ and “self-managed [Monopolistic
and Oligopolistic] firms and cooperatives in [Eurocentrically] Capitalist
and [Eurocentrically] Socialist economies [respectively]” (Awan,
1983: 31)? These ‘small borrowed firms’ occupying and occupied by an Ummah,
a community, are constituted by continual temporal ‘states’ of abductions and
transformations as Individualized and Communal Caretakers are
always only occupying temporary states of ownership. That is, these states of
ownership are never permanent. It is important to note that Communal
Caretakers have an essence: Shirakah, partnership in everything,
particularly that which subscribes to the economic, and who “decide freely [Ikhtiy’ar]…[to
participate or not] without outside influence…[unlike those un-consented to and
influential visitations by] capitalist suppliers [in Eurocentric Capitalist
Economies and similarly] planning authorities [in Eurocentric Socialist
Economies]” (Awan, 1983: 32). Thus participation in ‘small borrowed
firms’ is guided, unlike Eurocentric Capitalism and Socialism,
upon the ‘basis of equality’ and a collective obligation, Fardh, towards
a shared communal responsibility in the decision-making processes following the
establishment of what is referred to as Tawheed. Tawheed, is
anything but a limit, for it is a private recognition and a public declaration
that “once the Sovereignty of God is recognized, the ‘authority’ for [a small
borrowed firm’s] establishment is vested in the whole Ummah
(Community) and is to be exercised in light of the Koran through the
‘democratic’ process of [partial or full] consultation with [in] the Ummah”
(Awan, 1983: 32). Tawheed is a coin with two faces: one implying that
God is the creator, and the other that individuals are equal partners and that
each individual is brother and sister to the other (Esposito, 1980: 31).
Pertaining to Public Property, this Tawheed’s consequence is that
the Ummah and hence community becomes built upon equality and
cooperation, as divinity belongs solely to God (Esposito, 1978: 31). A
Koranic verse illustrates further: “And they conduct their affairs by mutual
consultation”, through Shura (Qurran, Chapter 42: Verse 38).
Furthermore unlike Islams’ creation of ‘small borrowed firms’, another
major difference between them and Monopolies/Oligopolies and even State-run
cooperatives is that “self-managed [Monopolistic and Oligopolistic]
firms and cooperatives in [Eurocentrically] Capitalist or [Eurocentrically]
Socialist economies remain financially dependent [up]on owners of
capital or state bureaucracies” (Awan, 1983: 31). A resultant “undue
influence on the decision-making process [through the ‘state’, through
‘capitalists’ or a hybrid of both] arises” (Awan, 1983: 31). That is, the
potential for coercive influences comes about. Islam(s) are opposed to these
coercive forces. Associations within these ‘small borrowed firms’ become
related not to ‘Eurocentric ownership’, but a ‘dual ownership’,
again where individuals and the communal are in continual processes or ‘states’
of temporary borrowing(s) of Property. The associations and bonds
within these ‘small borrowed firms,’ through Islam(s), are premised upon
acts of participation, involvement, and more importantly characterized in their
desire to become conditionally open to everyone so long as those choosing to be
involved espouse an ethical commitment to the community (Awan, 1983: 31). Thus
I ‘speak’ of a radical openness, through Islam(s), which is conditional upon
the assumption that a/the individualized subject(s) desiring inclusion,
through participatory acts within ‘small borrowed firms’, recognize(s)
two matters: First, the importance and necessity of all that is communal,
unlike Eurocentric Capitalism, through an appreciation of all
associations with other Caretakers; Secondly, that a/the individualized
subject(s) recognize the participatory commitments through a becoming
‘borrower’, Caretaker, never an absolute owner themselves.
Hence s/he becomes like all other and any other Caretaker(s) equal and
never privileged over others. Ownership is correlated, through Islam(s), solely
with God while caretaking is premised upon community volunteering in the
caretaking processes. Therefore the participatory acts are of a Voluntary
essence unlike the Involuntary Relations born out of Eurocentric
Capitalism. Therefore, Islam(s) are in opposition to coercion. Eurocentric
Capitalism’s abuse of labor through surplus labor through the
monopolistic appropriation of labor by the entrepreneur and whom is no longer
the landowner, in Islam(s) then is unacceptable (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980:
442).
Islam(s) are opposed to Involuntary
Relations because Communal Caretakers are to be born out of Ikhtiy’ar,
the voluntary relations and associations (Wilson, 1997: 134), It is
a Fardh, a religious obligation, that there is a guaranteed degree and
expected quality of life amongst the ‘members’ of a community, and for this to
happen Caretakers and the community at large ought to be able to choose
and voice their opinions freely. Governing the relationship, the association
amidst Communal Caretakers becomes an ethical conduct. A conduct that
neither perceives a Communal Caretaker, a voluntary worker, to
be in a position of enjoying any innate moral superiority over another voluntary
worker (Esposito, 1980: 44). Communal Caretakers are “accorded a
dignity in keeping with …[their] status as…vicegerent[s] of God on
earth…[whose] return[s] can take the form of wages or a share in the ‘Useful
Profit’ of enterprise” (Ahmad, 1991: 37). Islam(s) are therefore
“strongly opposed to [the] exploitation of [Caretakers by one another]
and [they instead] seek to promote the greatest amity between” Caretakers
(Ahamd, 1991: 41). A Koranic verse iterates this: “Withhold not things justly
due to others” (Chapter 29: Verse 183). Another reason that Islam(s) are
opposed to Eurocentric Capitalist actions is that Capitalism suffocates the
Involuntary worker financially, to say the least. In Islam(s) “wages
[to voluntary workers are not] to be determined exclusively by the free
play of market forces” (Ahmad, 1991: 41). In other words the “wage [paid to the
workers in Islam(s)]…[should] not [be] related to the marginal productivity of
the worker[s]” as in Capitalism; hence Real Wage (Ahmad, 1991:
42), Rather the wage paid to any worker or Caretaker should be related
to the cost necessary for the workers/Caretakers to have an adequate
quality of life instead of simply them being provided with a supposedly ‘decent’
standard of living (Ahmad, 1991: 42). Why? Because Real Wages in Eurocentric
Capitalism are not converted to the ‘actual cost of living’ by
correspondence and comparison, and therefore they in reality result in an
exacerbation of the differences between the two sets, owner and owned;
entrepreneur and worker (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 446). Islam(s) however
require that compensation be paid to workers/Caretakers, unlike Eurocentric
Capitalism, before their sweat dries therefore not making the worker wait
for market forces to determine their wages and their fate (Ahmad, 1991: 42).
Therefore Islams’ definition of ‘wage’ and the one I am using here has an
essence that is opposed to the Eurocentric conception of Wages, as well
as the Eurocentric Capitalist and Socialist Conceptions of labor.
An Individualized Caretaker’s Face wears it emptiness
openly
“In order to have shit,
that is, meat, where there was only blood and a junkyard of bones…[‘man’]
learned himself [or/and herself] to act like an animal and to eat rat daintily”
(Artaud, 1976: 560-561).
As illustrated above,
Islam(s) embrace and focus on the collective potential of community, but hold
that such a realization is born only when the singular is free. This section respectively
is dedicated specifically to addressing Individualized Caretakers their
form and their relationship(s) to Communal Caretakers. Although Communal
Caretakers are preferred, Islam(s) appreciate singularity and hence
difference, and seek to make room for both the community and the individual
together (Esposito, 1980: 42). For this to happen, Islam(s) hold that the
singular must be free and that desires are affirmed, rather than negated and
dismissed as in Despotic Eurocentric Socialism. Such individual freedoms
and the affirmation of desires that comes with it, however, are left to
flourish only until they override the rights of the communal as I
mentioned in the former section. Thus there is a limit to individualized
desires. This way Islam(s) avoid the radical focus on the individual’s rights,
which, in Western Liberalism, dismisses the importance of communal organizing.
Instead, Islam(s) adopt measures, which will be discussed relatively soon, with
the symbolic and practical intent of reducing the conflict of interest and
negotiating between the rights of communities and individuals.
Because Islam(s)
embrace individuality they offer spaces where the Individualized Caretaker,
the singular, not Communal Caretakers, not the plural and multiple, can
innovate and bask in difference. This appreciation of difference is critical
because one must find a major field of action for human imaginations. There is
always a subject, an individual, who desires imaginatively to create something
‘new’, which others belonging to the communal may not necessarily be inclined
towards or interested in. Therefore the essence of desires belonging to
subjects, consciously and unconsciously, is not centered nor fixed in ‘states’
of stagnation but rather it always occupies varying intensities and ‘states’ of
flux. There are no desires that are centralized. Thus we say together: desires
are infinitely in flux and endlessly becoming. Endlessly becoming something
‘other’ than what they were and what they supposedly are. Again it is important
to re-iterate that the fact that desires are always becoming is not
however to be taken as a justification for inequality in Capitalist
societies. Islams’ subject then may become an Individualized Caretaker,
a ‘small borrowed firm’, but remains subject to specific constraints.
How?
Because idealism has
no place here and because of the potential for there to be differences in Mal,
money, that rise to the surface amongst Caretakers as a result of
trying to build a compromise between the rights of the individual and
those of the communal, it is important to understand how Islam(s)
propose that individualized desires in particular are kept in check. How
are these differences in Mal dealt with? Before I respond to such a
question, it becomes important to note that what I refer to as Mal is
composed differently than what is Eurocentrically referred to as Wealth.
Differences in Mal arise in Islam(s) through “differences in human…[, individualized
desires,] for work,” and not through Property as Property is
Publicly owned and belongs solely to God (Esposito, 1980: 32). Therefore
Islam(s) adopt overriding tactics that parallel desires and that actively
denounce disparaging differences of this Mal; aroused through
fluctuating desires. Some of these tactics are specific, like those associated
with the Individualized Caretaker, while others, as I intend on
discussing near the Chapter’s end, are applicable on a more strategic and hence
communal level. With respect to an Individualized Caretaker who may
attempt to accumulate Mal or appropriate Public Property, any
desire to claim natural resources as their own becomes constrained symbolically
through the principle of absolute ownership by God, which was discussed in the
previous section; Tawheed (Esposito, 1980: 41). “Natural resources
[objects] in the universe, such as land, capital, general circumstances such as
shortages for reasons of war or disasters as well as laws of nature, all
these ‘belong’ to the whole of society, and all its members have equal
shares and rights of access to them” (Esposito, 1978: 31). Therefore no
Individualized or Communal Caretaker has the right of claiming a
bigger share (Esposito, 1980: 31). Hence the Individualized Caretaker is
not only symbolically constrained by the concept of Tawheed, but is
bound practically through the community by being only allowed the borrowing of
specific types of property (Ahmad, 1991: 34). The remaining properties
therefore must be strictly communal properties, for they are
particularly for the larger community’s interests (Ahmad, 1991: 34). Another
practical tactic is that if an Individualized Caretaker is using
or going to use certain resources over which they may claim ‘priority’, they
are required by the community to “give it up to another member of society
[if it is unused] and [thus the Individualized Caretaker] should not [be
allowed to] claim ultimate [absolute] ownership over the…[Mal] produced
by that resource” (Esposito, 1980: 31). Furthermore if an Individualized
Caretaker, whose use of a Property is “in a manner which
damages…others” then this is disallowed and again it is at this point that the
community intervenes to prevent the individual from inflicting any further
damages (Ahmad, 1991: 33). Even more so the extra Mal beyond the Individualized
Caretaker’s equal share and “which is due to productivity of those natural
resources that are used” and which does not belong to the Individualized
Caretaker to begin with, are all to be given up, detached and uprooted from
a Caretakers’ lust for such Mal by the community itself, through
the abstract measures that will be discussed by the end of this chapter (Esposito,
1980: 31). An Individualized and Communal Caretaker for
that matter is/are encouraged therefore through these measures to never
be rooted and fixated in their lust for money. That is faith and these are the
Islam(s) I speak of here. “If a segment of society is without [a reasonable
quality of life which includes] shelter, clothing, food, and adequate economic
opportunity, then societal needs [and thus that which is communal]…take[s]
priority over” these ‘small borrowed firm’ inhabited by an Individualized
Caretaker’s desires.
An Individualized
Caretaker is therefore not a creator, but one whose position is necessary
to rightly maintain the conditions for the creativity belonging to the Individualized
Caretaker’s autonomy and desires. Instead of seeing this Caretaker
as a capitalist, it is important that the desires belonging to the
former be allowed to become ignited and subtly kept in line through overriding
tactics such as Islam(s) propose. It is time for You to think in reverse and
to suddenly revile your thoughts.
Almost all the witnesses had a
different opinion
Because dual ownerships, through Islam(s), “guarantee equal
[indiscriminate] division of initial…[Mal and Public Property]
among all members” of a community it becomes important to ask who ‘supplies’
the initial capital for these ‘small borrowed firms’, individualized and/or
communal (Awan, 1983: 32)? “The answer to this is that because “the
availability of [communal] capital [is] at zero interest rate [, since
interest as I will discuss later is forbidden in Islam(s),]…[there is the
guarantee] that an individual or community would be better off by providing
‘their’ monetary assets for investment, rather than keeping them in the…banks
and paying costs on these assets” (Awan, 1983: 32). One might ask why the communal
would be inclined to do this? They are inclined to do this to prevent a Monopoly
and an Oligopoly. I discussed this briefly in the former section
distinguishing between small borrowed firms in Islam(s) and Monopolies/Oligopolies
in Eurocentric Capitalism. I proved that Monopolies and Oligopolies
are not permitted, at least theoretically, in Islam(s) and that the growth
of ‘small borrowed firms’ cannot lead to a monopolistic control of Caretaker(s)
(Choudhury, 1997: 108). The firms and community, through the tactics described,
have a way of regulating, in one or a combination of ways, the size of these
firms such that they can never get an opportunity to achieve too much economic
power. This is because if Property is temporally used primarily for the
service of the community, and if its availability is through God first, then
there are “no artificial obstacles [that] prevent new [small borrowed] firms
from entering or existing [small borrowed] firms from leaving”
(Awan, 1983: 33).
It is also important to note that Eurocentric
Capitalism’s Monopolies and Oligopolies cannot exist because of the
presence of Mudarabah/Musharakah.
Mudarabah/Musharakah is an external financial structure, communally
established in Islam(s), completely devoid of Interest, that encourages
joint ventures. It calls for the extension of existing Caretaker
relationships and creation of new Caretakers. Furthermore it
commences, or at the very least, provides the potential for, the commencing of
‘new borrowed small firms’, raising them to the surface as independent
offshoots of existing ‘small borrowed firms’ (Choudhury, 1997: 110).
There are
obviously two positive effects of such an impetus, Mudarabah/Musharakah.
The first pertains to the creation of a greater number of ‘small
borrowed firms’, more diversified ‘small borrowed firms’, with
subsequently greater effective complementary inter-linkages appearing and hence
more adequate resource allocation amongst these ‘small borrowed firms’
occupying and occupied by an Ummah (Choudhury, 1997: 110). The second
positive effect is a minimization of Israf (Choudhury, 1997: 110) In
other words Mudarabah/Musharakah seeks more adequate resource allocation
by minimizing waste in production, consumption and commodity exchange value,
all of which occur because of stockpiling and which results in what
Islam(s) refer to as Israf.
More plainly Islam(s) desire to minimize the gap of
stockpiling, the surplus of object and subject; to prevent
unnecessary depletion or destruction once a threshold, the threshold in
which stock begins to pile, is reached (Deleuze & Guattari, 1997: 440). Islam(s)
seek to minimize the production of shit that you don’t need and that You and I
will never consume. Islam(s) try and do this by proposing that the
threshold becomes the exchange limit, in which exchange is of
interest to both parties, consumer and producer. Therefore it, the exchange
limit, is “one of temporal succession[s] because…[it] preserves itself
[from Israf]…by switching territories [of what is produced and what is
consumed in a joint collaboration by both parties] at the conclusion of each
period (itinerancy, itineration)…[and it is] this iteration
[that] will govern the apparent exchange” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1997:
440). Conversely Eurocentric Capitalism desires such stockpiling
to occur, since its law and concern is that of the simultaneous exploitation of
different territories; or, when the exploitation is successive, the succession
of operation periods bares on one and the same territory” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1980: 440).
There are
other, specifically three, Islamic symbolic effects of Mudarabah/Musharakah.
The first is a desire that belongs to the fact that it illustrates Ehsan,
kindness and generosity to another subject, a member of the community. The
second is that it symbolizes Huquq al-Ibadah, duties to another subject,
a member of the community therefore enhancing the spirit of a community’s
cohesiveness. Furthermore it affirms Huquq al-Allah, duties to God, the
absolute owner of Property and which Caretakers have
temporarily borrowed from, through a fulfillment of God’s request of preserving
Huquq al-Ibadah; the caretaking of God’s Property.
The accuser even pretended that it wasn’t the accused but
someone else who had sung
I
am about to ‘speak’ of Islams’ Reactive strategic resistances towards Eurocentric
Capitalist Wealth. Capitalist Wealth is accumulated and hence is
comprised from four apparatuses of capture: Interest, Surplus Profits
not Profit, Ground Rent, Inheritance and Taxation. Islam(s)
and this economy of a paper address all these apparatuses of capture, all these
tentacles.
Rejoice
Interest,
belonging to Wealth is referred to through Islam(s) as Riba.
It, Riba, is forbidden thrice, at least, throughout the Koran. A verse
illustrates this: “Those who benefit from interest shall be raised like those
who have been driven to madness by the touch of the Devil; this is because they
say: ‘Trade is like interest’ while God has permitted trade and forbidden
interest…If the debtor is in difficulty, let him [and her] respite until it is
easier, but if you forego out of charity, it is better for you if you realize”
(Surat Al-Baqarah: Verses 275-281).
Riba, and its “collection…was and is forbidden because it served [and
serves] as a means of exploiting” all who experience bare poverty (Esposito,
2002: 163). It, Riba, takes advantage of an individual’s weak economic
position and is repugnant of the spirit of Islam(s) whose underlying
philosophies are those of al-‘adl wa’l-ihasan, justice and benevolence
(Ahmad, 1991: 36). Riba is an apparatus of capture. Islam(s) perceive Riba’s
essence to be anticipation-evaluation-calculation, and as such it offers “an
unfair gain to the lender [of a loan, Qard-e-Hasanah], [and] whom
receives money without working for it” (Esposito, 2002: 166). Therefore it
“imposes an unfair burden on the borrower, who must repay the loan and a
finance charge regardless of whether his [and/or her] money grows or he [and/or
she] suffers a monetary loss” (Esposito, 2002: 166).
Islam(s)
forbid Riba because its fluctuations perpetuate monetary disequilibrium
and a randomness causing the exchange value itself of money to neither reflect
the properties of store of value in money or stable valuation of Property
(Choudhury, 1998: 170). Riba according to Islam(s) results in “monetary
aggregates [that] fail to satisfy the essential conditions of stability, exchange
and convertibility of monetary numeraire” (Choudhury, 1998: 170). Furthermore, Riba
is created, hegemonically determined and imposed by a Capitalist, a
self-declared Master of Wealth, as the condition of
economic ‘normalcy’ upon which the Slave and temporary recipient of but
a portion of that Wealth, a loaned wealth, must subscribe. Riba, Interest,
is a Capitalist’s, a Master’s selfless motive, and offers no
hospitality for a Slaves’ tears, sweat (Esposito, 1980: 32). This is how
Riba always has been and always will be a form of guaranteed Wealth power
and privilege for a Capitalist, a Master. Riba therefore
denotes “the payment of something definite in return for something uncertain”
and respectively militates against Islamic values and is differentially
different from what Islam(s) allow and refer to as ‘Useful Profit/Mal,’ Haq
Al-Mal, the right to earn a living. Useful Profit/Mal as a
worked for earning is required to be lawful and carries with it due obligations
that ought to be duly discharged to the community (Ahmad, 1991: 39). It, ‘Useful
Profit/Mal’, is unlike Riba because it “is uncertain and
[respectively its] actual quantum, positive or negative” is not predetermined
and yet limited within “reasonable bounds in the ‘interest’ of an equitable
distribution of income and wealth” (Ahmad, 1991: 39).
‘Useful
Profit/Mal’ is generated by Individualized and/or Communal
Caretakers “through work that should be just, but it need not be
strictly,[though Islam(s) always strives for it to be,] egalitarian” (Awan,
1983: 31). This lack of full equity arises out of varying
“skill[s]…responsibilities…[and desires] of work, [and thus] the share of the
residual” amongst the Caretakers will always be somewhat different
(Awan, 1983: 31). “The principle of social control of production” by Caretakers,
Individualized and Communal, creates the conditions that allow “profit-sharing
[to] act as the basis of distributing equally the resources and output of
production and are activated in” Islam(s) through these principles and
obligations (Choudhury, 1997: 107).
Surplus
profit is on the other hand, unlike Useful Profit/Mal. Surplus Profit is an
apparatus of capture. Surplus profit accrues exploitation of a subject or/and
an object and is premised on comparisons of the ‘two equal’ subjects, ‘two
equal’ objects and their appropriation for the sole monopoly or oligopoly of an
owner or owners respectively (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 441). Therefore
Surplus Profit is excessively constitutive of, over and above ‘Useful
Profit/Mal’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 446).
From
discussing Riba/Interest and Surplus Profit to a discussion of
the two remaining apparatuses of capture in the respective sections to
follow: Ground Rent and Inheritance.
An Exodus without Enunciations
“Ground rent, in its abstract model, appears precisely
when a comparison is drawn between different simultaneously exploited
territories, or between successive exploitations of the same territory” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1980: 440). Therefore, “the earth…the land has two
potentialities of deterritorialization: (1) its differences in quality are
comparable to one another, from the standpoint of a quantity establishing a
correspondence between them and exploitable pieces of land; (2) the set of
exploited lands is appropriable, as opposed to exterior unclaimed land,
from the standpoint of a monopoly that fixes the landowner or – owners”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 441). The second postulate here is the necessary
condition for the first. “The worst land (or the poorest exploitation) bears no
rent, but it makes it so that the other soils do bare rent, ‘produce’ it in a
comparative way” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 441).
Islam(s) say
then that “to receive rent on [God’s property as] land [that has never been
used] or resources is prohibited” (Esposito, 1980: 34). No Individualized
and/or Communal Caretakers within Islam(s) may lay claim(s) to
unused resources if they do not put them to use for the community (Esposito,
1978: 36). Contrarily, “ground [absolute] rent homogenizes,
equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking the excess of the
highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to a landowner [whom
is not a Caretaker]” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 441). However, “if
[through Islam(s) and bearing in mind that] the… [Caretaker(s), are
never absolute owners but rather borrowers] of such a property, [that it
happens that] God’s property, has ‘improved’ the land or resources, through
labor or other resources, ‘rent’ [never ‘absolute’, never ground rent]
can be levied [only] in proportion with such ‘improvements’”; not in
proportion and through association-comparison apparatuses of capture to other
territories (Esposito, 1989: 34). Furthermore it, ‘rent’, is subject
to a conditional ‘if’ and a conditional ‘can’ as opposed to a ‘must’. Hence
there is never absolute ground rent through Islam(s), rather ‘a possible
rent’ and that is not preferred, as opposed to ‘a must and absolute
ground rent’ through Eurocentric Capitalism. Respectively and even
in such a case of a Caretaker’s desire to request ‘rent’, never absolute
ground rent, a Caretaker receives two conditions: an ‘if’ and a
‘can’ to which obligations arise as the Caretaker owns not property. A/The
Caretaker(s) is/are bound and obligated by Islam(s) that operate and
interpret that “many individual ‘needs’ and…any excess…[were and are] not
permissible” (Esposito, 1980: 37). A/The Caretaker(s) is/are therefore
bound and obligated as I asserted formerly in the use of such Property
through the requirement that such Property be borrowed for the benefit
of the communal.
Class Struggle already permeates the family
“Islamic
inheritance laws are aimed at achieving a wide distribution of wealth amongst
the close relatives of the deceased; at the same time the laws are geared to
avoid hoarding and individualistic discrimination and squabbling within the
family unit” (Esposito, 1978: 35). Therefore Islamic Inheritance
laws possess an essence that desires an emission and a de-centering of the
deceased individual, displacing them, for the fabric of a community is placed
“ahead [and above] of the emotional whims of the deceased” (Esposito, 1978:
35). Islam(s) are concerned with a “dispersal of ‘wealth’ from one to many,
rather than its channeling from many to one” as Eurocentric Capitalism
(Esposito, 1978: 35). This is off course unlike Eurocentric Capitalist
Societies that desire to maintain a hold and centralize holdings and thus
Wealth.
I
sacrificed my nights to your business
Zakat, alms tax, is an act that ‘works’ against
any further potential hoarding desires seeking to worship Wealth: Zakat
through Haqq; a preservation of social justice. Zakat is
the third pillar in Islam(s) and on a personal note and just for you to know
there are five (Esposito, 1990: 26). It is a “divinely revealed requirement for
those who wish to believe [in] eternal salvation (Esposito, 1980: 26-27). Zakat
acts as an endogenous money multiplier and involves “the annual payment of alms
[a principled tax] in income and savings, in trade commodities, in crops, and
in certain other properties” as an obligation to the needy. Zakat is the
anti-thesis to Taxation.
This is
because “taxation...creates money…and it corresponds with services and
goods in the current of that [Economic] circulation…[In it] the state
finds the means for foreign trade, insofar as it appropriates that trade…and
which makes Monopolistic appropriation of outside exchange” possible
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 443). On the other hand Zakat is not
merely a conventional source of ‘nourishment supposedly for the poor’, like
that associated with governmental revenue and taxation (Esposito, 1980: 27).
That is, it is not used for the appropriation of an outside exchange as a means
for foreign trade nor could and should it be a source for Monopolization.
To prevent the appropriation of Zakat, Islam(s) demand that it is not to
be collected by the state, unlike Taxation. In other words because Zakat
is an obligation to the community as a whole and therefore is to be made
specifically and directly to those in more need of it, it should never be paid
to an impersonalized government nor to it a revenue-collecting agency
(Esposito, 1980: 27). Zakat then becomes a form of strategic
resistance to Eurocentric Capitalism and in a way the Eurocentric
State because it is premised on the Islamic belief that poverty is not
normal, all the mean while dismissing even practically the role of Macro-Fascist
state-like agencies. The distortion of Zakat as some sort of free
generosity of some towards others in the hope that the wealth of the rich and
the destitution of the poor may somehow miraculously find a point of balance
furthermore is inadequate (Ramadan, 2004: 178). This is because both
symbolically and practically Zakat is a disassociation of a ‘being’ from
‘their’ accrued ‘Wealth’ and therefore from their hoarding self; from
their Micro-Fascism. Zakat in this way is a full and ethical
conception of human relations (Ramadan, 2004: 178). Zakat is the right
of the poor over the rich and not a privilege being bestowed by the rich over
those in poverty. It is for “those in whose ‘Wealth’ is a right known
for the beggar and the outcast” (Esposito, 1980: 27). And it is because of this
that Zakat ought to be given willingly, not to be paid begrudgingly, if
the divine law [associated with it] is to be fulfilled” (Esposito, 1980: 27).
Because it is a means of reducing selfishness and expiation for past
selfishness and a tomorrow filled with the incentive of having improved
oneself, Zakat becomes an act of having conquered a Micro-Fascism
within oneself even if but temporally, until the next time it is paid again,
again and again (Esposito, 1980: 27). A Koranic Verse to support this is that:
“The free will offerings are for the poor and needy, those who work to collect
them, those whose hearts are brought together the ransoming of slaves, debtors,
in God’s way, and the traveler; so God ordains” (Chapter IX: Verse 60). If Zakat
is not sufficient to restore equality then it is ‘repeated’ until the
sufficient qualities of life of those who claim assistance are met (Esposito,
1980: 28). It is in this way that Zakat becomes not “just a widow’s mite
to be paid out of duty and distributed as charity…anything but that…woven into
the very fabric of society, that aims at freeing the poor from their dependence
so that eventually they themselves will pay Zakat [to help others]”
(Ramadan, 2004: 189). Therefore it “demands…knowledge of the environment, the
community, and the social and economic situation” of that community (Ramadan,
2004: 193). In the seeking of such knowledge a sense of communal responsibility
is continuously reborn over and over again, as the community becomes more and
more aware of its own self and its own conditions.
Here you are starting to comprehend what this chapter is
pursuing in my place
To put an end, to
indicate, to express what I wandered here to do I am left with what remains:
the Active resistances endorsed by Islam(s) and that work not merely as
practical forms of resistance, as the Reactive ones above, against Eurocentric
Capitalism but as complementary measures to each other in the generation of
a new economy rather than simply subscribing to the Capitalist one that already
exists. These injunctions ‘work’ actively against any further potential
hoarding desires directed towards the accumulation of Wealth.
The first act of
resistance is Infaq. Infaq of Sadaqah is the act of
voluntary spending of charity but unlike Zakat it is un-obligated.
However, like Zakat it is directed to the welfare of those in more need
and is always encouraged. Then there is the second act of resistance and which
is It’am. It’am is the act of voluntary feeding of, again, those
in need of sustenance. Again It’am is un-obligated, strongly encouraged
and acts as a practical force of resistance launched towards Eurocentric
Capitalism (Ahmad, 1991: 42). If You need more of a clarification, more of
a stance, more a vengeful act to illustrate the points I raised regarding Wealth,
the Koran offers You and I this verse: “As for all who lay up treasures of
gold and silver and do not spend them for the sake of God- give them the tiding
of grievous suffering [in the life to come]: on the Day when that [hoarded
wealth] shall be heated in the fire of hell and their foreheads and their sides
and their backs branded therewith, [those sinners shall be told] ‘these are the
treasures which you have laird up for yourselves! Taste, then, [the evil of]
your hoarded treasures!” (Chapter 9: Verses 34-35). Another Koranic verse
that illustrates the importance of Infaq is: “as does he [and/or she]
who spends his [and/or her] wealth only to be seen and praised by others…for
his [and/or her] parable is that of a smooth rock with [a little] earth upon
it-and then a rainstorm smites it and leaves it hard and bare” (Chapter 2:
Verse 264).
This last verse gets
something out that is of vital importance. This attitude, this duty to be
discreet in acting charitably is more important than it appears: “it bears the
mark of respect for an individual’s dignity in all circumstances, even the most
intimate…to give before the poor who need to beg...to avoid being seen by
anyone so that no one has to be embarrassed…[to give members of a community
what they] are entitled to have” (Ramadan, 2004: 181). Therefore “to bare faith
[in Islam(s)] is to bear responsibility for social commitment at every
moment…to possess is [tantamount] to have the duty [and obligation] to share”
(Ramadan, 2004: 182). Unlike Islam(s) we find that Eurocentric
Capitalism comprises an inhumane economy that organizes, produces, and
structures injustice, discrimination, exploitation and famine” and is a jungle
and “no jungle on earth …[ought to be] home to such horror” (Ramadan, 2004:
182). This represents a contradiction, for Islam(s) whose pledge is that they
believe that the roots of everything on earth belongs to God alone, and people
are only merely entrusted with managing these belongings amongst themselves.
There are two more injunctions, Ramadan and Islamic Banks. Then
what? Then nothing. There is nothing left for I here but these further two acts.
It is calculation, rationalization that causes you to
fall with open eyes into other relations, instead of reaching a turning moment
in my foreign thought
Ramadan,
is a fast, a Sawm, from dusk till dawn for a month. Ramadan is a
symbolic and practical “act of worship in itself…[that is supposed to] lead
Muslims to perceive, and to feel inwardly, the need to eat and drink and, by
extension, to ensure that every human being has the means to subsist” (Ramadan,
2004: 89). Ramadan is a fast whose end commences with Sadaqat
Al-Fitr, “another [obligatory] charity [in addition to Zakat and all
others I mentioned above]…imposed on every Muslim/Muslima who has the means
for themselves and their dependents” (Budak, 2005: 93-96). Sadaqat Al-Fitr is
“related to Property and is obligatory on every Muslim/Muslimas that
possesses more than the prescribed amount of provisions after giving the
charity…to be given in person into the hands of those who are eligible to
receive…[not] the wealthy” (Budak, 2005: 93-96). Ramadan is practical
because it reduces surpluses and hence excessive consumption and respectively
production, discourages the extravagant spending and wasteful use of resources
even if but temporally for a month. I ‘speak’ of Ramadan, a disruptive
resistance to a god, Eurocentric Capitalism.
Now, lastly, Islamic banking is a resistance that does not allow
unrestricted access and use of the financial resources of the banking system
primarily with reference to the criterion of ‘creditworthiness’ (Ahmad, 1991:
46). It is a resistance that rose to Eurocentric Capitalism’s banking
institutions, “established in the mid-nineteenth century…end of the twentieth
century…funding trading activities…saving accounts with no interest…whose
patrons [credit worthy or not] participate in investments and either earn a
share of the profit on the return or suffer a portion of the losses sustained
by the bank” (Esposito, 2002: 168). Islamic banks aim at “[socially] empowering
grass-root levels by extending their social funds towards developing a
diversity” of ‘small firms’ to generate a rhizome, inter-linkages, to benefit
and uplift the grassroots (Choudhury, 1997: 178). They developed to bring forth
and about inter-communal economic cooperation, participation and restoring
agencies back to whom these agencies belong to, You, I and the rest of the
community (Choudhury, 1997: 178). Transactions involving risk, the use of
equity sharing, “rather than debt financing…a [new un-colonial] means” of
offering hospitality, a way out to impoverished communities (Esposito, 2002:
168). The rise of alternatives to a god’s whose Inflations and deflations
militate against Islam(s) ideals of giving fair measure of value in all
transactions (Ahmad, 1991: 46).
The Other Trial
I tell you
this I deny altars. “The disinherited (and the rest) will not be mobilized by
just any form of Islam(s); what above all needs to be offered to them, with or
without Islam(s), is a future prospect that means progress in the conditions
under which they live” (Rodison, 1973: 230). I tell you this again I deny
altars. There needs to be a mobilization of Islam(s) under the anti-capitalist
conditions and concepts proposed above. These Islam(s) would operate where the
above links, ideas, become forces, where a new zeal to mobilize commences once
more, making Islam(s) ready to sacrifice immediate interest, individual
interests, to the collective once more. I ‘speak’ of a psychologically
individualized ‘agenda’ armed with steel and borrowed from if not enforced by a
god, Eurocentric Capitalism, and whose values and injunctions offer powerful
corruptive forces of possessiveness and love for Wealth, particularly among the
ruling and influential classes in Islams. I ‘speak’ of a psychologically
individualized agenda, starting with the introduction of the dynastic concepts
in the aggregate Islams, “concentrated power and corruptive influences among
certain families and their entourages” and now inherited by succeeding
generations after generation (Abdul-Rauf, 1978: 13). I ‘speak’ of a
psychologically individualized agenda brought forth by Mongol wars and the
Crusades (Abdul-Rauf, 1978: 13). I ‘speak’ of a psychologically individualized
agenda brought forth by European Colonialism causing a fragmentation of Islams,
the abandonment of traditions in favor of European institutions and a gradual
transition towards nationalism (Abdul-Rauf, 1978: 13). The former two are not
justifications worthy of attention any more for the becoming Anti-Capitalist
Islam(s), for they have been used as excuses for far too long, a blaming game,
a sobbing game and a tautological game. The sacrifices required of these
Anti-Capitalist Islam(s) require neither an evasion of nor a profiting from the
sacrifices made, neither a boasting nor a glorification of such a virtue or
piety when made. For Anti-Capitalist Islam(s) to ‘return’ to their lost yet not
forgotten essence, for Anti-Capitalist Islam(s) to confront reality, rather
than a mere augmented past, that neither could return nor become redrawn. There
needs to be something new that is translatable into specific, clear and
combative slogans and actions. “Through these slogans, each individual would
have to see himself [and herself] confronted with an immediate duty to perform,
each in his [and her] place…all this might be associated with a denunciation of
the privileges of wealth and power identified with those who had distorted
Islams” (Rodison, 1972: 230). “This revolt and these micro-revolts
against the current shapes of Islams have to be linked with the proclamation of
[these] new [Anti-Capitalist] Islam(s)…in which the enemy of this construction
can be denounced as an adversary of the highest values to which these
ideologies appeal” (Rodison, 1973: 231). Even if this adversary becomes the
‘clergy’ themselves. I ‘speak’ of ‘clergy’ who and whom Muslims and Muslimas
who supposedly choose this faith and supposedly follow one form of it or
another, have become too reliant on, too attached to, and worshipping of. I’
speak’ of ‘clergy’ who “with the coming of [nationalist]
independence…gradually…[rose] on the social scale...[alongside] the (more or
less exploiting) upper strata [and who] increasingly proclaim their ‘attachment
to Islam[s], in a frenzied search for an ideological guarantee for their social
and material advantages” (Rodinson, 1973: 226). “The more successful the
‘clergy’ become in raising their standard of living, or even merely in becoming
integrated in the nation, the less will Islam[s] serve as… slogan[s] for the
disinherited” (Rodinson, 1973: 226). For now, despite a few, Islams’ ‘clergy’,
the meek, have inherited this faith and I offer them like the god I ‘spoke’ of
here, Eurocentric Capitalism, no hospitality. Now I speak of authority and now
I am becoming Anti-authoritarian and so are Islam(s).
Chapter Two: Pedagogical Juridical Orders: Decentralized &
Anti-Authoritarian Movements of Speaking
Pleading with you, I ask you once more,
tell me what “is”? “Is” signifies what you are? “Is”, present indicative and
singular. “Is” this, not that. “Is” not that, “is” this? “Is”, an un-litigated
totality. “Is”, the presumption of a firm metaphysical ground, an essence.
“Is”, the presumption of a fixed being, and center, where the meaning of your
life remains constantly unchanged. “Is”, an oppression (Call, 2003: 50). “Is”,
exclusionary of everything outside it. “Is”, a negation unparalleled to
affirmation. “Is”, a propositioned mandatory un-porous membrane, a way of life
that permits no movement(s). “Is”, a solitary haven from “Nous”, “us”,
everything and everyone dispersed. Dispersed from that which we do not know and
have not experienced, would not like to know and experience and that which we
refuse to know and experience. “Is”, a demarcation of a You and an I.
“Is”, a “state” between the You and I and any potential propositions towards
becoming(s) of “Nous”. “Nous”, a symbiosis, an alliance that brings to play
parts of a you and a me, varying in degrees and intensities, and void of
accompanying possibilities for filiations. Look for a ‘Nous’, a “third party”,
here, in this factory of a paper, and in the theater (Deleuze & Guattari,
1980: 238). I am not suspending my demystifying of “Nous” yet. Deleuze and
Guattari propose that “tu”, you, have two axes within a social space,
significance (surface) and subjectification (depth). You, “tu”, have very
different semiotic systems (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 167). What does this
imply for “Nous”? Picture your face no longer an “is” but exhibiting
possibilities of becoming(s) part(s) of something and someone “other”. Your
self- proclaimed beautiful face, mine, infinitely wretched. Our skin, a canvas,
a surface but really maps comprised of colors, facial traits, wrinkles, lines,
different shapes, fonts and sizes. Any scars? Forgive my indecency. No scars.
Recall now your face “is” a self-proclaimed beautiful. I ask you. Has your face
not become an “other” between today and yesterday? Or have you witnessed no
signs of aging yet? Or have you achieved immunity? You resist, I know. You
desire your face to always remain an “is”, for temporarily your “is” is most
beautiful. It protects you. I? Wretched, yes, but never mourned my face. I,
unlike you, never greeted farewell what I saw in the mirror. I felt no despair.
Instead I wrote its eulogy and buried it. I, unlike you, embrace my distance
from your beautiful face. I unlike you bask in the difference of my ugliness. I
unlike you bask in difference, period. I, unlike you, bask in organic deepening
separations, through my facial maps and coordinates. I, unlike you, value my
face in its incompleteness even more than for its fragmentations, and even more
for its pronounced incompleteness, for its punctuated yet open interruptions. I
desire my face to always remain as becoming(s). You propose a singular. Absurd.
Singular implies ‘is’. I propose multiple upon multiple. I propose ‘Nous’ in
steps of hospitality…
History of the Lie: Prolegomena
I ‘speak’ now in this Chapter of Authority. The Islam(s) that I conceive
of here were, are, and shall continue to remain, determined -- like
Post-Anarchisms -- to “undermine structures of [Eurocentric conceptions of]
authority and [Eurocentric conceptions of] hierarchy…[through the
employment of] a war model of writing to expose the suppressed antagonisms and
differences within…[Eurocentric] discourse whose claims to universality,
wholeness and lucid self-reflection have been sounded since the time of Plato”
(Newman, 2001: 115).
Posed in these terms, the abstract question ‘What ‘is’ Authority?’ would
already be caught up in a series of presuppositions that demand dismantling.
This proposed oneness, this inaccessible ‘is’ in the question posited above,
“envelops a web, as there is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or
physiology of any signifier [, here, Authority,] that thinks that it
mastered ‘the game’, deluding itself, creating its own myth, wanting you to
look at it without touching it (Derrida, 1972: 63). There are two ‘types’ of Authority:
the first is tactical, that is, Micro-political and hence engages in Micro-Fascisms,
while the second is strategic, that is, it is Macro-political and hence
engages in Macro-Fascisms. The Micro lies inside all subjects, the
You and the I, the he and the she, the us and the them, while Macro’s
origins are Micro-Fascisms themselves, set into resonances that multiply
their powers and points of applicability. I am speaking then of two Fascisms
though I would have longed for a “collapse of distinction between the Micro
and Macro-political spheres, seeing one as always referring to the
other-seeing a transformation in one area as always having implications in
others” (Newman, 2001: 98). Micro-Fascisms’ essence neither necessitates
their becoming conceived of Eurocentrically or/and
non-Eurocentrically because they take place in private or secret events,
inside subjects themselves. In other words they take place inside all of
us. Macro-Fascisms, on the other hand, become visible as
they take the form of public events and are Eurocentric, as it
is Eurocentricity that has given birth to them. I am of course referring
to the public events abstractly known as the Eurocentric State
and Capitalism. I will repeat this statement soon enough: You and I
owe our Micro-Fascisms to the Macro-Fascist Eurocentric State, but the
Eurocentric State owes its inception from our thought and hence the
relationship between Micro and Macro-Fascisms becomes important to examine.
From this point on Authority becomes The Other Trial.
I will first begin this chapter
by discussing Micro-Fascisms in the first section titled Secret
Events, only to follow this with a very brief account of Macro-Fascisms
in the section titled Possible Beyond of Public Events. I will then
proceed, in Assalam Alikum & Salut to You, with a discussion on why Post-Anarchisms
possess Micro-Authoritarian tendencies within them; very briefly, this
is due to their negligence and silence on the discussion of religions, and
specifically Islam(s), that conceive Macro–political Authority in a
non-Eurocentric light. It is this conception that may have respectively
contributed to the growth of Post-Anarchisms themselves but instead was
ignored. The final section is titled Without an Alibi, sans délai, and
it will discuss how the Islamic interpretation used here is Anti-authoritarian
and thus very much in line with Post-Anarchisms. In this section I
will introduce again new concepts like Ijma, Shura and Maslaha,
in an effort to acquaint you with them, as well as carry on with an extensive
discussion of the concept of Khalifah in Islams and its
re-interpretation in Islam(s).
Secret
Events
I begin then and say that what I denote as ‘secret events’ represent the spaces
that are occupied by Micro-Fascisms. I posit that these Micro-Fascisms
rhizomatically emit two significations, though not necessarily constrained to
such significations: A first signification, a being’s, the You and the I as
well as any other subject, intent(s) of worshiping ones own self. This intent
takes on dramatic form(s) of growing egoisms struggling with one another and that
wage war on one another resulting in the birth of a subject’s paranoia
and the subject’s subjugation of others (Levinas, 1987: 4). I ‘speak’ of Micro-Fascisms
exhibiting the state of always wanting the resurrection of themselves and hence
“the very egoism of the ego” (Levinas, 1987: 137-138). The second signification
and which is a result of these Micro-Fascisms is that the individual
always pushes them-self to the forefront without a regard for anyone or
anything else in their path. It is ‘the war of each against each’ and this
becomes the rule of surviving in today’s world. This rule comprises the most
fundamental principle to being a Capitalist, a lord and prince. And as
this happens an individual’s feeling of “responsibility for the freedom of
others” disappears (Levinas, 1987: 136). It disappears because the individual
no longer really comprehends the necessity or importance for bearing
responsibility towards anything and anyone but themselves. Individuals who love
themselves so much tend to feel that responsibility is a burden; a poisoned
limb that ought to be severed at any cost so that the rest of the body does not
become contaminated. But responsibility is “far from being a limitation or
negation of…[a being’s] freedom, [as] the freedom of [a being’s] neighbor is
instead its precondition and confirmation” (Bakunin, 1916: 151). It is these
two significations that result in Micro-Fascisms within us, Micro-Fascisms
where “the weak [egos] have conquered, where the strong [human spirits] are
contaminated, where the slave who has not appeared prevails over the master who
has stopped being one: the reign of law and virtue”; all this gives rise and
birth to Micro-hierarchy, a genesis and rule; Micro-Fascisms of
Micro-hierarchies (Perez, 1990: 17).
Possible Beyond of Public Events
The second type of Authority is Macro-Fascism. Macro-Fascisms
mark, evoke and commence a Meta-hierarchy built upon making the “Church,
morality and the State the masters and keepers of all hierarchy” (Perez, 1990:
18). Macro-Fascisms collect all the Micro-Fascisms that are
willing and dedicated to making themselves visible, as well as their Micro-hierarchies
only to recompose them into a Meta-hierarchy. The Meta-hierarchy
that I am speaking of here is the “hier(archy) of institutions and
eco-political frameworks set up by those who cannot lead or obey themselves: of
the weak and the slaves and of those who need an outside hier(archical)
authority in order to act” (Perez, 1990: 18).
Wailkum Assalam unto & Salut to you!
Before I proceed further it is important that one calls oneself to judgment,
that one evaluates ones choices and decisions and the implication of all the
above on others. But what happens when one does not garner the courage to do
so? Your thoughts as a Post-Anarchist, your way of living through Post-Anarchisms,
as it stands safely here and now unfortunately are both complicit in state
domination, as they remain to varying degrees state philosophy and you
have not called yourself fully to judgment. How could I refrain from presenting
such a claim: ‘Post-Anarchisms as State Philosophy’ when you, a
Post-Anarchist, and Post-Anarchisms, have become blind to religions,
particularly Islam(s), and thus they face a ‘state’ of obscurity in your
inventions as You vanish them from all the schemas that constitute your
Post-Anarchisms. The annals of Eurocentric State philosophy signify a
way of thought characterized by and through Western metaphysics: a rational,
calculable foundation of order premised on identity, truth, justice and
negation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 99).
That said, Post-Anarchisms
never greeted Islam(s), premising this lack of hospitality to Islam(s) on
the same foundations and themes that resided in Anti-Religious Classical
Anarchisms: religion is possessed by possibilities of domination. Post-Anarchisms
continues to be silent regarding Islam(s), though they claim to dismantle
Eurocentric metaphysics. However strange this priority may appear, the first
aim of your audacious ‘re-interpretation’ of Anti-Religious Classical
Anarchisms to Post, I had thought, for You, was to posit even if but by
expression and make necessary, through any means necessary, contact with
Islam(s). This contact would be with the intention towards it of
taking some pleasures from it, through your appreciation of différance.
What I thought You desired was to become in continual movement, prepared to
co-exist along with “multiple ideological dimensions, all the while
developing an analysis and a confrontation which, without trying to overcome
specific differences, nevertheless tries to prevent them from degenerating into
passive and mute divisions” (Guattari & Negri, 1985: 111). Once more I
ponder how such an arrangement may commence subsequently if Post-Anarchisms and
you have not killed, or at least sought or had the intent to kill, your inner
Micro-Fascisms regarding both of your presumptions, expressed or unexpressed
when it comes to religions, particularly Islam(s), and without any delay.
Your single minimal limit has not yet opened up incomprehensibly vast
vistas of becoming. The nerve of my argument becomes that there are
surely a billion ways to fulfill this prescription; a prescription of
comprehending, thinking of, and resisting Hegemonic Authority, Micro
and Macro-Fascisms that impose limits and constraints upon
individuals. Consequently You, now a Post-Anarchist, have not
acknowledged nor given adequate respect to singularity: “a respect for what is
different [with respect to Non-Eurocentric conceptualizations and
interpretations], for what is singular” (Newman, 2001: 170). The consequence of
which is that you have not risen alongside, let alone greeted with the
slightest gesture, a kindness, a hand lifted or laid on shoulders or foreheads
of Islam(s) (Derrida, 2004: 313).
It is then in this respect that Post-Anarchisms become
a rational thought, become a coded thought, and become penetrated
by state thought and whose “dependency [lies] upon rational discourses for its
legitimization and functioning, while, in turn, making these discourses
possible” (Newman, 2001: 99). Here I wish to segment albeit briefly and
characterize a distinction, for it is a thing with value, as You will
undoubtedly see. I wish to clarify something for
You.
I despise authority, Micro and Macro, but if I do then it becomes a duty for me
to seek a different way of living that merely becomes a way and never the
shortest way. A necessity arises then for me to discover the answer to these
series of questions: Am I to become content with a single line of flight, an
Interpretation here in this economy of a paper towards an Islamic Anarchistic
Becoming premised in its singularity to Resisting based on becoming and acting
as an Anti-Capitalist Muslim? Should I be content with that line of flight as
the only maxim of importance or relevance here between Post-Anarchisms and
Islam(s)? Ought this maxim become where I want to ‘be’, as a Muslim because I
can’t fly anymore? Is it deceitful to say that there is no appeal to claim an
Anti-Authoritarian Islamic Anarchistic Becoming before trying? It would become
a crime I say to extricate myself from difficulty now, for my maxims here
throughout this economy of a paper and which I never could or would expect to
be complete nor be held as a universal law, as that would necessitate them
destroying themselves, would have been made in bad faith; without the intention
to fulfill promises I promised to fulfill. I could proclaim that I did not lie
but that instead my promises were misstatements. But such a claim would be
taking refuge in the shorter path to your houses, the shorter way to
potential hospitable hosts to Islam(s); Post-Anarchisms, and off course
equally hospitable hosts, Islam(s), to Post-Anarchisms. I am here to fulfill my
promises foregoing any accusations by anyone that they were made in haste and
are deceitful.
Without an Alibi, sans délai
A mutual
consultation was referred to earlier in Chapter Two, during my
discussion of relationships and associations amongst Caretakers; I signified
such a consultation using the Islamic signifier Shura. But Shura
cannot be considered merely a signifier as it occupies an entire Chapter,
Surat Al-Shura, in the Koran and therefore it is of the utmost
importance if I am to discuss Authority and in particular Macro
political Authority; the State. Shura counterattacks
authority and hierarchy, if they exist, and both have been historically
condemned in Islam(s) (Esposito, 1996: 25). Shura is a practical process
comprised of mutual consultation amongst Muslims/Muslimas and which is
complemented with two new creations and significations: Ijma, community
consensus, and Maslaha, public interest (Esposito, 2002: 159-160).
Because Muslims/Muslimas perceive themselves to be in a temporal ‘state’ of
existence in this world, as if they are strangers or are traveler(s), their
decisions alternate, with degrees of difference, and are always in flux. Hence
mutual communitarian decision-making processes are dependent upon the
community’s circumstances and environmental conditions. These temporal ‘states
of existence’, then, in Islam(s), are bound by principles of Tawheed, Ijma,
Maslaha, all of which require always-evolving ‘states’ of Ijtihad
that are unbound by ideological or literal interpretations of day to day life.
There are two Koranic verses to illustrate this: “Not all of them [beings] are
alike” (Chapter 4: Verse 113) and so “unto every one of you We [God] have
appointed a different law and way of life and if God had pleased, God would
have made you in a single Ummah [community], but that God might try You
in what God gave you. So vie with one another in virtuous deeds. To God you
will all return, so that God will inform you of that wherein you differed”
(Chapter 5: Verse 48). Both these verses affirm the divine decree that the Ummah’s
essence is difference. The consequence of this is that Muslims/Muslimas
are reminded that they will always become something different than what
they perceived themselves to be. This occurs as they begin once more to embrace
the heterogeneity that comes with basking in difference regardless of
whether that difference comes from within the Muslim community or ‘outside’
it. Islam(s) then occupy temporary ‘states’ of traveling as
Muslims/Muslimas exhibit both nomadic and migrant traits. The nomad
is the one who enjoys both autonomy and a path of their own, as
every point is a relay and exists only as a relay (Deleuze & Guattari,
1980: 380). Muslims/Muslimas adopt on the surface a seemingly contradictory
identity that “cannot…belong to one person alone, and no one belongs to a
single unity…every identity comprise[s] a multiplicity of elements” (Day, Citizen,
Nomad & Smith Political Spac, 2003). Every identity in part is a
nomadic identity like that of barbarians who ‘sow not, nor have any
tillage…[are] without habitation, having no dwellings but caves and hollow
trees” (Day, Citizen, Nomad & Smith Political Spac, 2003). Nomadic
identities have a trajectory that “distributes people (or animals) in an
open space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 380), or even distributes Divine
attributes upon viceroys, in this case Muslims/Muslimas who are opposed to Fasasd-Al-Ard,
the blasphemous act against God by destroying God’s creation, cutting “asunder
what God has bidden to be joined” (Qurran, Chapter 2: Verses 26-27). But as
highlighted, Muslims and Muslimas are migrants as well. “A migrant identity [is
one] that goes from one point to another, even if the second point is
uncertain, unforeseen or not well localized” because they, Muslims/Muslimas,
rely solely, first and foremost, upon God for everything (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1980: 380). “Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a
common aggregate; their case and conditions are no less distinct for example,
from those who joined [Prophet] Mohammed [, SAW,] at Medina,
those who had a choice between a nomadic pledge, and a pledge of Hegira [,
migration,] or emigration” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 380). All this
illustrates that at the Micro-political level, Muslims and Muslimas are
not fixed, revolving around a single axis in their identities or the ways in
which they live. Therefore they are anti-authoritarian towards their own
selves, performing Ijtihad as they try and ward off their Micro-Fascisms.
Further proof, but
now on the Macro-political level, that Islam(s) are anti-authoritarian
is that the Koran “envisages the…[Ummah] as a perfectly egalitarian,
open society based on good will and cooperation” (Esposito, 1996: 28). The
Koran furthermore “laid down the principle of Shura to guide the
community’s decision-making process” (Esposito, 1996: 28). I do not ‘speak’ of
a “classical doctrine of Shura, as it developed, [and that] was in
error…[as] it viewed consultation as the process of one person, the Khalifah,
asking other people for advice” (Esposito, 1996: 28). Quite the contrary, “the
Koranic understanding of Shura does not mean that one person ask others
advice, but rather mutual advice through mutual consultation” (Esposito, 1996:
28).
The signifier Khalifah,
is a Non-Eurocentric signifier, that historically has undergone
“traditional and modern debates, over…[its nature and viewing] in monarchical
terms” (Esposito, 1996: 26). Now this signifier could and ought to be interpreted
differently because understandably adherence to the classical meaning of the
term would obviously undermine the anti-authoritarian practices like Ijma,
Maslaha and Shura and that were highlighted above in Islam(s).
Therefore, this new conception of Khalifah “is [of] a profoundly
different meaning of the term [, than what that term signified historically and
now signifies, as it has] received [and continues to receive] increasing
attention [during] the second half of the twentieth century (Esposito, 1996:
26). “In addition to the connotations of ‘successor’ that the Arabic term Khalifah
involves there is also a sense in which a Khalifah is a deputy [or]
representative” and hence a ‘caretaker’ of sorts (Esposito, 1996: 26). The Khalifah
is no Malik, no king, but rather someone whom is supposedly chosen
by the community as their representative (Ramadan, 2001: 148). ‘Classically’,
the ‘choosiness’ may have occurred “by means of elections, a representative
system or any other original ideas…[provided that] all the conditions that
allow one the opportunity to choose with full knowledge of the facts [are
present]” (Ramadan, 2001: 148). The other criteria for such ‘choosiness’, is
that “any pressure or attempt at Coercion, to influence public opinion,”
is unacceptable (Ramadan, 2001: 148). These two criteria however assume that
people within the community are capable of participating in the decision making
process of choosing itself having had knowledge of all the ‘facts’ regarding
those who are candidates to be ‘chosen’ in the first place. However with
ignorance, illiteracy, corruption and misery which are many social phenomena
very much predominant in contemporary societies this assumption cannot be
fulfilled Islamically, and thus obstructs the real participation of the
grassroots in the decision making process of choosing someone supposedly to
lead (Ramadan, 2001: 148). What becomes even of more importance is that in no
way do Islam(s), through the Koran or otherwise, justify or endorse strictly
this ‘Classical’ interpretation of having a Khalifah. This is because
only “general principles were given in the field of politics and social
affairs…but the Koran does not mention details and particulars which have been
left for the Ummah to formulate to the needs of the time and space”
(Ramadan, 2001: 148). Given therefore the lack of the conditions necessary for
the choosing of the Khalifah and the non-binding nature of the idea of
the Khalifah itself there have been more ‘radical’ interpretations
posited. The interpretation I choose is the one bound with my former discussion
about the necessity that all beings of the Ummah are bearers of God’s
trust. Hence, they, all beings, are all equally
Caretakers whether
pertaining to God’s Property as I argued in Chapter One or the Ummah’s
political associations amongst one another; themselves. In other words
Muslims and Muslimas are Caretakers of one another; God’s vicegerents
and therefore bear a responsibility towards one another. “It is possible to
interpret…sections of the Koran as identifying human beings [, the Ummah,]
in general as God’s vicegerents [Khalifahs, multiple, as opposed to its
singular form, Khalifah,] on earth and human stewardship over God’s
creations” (Esposito, 1996: 26). This is because this reading “lets us now
consider [further that] ‘Khalifah’, which according to the Arabic
lexicon, means ‘representation’…the representation of God on earth…required to
exercise divine authority in this world [is] within the limits prescribed by
God” (Esposito, 1996: 26). “The implications of this [is that] after
subscribing to the principles of Tawheed, subscribing only to God’s
Absolute Authority, Muslims/Muslimas in the Ummah are then collectively
and as a group ready to fulfill their responsibilities of representation
towards one another (Esposito, 1996: 26). “Such an…Ummah…carries the
responsibility of the Khilafah...each one of its individual[s] shares
the divine Khilafah…every person in an Ummah enjoys the rights
and powers of the Khilafah and in the respect all individuals are equal”
(Esposito, 1996: 26). The identification of Khilafah with humanity as a
whole, rather than with a single Khalifah or political institution, is
affirmed even further in Islams’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
These rights are defined in “a document [, that emphasizes that the objective
of the Ummah]…is to ‘reach the level of self-governance’” (Esposito,
1996: 26) Thus “this perception of ‘Khilafahs’ becomes a foundation for
concepts of human responsibility and of opposition to systems of
domination…[providing along the way] also a basis for distinguishing between
democracy” through Eurocentric traditions and that of Islam(s)
(Esposito, 1996: 26). Re-iterating then, it is possible to see that the
obligations of bearing the communal right to self-govern and which “do[es] not
fit into the limits of Eurocentrically based definition[s]…[is premised
in]…consultation (Shurah), consensus (Ijma) and independent interpretative
judgments (Ijtihad)” (Esposito, 1996: 26). This interpretation however
is not merely theoretical but practical as well. It is visibly identifiable
that in some Muslim communities there has been a “growth of …and the gradual
formation of legislative assemblies” (Esposito, 1996: 27). This indeed
“constitutes a…step…[in] the transfer of power of Ijtihad from
individual representatives of schools [of thought] to Muslim legislative
assemblies which in view of the growth of ‘opposing’ sects [and] is the only
form of Ijma (Esposito, 1996: 27). A form of Ijma that “will
secure contributions to…discussion[s] from [lay individuals]” who desire, have
a right to and are keen in participating in the political decision making
processes and which are necessary in Islam(s) (Esposito, 1996: 27). Therefore
and as illustrated with Inheritance there is always the desire within
Islam(s) whether regarding Wealth and even more so with power and hence
authority, Micro and Macro, that there be a dissipation from the
singular to the plural.
In
summary then if the conditions pertaining to the ‘choosing’ of the Khilafah
fail, as they do in contemporary society, and the fields pertaining to the
political are unspecified, as I proclaimed above, then the political ought to
be replaced with a form of organizing outside the adopted conception of Eurocentric-style
democracy and certainly the Eurocentric Fascist State. Islam(s) see
that “there are significant problems with Eurocentric-style democracy…as
every Muslim/Muslima [is/are required, in accordance with their individualized
abilities]…to give a sound opinion on matters [pertaining to Islam(s)],
[and]…entitled to interpret the law of God” (Esposito, 1996: 25). “The theory
that the influential persons could represent the general public was [and still
is] operative in [Islams]…but in view of changed circumstances and in
consideration of the principles of consultation…it is essential that this
theory should give place to the formation of an assembly…[a] real
[representational] of the people” and this is what Islam(s) advocate for
(Esposito, 1996: 25). “People are the rightful bearers of the trust…within this
framework…the absolute sovereignty of God makes any human hierarchy
[theoretically] impossible, since before God all humans are equal” (Espostio,
1996: 25). It is important to note that theologically speaking every
“hierarchal, dictatorial system has been condemned as non-Islamic” (Esposito,
1996: 25). Furthermore “the label ‘king’ (Malik) [, in the past, has and
continues till this day within Islam(s) to be regarded as] a negative term for
arbitrary personal domination” (Esposito, 1996: 25). Because there is no proof
of the necessity for a Eurocentric Civil Society in Islam(s) and because
God is the sole Authority based on Tawheed, the interpretation I
posit here insists that there are Islam(s) that ideologically espouse Anti-authoritarian
tendencies. These Islam(s) recognize that Authority is a problem and
thus upon this recognition there is an effort on their part in finding and
seeking ways to minimize the domination effects of Authority both on the
Micro and Macro level.
There
are two more brief matters pertaining to Islams’ perspectives on Authority that
require addressing. You may approve of what was and has been claimed above but
call to question Prophet Mohammad’s (SAW), my Prophet’s ‘Authority’. I
tell You without hesitation that a prophet signifies prophecy.
He, the prophet in Islam(s), is neither a Malik nor God, as
opposed to what exists with Isa, Jesus, often interpreted as ‘The King
of all Kings’, at least in the majority of contemporary forms of Christianities.
Furthermore the signifier prophet itself does not necessitate its
association with your Eurocentrically conceived Authority. A prophet
through Islam(s), is “nothing but a Rasul, a messenger, for a
religious call, purely for the sake of religion, unblemished by any [necessary]
tendency to rule or call for the formation of a nation [or state]”
(Abdul-Al-Razeq, 1978: 44).
As with regards to
the second matter it is critical that I reiterate that although Anti-Religious
Classical and Post-Anarchisms may contest and detest God’s Absolute Authority
it is important to realize that Islam(s) advocate that there is la ikrah
Fi’d-din; “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qurran, Chapter 2: Verse
26). In other words, “God has not been completely usurped…as has always been
claimed [in Anarchistic discourses]…God has only been reinvented in the form of
essence” (Newman, 2001: 6). Just because you claimed that God is dead does
not imply that you have annihilated God or that ‘that’ God does not exist any
longer; you have no proof as such to your claim. Therefore “as long as
[Anarchisms, Classical and Post, as well as Anti-religious Anarchists] continue
to believe absolutely in grammar, in essence, in the metaphysical
presuppositions of language…[Anti-Religious Anarchisms, Classical, Post and]
You [will] continue to believe in God” (Newman, 2001: 6). God is not dead and Classical
as well as Post-Anarchisms have “not ousted God …[but rather] the place of
authority of the category of the divine remains intact, only re-inscribed in
the demand for presence…Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental
structure” (Newman, 2001: 6).
So I tell
you this: If it had not been found in one way or another that You, a
Post-Anarchist, are justified in certain matters then your existence to me
would have been nothing more than an abject drifting. But all of those who know
You including I over the course of the years would agree with this assertion in
mind: When I began to know of You, You Classical Anarchist becoming Post, I
learned about the unbelievable difficulties in which you found yourself and
which finally caught up with you. No one would have wanted and still no one
wants to be in your place. It is then that I began thinking of myself and I too
felt the same regarding Islam(s). In a sense I felt pitiless for you. I had
wanted to see both our existence intertwined like grapevines, even though and
let me be frank I knew You to be guilty of certain charges and perhaps you felt
the same regarding I, though it must be admitted on your end that you have
never ever ‘justly’ justified such charges. I did not feel pity because like
you I continue to find you and I very ‘strong’, always up to the ordeal,
without wondering to much where we both found our strength. But a quick look
into your resolved eyes, with the quick assurance of what was needed from us
both, and any doubts that I had were put to stop, though I must admit that the
curiosity remains, at least on my part, to everlastingly and strangely wander
about for Nous…
Chapter Three: Nous
Step of Hospitality
An “us”, “Nous”, is unavoidable. The passion, the
endurance, the patience of work towards an emanation of a referent, “Nous” is
recorded here. Together forever. I am a Post-Anarchist and a Muslim/Muslima.
Contrary to your wishes, our faces, “Nous”, the You and the I, are not “states”
confined solely to difference. Let us assume an open theatre. You walk past me
and I past you. You merely capture a surface me. If you believe in chance, and
I decide to stand still, you may watch me, as the spectacle you seek. If not by
chance then you are blessed. Your captured image of a surface I, begs me to
think that you think me, hideous, indecent and wretched? But you are the
starting point for such a reflection and judgment upon me. You recognize me as
an infidelity and betrayal of you. Here you opened, naively, the prospect for
an “us”, “Nous”. On the other front, I am too wretched for you so I blind you.
There remains a discreet means for you to interrupt my radiations or ugliness.
My eyes. My eyes are hollow black holes. My eyes are doctrines that testify to
something beyond my surface and stand for depth. A depth inaugurated by
interpretations without beginnings and without ends. A depth that irrupts with
unconditional hospitality; A depth that desires an “us”; An unconditional
hospitality that consists of welcomes without reservations and calculations to
all new arrivals. You picked me out. You singled me out. You think me an
anomaly in your equation for believing in religion? You have not come here to
be friends. You know nothing of my depth. You know nothing of Islam(s). You
know nothing of Post-Anarchisms. You, a becoming Post-Anarchist, have treated
me, a becoming Muslim/Muslima, as a receptacle and allowed me to be treated as
a receptacle for others through your prescriptive merely surfacing and cryptic,
at best, reservations on Islam(s) (Perez, 1990: 63). You see no “Nous”, no us.
Now I tell you of my discovered depth and “Nous”, an “us”.
A Different kind of Friday Morning
From the beginning of this economy of a paper and throughout this text I
reminded You that if anyone including You insisted on replying to the subject
matter ransacked here, that it ought to be taken into consideration more or
less that “there are friends to whom one abandons the ‘empirical’ and friends
to whom one confides the essential” (Blanchot & Derrida, 2000: 84).
You need
to account for any mute witnesses in your Classical and Post-Anarchisms without
speaking for them, in place of them or drawing all sorts of consequences in
truth from an abandoned or inadequate search of them. As for I, I ‘speak’ with
the pretext of sparing You this former complaint of You upon I. Let us not
forget what I had come to do. The testimonies addressed here, make clear that
your complaint that Islam(s) confine, bind, are unceasingly dogmatic and seek
to torment everyone and everything outside their understanding does not stand.
Despite Your perceptions of Islam(s) and Muslims/Muslimas it is ironic that I
am the one incidentally going far to associate with You, a formerly Classical
and present Post-Anarchist because I feel that I am bound to You. Unlike your
excommunication of Islam(s), either as an intentional activity of your Micro-Fascist
ego or your unintentional and somehow involuntary belief that somehow your
castle of a dwelling place is vulnerable if it decides to approach Islam(s),
the fact is that we need to build something here together. You have not
benefited from knowing Islam(s) and I, but instead placed Islam(s) and I at
fault and expect an impossible redemption of what in your eyes connotes a sin
and an illegitimate temptation because of our passion and belief in God. But in
condemning Islam(s) You have given rise to every passion that I espouse here
and that is indeed now resulting in my desire to relate to You. In
Post-Anarchisms’ rejection and staunch opposition to Eurocentric Authority
and Eurocentric Capitalism I seek that Islam(s) be there as well. I am
not dreaming for them, Islam(s), to have priority or proclaim themselves as
more self-righteous than Post-Anarchisms but rather for them to be with it, not
before and not after it, as that would suggest a privileged order, a
prioritizing of one over the other. And it is this passion for Post-Anarchisms
that has led me to my transgressions into Post-Anarchisms’ sacred space(s) in
search for an us, a Nous. Respectively and abstractly this Chapter
exists for us to begin thinking about how we can build a community together and
for me to show You that Islam(s) affirm differences within themselves and
without. These two matters: building and acceptance of the other are
intertwined. Why? Because for any building to be realized it would be
difficult for Islam(s), to regard themselves as wanderers and to free
themselves, as they prepare to build with others something creative, without
them formally recognizing first that there is a possibility that others, those
choosing to remain as non-Muslims, ought to reserve the right, as they have, to
translate the world in their own ways and through their own eyes; and that such
a world indeed could be a profoundly beautiful world.
Therefore I will begin in When my
gaze meets you, our Bodies are in touch by discussing what I call elective
affinities. In other words, how Islam(s) perceive their associations to be
with what I refer to as plurality without is; those who do not identify
as ‘being’ Muslim/Muslimas. I will then proceed, in In a silent instant…the
Touch of promise, with a specific discussion that addresses the logical and
contextual practical corpus or voice of Nous as well as addressing the
difference between it, Nous, and elective affinity. I will
conclude by discussing Nous and justice in An Echo of my
Incarnation.
When my gaze meets you, our Bodies are in touch
At the
beginning and in the instant when Muslims/Muslimas and Post-Anarchists begin to
discuss anything with one another they begin the processes of seeking to
understand one another. It is this will to understand one another that
permeates what may appear to be a hegemonizing vacuum or ‘space’ between both
these communities. This vacuum or space between them is alive and hence its
power lies in it ability to distance both communities, under the illusion that
they do not belong together. The result of this distancing is that ideological
differences and similarities are feared and as a result egoisms associated with
Micro-Fascisms begin to incubate and foster themselves within both
communities. This occurs because both communities begin to presume to know
everything about one another when in fact they know really very little if
anything of one another at all. Islam(s) do not believe that these fears ought
to exist and they demand that there be an affirmative desire to always
characterize and examine any depth – thus, not merely the surface – but
rather everything that is different, inside its own selves and outside them.
Therefore Islam(s) proceed from the affirmation of difference individually and
communally. A Koranic verse that illustrates this is: “We have created you
tribes and nations so that you may know one another. In the eyes of God, the
noblest among you is the one whose is the most virtuous” (Chapter 49: Verse13).
But
what does to ‘know one another’ mean and entail in the verse highlighted above,
bearing in mind as I said at the beginning that there always have been and that
there always will be varying degrees and intensities associated with any form
of understanding? What it entails and means is that there are infinite
processes and ways that are involved in one getting to ‘know’ someone and
something else. In other words ‘knowing’ is not an instance of elective
affinity and hence finite. Rather, it is infinite and hence involves
movements on behalf of any party involved in always seeking and striving to
know the ‘other’ someone and/or something. Elective affinity’s occurrence
is a consciously or unconsciously motivated relation or connection that You
and I share and whose instance is created when the rhizomatic You intersects
and is capable of accommodating the rhizomatic I or vice versa. That is, it
occurs when paths cross, like when people first meet, whether people meet
because of fate or luck. But Elective affinity is ‘elective’ in
the sense that it is selective of the traces, the points of relation
that it chooses to relate through. In other words at the instance when people
first meet they either see or seek a theme reflected in each another or not. If
the theme exists the relationship may survive but if it does not, then in all
likely hood the relationship will fail. But this is problematic because it
assumes that relationships are simple and that if at first glance nothing
supposedly appears on the surface to be common then efforts into the
building of the relationship subside all together. But as I highlighted
earlier, Islam(s) seek depth and not merely the surface.
Therefore any acts directed towards the choosing of themes on which individuals
and communities relate to ‘others’ outside them involve the setting up of
hierarchies. These hierarchies are not only established by selectively choosing
what can or cannot be considered as a point and/or points of relation but how
one knows whether that that point and/or points of relation can exist or not.
This is because elective affinity seeks the acknowledgment that ‘I have
something common’ or ‘of interest to You’ and that You and I share. Elective
affinity is premised upon judging the surface without going much in depth.
This causes misleading assumptions as those associated with
Anti-Religious Classical and Post-Anarchisms’ perception that there are no
points of relation or intersecting nodes between Islam(s) and themselves, and
which evidently this economy of a paper is seeking to prove otherwise. Ought
this imply therefore that efforts towards building a ‘real’ relationship
between Islam(s) and Anti-Religious Classical and Post-Anarchisms not have been
attempted because on the surface things appeared a certain way, when if
one looked at matters more in depth one would find enough to at least
see that Islam(s) do share with Anti-Religious Classical and Post-Anarchisms
enough for a relationship to happen? This notion of ‘stopping’ at elective
affinity is therefore problematic because it is limited in its imagination.
In elective affinity You are supposedly endowing upon I the privilege of
‘knowing’ something of You or I am endowing upon You such a ‘privilege’. But
this endowment is premised on the assumption that somehow we ‘own’ what we know
and are privileging someone else by the disclosure of such knowledge. This only
leads again to Micro-Fascisms that re-enforce the spaces and distances
that already exist between individuals and communities. Islam(s) disagree with
this perspective with regards to the ownership or endowment of knowledge. This
is because everything upholds its testimony to God again through the concept
of Tawheed. Therefore Islam(s) see You and I as Caretakers that are
occupying places of autonomy, of choice, of a will if such a will exists and
God opens and binds our hearts together, towards us knowing one another.
This could be illustrated in this Koranic verse: “And if God had
pleased, God would have made you in a single Ummah [community], but that
God might try you in what God gave you. So vie with one another in virtuous
deeds. To God you will all return, so that God will inform you of that wherein
you differed” (Chapter 5: Verse 48). Regardless of whether it is God or
not who binds hearts together, there are two points that I wished to illustrate
here by using this verse. The first is that there are no single homogenous
communities and thus there lies the necessity and acknowledgment of difference
existing within and without Islam(s). The second is that with an affirmation of
such difference every community espousing particular ethical and political
principles and commitments is required to vie with every other. But for this to
take place communities need to get to know one another and the doors to a potential
relationship between them ought not be shut. This is because the potential for
a point of relation and the processes involved in getting to know never
really end. Hence there will always be the possibility for relating. We need
something that goes beyond just isolated instances of elective affinity.
There needs to always be a continuous movement of understanding for a community
to be built, something that goes beyond simply chosen parameters of possible
commonalities.
Elective affinity then is
where You, as a Post-Anarchist, and I, as a Muslim/Muslima, meet. It is also
where you and I find similarities as well as differences. Elective affinity carries
with it the initial advent and the opportunity for the discovery and perhaps
the partial emergence of a line of flight towards a fictional
friendship between You and I; a fictional friendship that is not yet
Nous and therefore not yet a community. Thus elective affinity is not
sufficient, it is merely a beginning and denotes only a form of initial contact
between You and I, premised upon the common themes above:
Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Authoritarianism. But now what a community, our
community, requires is a never exhausted yet always exhausting line
of flight or processes of always getting to know one another so that
Nous can emerge. It is important to note however as I mentioned above
that this implies that the building of Nous does not imply that anything
goes. This point will be discussed in the final section An Echo of my
Incarnation. Thus fictional friendship does not go far enough to
give it the status of Nous.
In a silent instant…the touch of a promise
Nous is
not selective. Nous is not elective. Rather, Nous is a
negotiation. Nous requires the lengthening, prolonging and relaying of
its line of flight. Nous is not aggravated solely upon lines of alliance
between You and I, as that denotes You and I becoming selective or elective of
what You and I specifically desire from one another. Nous is not built
solely upon an intent, for You and I, to ‘meet and greet’, supposedly uniting
in ‘solidarity [in] every struggle against [Eurocentric] Capitalist/and
or [Nepotistic] Socialist [or even Eurocentric Authoritarian]
orders” (Guattari & Negri, 1985: 19). Nous therefore from a
“molecular point of view [is not premised upon places where] each attempt
[becomes] at [achieving] ideological unification” for such a desire “is an
absurd and reactionary operation” (Guattari & Negri, 1985: 108-109). We
can’t agree on everything so we teach our selves and one other to negotiate.
Why? Because “desire, on a social terrain, refuses to allow itself to be
confined to zones of consensus…why ask a feminist movement to come to a
doctrinal or pragmatic accord with ecological movement groups or with a
communitarian experiment by people of color or with a worker’s movement, etc…”
(Guattari & Negri, 1985: 108-109)? Therefore it is not necessary as the
Koran testifies that individuals share everything in common for a community to
be built: “If your Lord had willed, all those on earth would have believed
together. Would you then compel people to become believers?” (Chapter 10: Verse
99). And so “ideology shatters; it only unifies on the level of appearance [as fictional
friendship]…[but] what is essential [conversely] is that each movement
shows itself to be capable of unleashing irreversible molecular revolutions”
(Guattari & Negri, 1985: 108-109). Perhaps I should insist on this
difficult and decisive point: These molecular revolutions undeniably
request, abide, believe in and appreciate everything that is infinitely plural
and multiple.
Nous
then becomes a pluralistic form of affinity that requires that Anarchists,
Classical and Post, and Muslims/Muslimas ward off fear, egoism and vanity
within them, particularly regarding all that lies outside them. It requires
that both communities turn their abstract love for humanity into a concrete act
directed towards flesh and blood individuals (Dostoevsky, 1989: 224). It
requires not pretending to know and not just wanting to know someone else but
actually getting to know someone else without any malicious intent behind this
act of knowing. Such an act, necessitates that the act itself becomes void of
self-righteousness and thus requires a process of honesty with oneself and the
other. Nous’ act is void of any intent to coerce or compel someone else
and therefore is respectful of the other. Acts of debasing, degrading, coercion
and conversion exemplify compulsion and are Micro-Fascisms that ought to be
fought. That is why “the Koran…does not look at faith in terms of
what divides and disperses, ignoring the wisdom of diversity and objectives of
having faith to begin with” (Esack, 1997: 171). “Righteous deeds… recognized
[in Islam(s)] are not the monopoly of any single competitor…as the judge God,
has to be above the narrow [and divergent] interest of participants…claims of
familiarity with the [sole] judge [God] with any particular ‘team’ will not
avail the participants” (Esack, 1997: 175). As the Koran highlights: “Unto us
our works and unto you your works; let there be no dispute between you and us.
God will bring us together and to God we shall return” (Chapter 42: Verse 15
& Chapter 2: Verse 139). To exist, to indulge upon such an existence through
not yielding and proclaiming the right of way to other dignitaries of God
indeed denies God’s sole Authority according to Islam(s). That is why
Islam(s) pronounce that “no Authority, no leader, no government, no assembly
can restrict, abrogate or violate in any way these rights”; rights ordained,
asserted and which belong solely to God not demagogues (Arkoun, 1994: 106).
“Contempt for [the] other, the Koran suggests, was [, is and continues to
become] rooted in notions of being the chosen [ones] of God” (Esack, 1997:
158). Therefore Islam(s) cannot themselves claim that Muslims/Muslimas are the
chosen ones, at least theoretically. This is because, according to the Koran:
“Nay, but it is God who causes whomsoever God wills to grow in purity; and none
shall be wronged by even a hair’s breadth” (Chapter 5: Verse 49). Therefore a
new concept emerges in Islam(s): Al-Haqq, ‘the just’, and which “applies
to God as a transcendent being to whom [any]one as [a human] being has not a
privilege of accessing but rather a right to” access (Esack, 1997: 158). The
idea behind Haq is that it “takes on the movement from the
singular transcendental form to a pluralistic one on this earth through its
multiplicitous form; Huquq” (Esack, 1994: 175). Muslims/Muslimas would
be acting as demagogues therefore if they deprive rights established by God
unto others. This is why Islam(s) cannot as social entities display superiority
over anyone because only God grants everyone’s Huquq. Anything otherwise
would mean that Islam(s) and their parochial God are above everyone else
(Esack, 1994: 175). Such a claim, if it were to occur by Islam(s), would place
Islam(s) in the same positions as certain hegemonic individuals and communities
that were encountered historically and whom have monstrously exaggerated their
crimes of vanity in the name of their God; those whom plunge in a savage and
solitary desire to appropriate and negate God all together for their individual
or communitarian indulgence (Esack, 1994: 175).
Inclusiveness
in Islam(s) becomes superior to exclusiveness. The proof that I have here lays
with the Koranic verse: “Freedom from (all) obligations (is declared) from God
and God’s Messenger (SAW) to those of the Mushrikûn (polytheists, pagans,
idolaters, disbelievers in the Oneness of Allâh), with whom you made a treaty”
(Chapter 9: Verse 1).
An
echo of my Incarnation
Islam(s)’ are not naïve to request the “[dissolving of all] power relations in
the utopia of perfectly transparent communication…but to give one’s self the
rules of law…the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of
power to be played with a minimum of domination” (Foucault, 1987: 129 cited in
Day, 2001: 30). Islams’ roles become directed instead towards the cultivation
of a spirit in respecting ‘the others’’ customs and practices as they accept
that the faithful adherents of all traditions will also attain salvation and
that “no fear shall come upon them neither will they grieve” (Qurran, Chapter
2: Verse 262). Conversely an unjust desire on part of Islam(s) would be for
them to strike fear upon and thus transgress another community that supposedly
does not testify to or pledge allegiance to Islam(s) because this would be an
absolute brevity upon Tawheed; upon God. This is illustrated in these
Koranic Verses: “O you who believe! Let not a group of you be-little [and
hegemonize] another; it may be that the latter are better than the former… Nor
let some women belittle other women; it may be that the latter are better than
the former… Nor defame one another, nor insult one another with nicknames… How
bad it is to charge someone with iniquity after they have believed… And
whosoever does not repent, such are indeed transgressors…O you who believe,
avoid much suspicion; indeed some suspicions are sins. And spy not, nor
backbite one another” (Chapter 49: Verse11). The root is here made clear, a
root of tireless responsibility for ‘the other’; a “‘responsibility without
limits’ in the face of the other” (Derrida, 1992: 22 cited in Day, 2001: 27).
“The infinity of this demand means that, justice cannot be reduced to any
particular system of injunction – it remains always to come (à venir)”
(Derrida, 1992: 26-27 cited in Day, 2001: 27). This commitment to social
justice and even more precisely social jurisprudence, so long as particular
ethical and political commitments to Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Authoritarianism,
becomes apparent because in Islam(s): “if two parties or groups are
inclined to fighting, then make peace between them both, but if one of them
rebels against the other, then fight you (all) against that which rebels till
it complies with God’s command for justice; then if it complies, then make
reconciliation between them justly, and be equitable. Verily! God loves those
who are equitable”(Qurran, Chapter 49: Verse 9). Therefore it is not a matter
of anything goes. It is a matter of negotiations.
Without an interest but to attest to God’s creativity, the Koran invents and
does not prevent Islam(s) from engaging if not competing with ‘others’ and each
other themselves in the spirit of that which is just and that which recognizes
the mutual benefit of neighboring communities (Esack, 1997: 179-203). Nous
for Islam(s) “is not based on a vague and undefined desire for peace and
quiet…rather it is based on a struggle against injustice and for the creation
of a world wherein it is safe to be human and people are freed from
enslavement” (Esack, 1994: 179-203). Such non-elective affinity with the
“oppressed, furthermore, implies the recognition of them as agents of their
liberation with their own resources to draw own” (Esack, 1994: 179-203).
If one day I dared
Nous is then not where You and I ‘fictionally’ conform through abstract
associations but where everything is and always continues to be done, lived
according to the principal: ‘to know one other’. It, this principal, is where
with each episode we become drawn closer to one other. This ‘knowing’ ought to
be complemented un-regrettably with the conscious impossibility that we shall
never be one another and accordingly Muslims/Muslimas and Post-Anarchists are
always seeking the decay of the space or vacuum and hence the distance between
them. Post-Anarchists, Muslims/Muslimas and perhaps Classical Anarchists
through this interpretation and based on their shared commitments need
therefore to long and work together for the “creation of a ‘community with
neither presuppositions nor a State’” (Agamben, 1993: 82 cited in Day, 2001:
35). Through these coming communities, comprised of Nous, there
comes a challenge to “the false dichotomy between the ‘ineffability of the
individual and the intelligibility of the universal’ by appealing to [the]
singular rather than mass poles of identification” (Agamben, 1993: 81 cited in
Day, 2001: 35).
Chapter Four: Infinite Thoughts as The End becomes a
Beginning becoming an End
Mourn Nous,
not these words whose analytic show that both Your understandings and
imaginations have entered into a contractual agreement constituting your
judgment and taste regarding this economy of a paper? A ‘beautiful exposition’
is here, certainly not for “I” but perhaps for You, and that you insist in
destroying through this infinite hold on its language and which is always
retractable. You leave no imagination on the other hand for the extraordinary
violence, not of language, not of the word, words, striated segments, but
rather for any flights of thought that accompany this economy of paper. I could
take leave forever from that which has been ‘spoken’ here; what you think to be
and believe is my voice. But that which has been thought can never be said
again (Agamben, 1982: 108). Language was never my voice here, rather my
voice here accompanies my thoughts and that belongs to an “I”. An “I” that is
neither fascist nor paranoiac; an “I” that is rhizomatic and anarchical; an “I”
that requires… no… no…it creates without even needing to demand Nous; a
rhizomatic ‘us’. You came as close as possible to language, but never to “I”,
though you almost brushed against it, encountered it but turned back. You could
though reach the ‘depth’ of “I” as opposed to merely trying to correspond with
the ‘surface’. In a further move undeniably You could alternatively take the
shortest way, walk away towards your home untroubled. That would become pity
and an act of terror, but I desire that you flap your wings and think like a
pheasant lifting off and then disappears instantly among the trees, as a
porcupine buries in the thick underbrush, and dry leaves crackle as a snake
slithers away (Agamben, 1982: 108). There is something that is ‘said’
here in your flapping, as it does not communicate through language with the
porcupine or the snake that slithers away yet somehow has a voice. A voice that
is something else, not language for that “is not my voice”, but rather infinite
thoughts and which are here, and that require you to go beyond your limits, to
think beyond, to over-think (Agamben, 1982: 108). You need
to understand why you and I came here and why I rose from depth only to surface
to tell you of my depth. You need to think why it was “I” whom initiated this
and what “I” initiated here. Was there a distant proximity occupying the spaces
between You and I, that I was not aware of, or was there a negative secret
animosity, upon unfounded foundations, that made you remain in your infantile
dwelling place while “I” became and am still becoming a you and “I”;
Nous? This is not mysterious and sacrificial wisdom that I am trying to
make you conceive of here and bestow upon myself. “I” initiated this. “I”
initiated this noise, I chose and choose noise oriented towards and for you to
reflect upon, while you remain in your ever yet infantile dwelling, your
looking glass; glace. It is worth being reminded that again a noise, a noise I
say, castrated your glace while you covered your ears. Now you are delirious
and for a start you recognize that to this debate there is no side to take, but
the declaration of Nous. Everything else becomes
cinder.
Keep
it in the family
Formally speaking
I am a Muslim/Muslima and Post-Anarchist. I am not an assassinating imposter
transformed “into [an] incendiary projectile”; I am not a neo-pilot (Badiou,
2003: 141). When the Towering cements temporarily departed on 911 a movement
within me became realized; an overcoming, an always becoming, became
initiated, conjured up from under the rubble’s depth.
Yesterday the
word terror was associated with abuses associated with “the exercise of
State power[s]” (Badiou, 2003: 144). Now, terror has come to mean something
else. It, terror, is no longer associated with ‘the state’ but
rather it is now invented with a relentless faceless invisible enemy. The
towering cements departed and terror now has come to “designate…from the
position of the dominant, [the State,] all those who engage in a combat
[militant or any other] using whatever means at hand, against a given order
which is judged to be unacceptable” (Badiou, 2003: 144). “Anti-Nazi resistors
for Pétain and his militia” [are terrorists]; “Algerian patriots of the NLF for
every French government without exception between 1954 and 1962” [are
terrorists]; “Chechens for Putin and his clique” [are terrorists]; an always
becoming terror (Badiou, 2003: 145). Terror now is a spectacular
performance; a play whose predicate and habitual dwelling place, from the
perspective of many, has become, at least for now, Islam or should I say Islams
or better yet Islam(s)? Terror’s point(s) of departure have become the
aggregate Islams and the extraordinary complex relations they have to the
“manna of…[black gold]” in a Monarchy of Meccan Kingdoms of Sheikhs (Badiou,
2003: 149). But what is truly interesting is that terror’s motif signaled and
announced that I, a Muslim/Muslima and Post-Anarchist, can never again become
excluded. Rather I am now emancipated. This is because, and I have
recently come to realize this: If I am signified abstractly with a given name
that I ‘carry’ and which can always become replaced with another name by
imperial machines, Eurocentric Capitalism and State, when they don’t
like it, doesn’t suit them, then what holds the space of my name intact? If
these imperial machines dare to take another name and place another in its
place then the space occupied by my first name, and that has now come to be
known as terrorist, was always inhabited by symbolic positions
determined by supposedly imperial machines. Then where is my name? Has my name
resigned to these imperial machines on pain of returning to its habitual
dwelling place or has it become indifferent to such a ‘being’ being referred to
as a terrorist? Surely, if my name chose to hide then I would not hold its
choice as being far from being innocent. But I believe that my name that now
signifies terrorism has never and could never become threatened, because it and
what it signifies remains anonymous to imperial machines. My name, I say, was
always an emancipated name. It was free to be what it desired to be in all its
ferocity, in all its Terror from itself and unto
itself.
A
Testimony Already Forgotten: Invading Oceans by Becoming Planters
We, You and I, are becoming acquainted and I
feel there is a need for Nous to take action, to grow roots, not for fun
but to incapacitate two uninvited guests, Eurocentric Authority and
Capitalism. Islamic and Anarchistic practices require that
Muslim/Muslimas and Anarchists, Classical and Post, surface, to discuss their
depths, to accept, to receive, to invite Nous. That is my wish. One might
as well say that I came here not to assimilate with Anarchisms, while others
believe that I am already an Anarchist. Instead I say I came here in away to
alienate Post-Anarchisms from themselves, and thus You a Post-Anarchist from
yourself, so that it and You lament back at Your beginning, Anti-Religious
Classical Anarchisms and to respond to Islam(s) and what I have written here. I
came here to say that in this economy of a paper and following this, the next,
and every other I write, that throwing Your head first, like your former Classical
Anarchisms, is very near alienating and offer instead that You always remain
immediately conscious; for you to be light on your feet; for these blows here
to create us both. I without question came here, instead of staying with my
secret, to this supposedly inaccessible place; War of Dreams: Becoming(s) of
a Redeemed Circle A with an Eye and a Redeemed Eye with a Circle A. I do
not belong here though, in this economy of a paper, nor am I interested in
worshiping just the boundaries of its supposed nodes of elective affinities;
Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Authoritarianism and the creation of Nous.
Like you, I am engaged both individually and collectively, both in theory and
praxis, in re-creating myself like when I was first born, becoming human.
In this
re-creation I believe that I am becoming what I will call for now and
without settling in them individually or collectively an Anarcho/Anarcha-Muslim/Muslima.
I have tried to elaborate non-figuratively and literally giving Islamic
Anarchism(s) through Nous a way, a practice, an alternative, another
painting, a clarification and explanation. I did this through rigorous points
belonging to both ways of life being related to one another; thereby even
giving myself a new way to live. I have tried to remind You that every day on
any street corner we suffer as prisoners to imperial machines; Eurocentric
Capitalism and Authority. I told You of matters partially belonging
to my depth instead of merely giving You a surface effect. I have tried to
bring You to admit that You yesterday, an Anti-Religious Classical Anarchist,
have historically and politically exiled all religions and here particularly
Islam(s). Islams’ testimonies therefore are absent from both your Classical
Anarchisms of yesterday and Post-Anarchisms of today. Each time throughout, I
tried to illustrate that “in order to think religion abstractly, we [You and I
collectively] will [have to] take these powers of abstraction as our point of
departure, in order to risk eventually, the following hypothesis: with
respect to all these forces of abstraction and of dissociation, ‘religion’ is
at the same time [always] involved in reacting antagonistically and
re-affirmatively [always thus] outbidding itself” (Derrida, 1996: 2).
Therefore it does not serve You or I right to classify religions under
the same name because there is no right, no concept, nor even a word
corresponding to perhaps the last two monotheisms, Islam(s) and
Judaism(s), that does not “revolt against everything that in the Christianizing
of our world, signifies the death of God, death in God, two non-pagan
monotheisms that do not accept death any more than multiplicity in God…two
monotheisms alien enough at the heart of Greco-Christian, Pagan-Christian
Europe” (Derrida, 1996: 12).
I
also admitted that the “surge of Islam(s) will be neither understood nor
answered as long as the exterior and interior place…have not been called into
question,” and this is my life long promise to You (Derrida, 1996: 20). That
is, to conduct such questioning (Derrida, 1996: 20). This passageway would
require ‘an other’ already absent here, in this economy of a paper, the
interior, and out there, in the open theater, an exterior. What I am talking
about is ‘an other’ that is personal and that involves an establishment of
social connections through our commitments to values towards obstructing the
two imperial machines in the real world, not here in the written word.
Correspondingly I have tried to interest and tempt You to looking for such
opportunities. I tried to give these thoughts and their bodies some flesh.
Our values, our inferential structures, and our daily engagements as Anarchists
have to reflect the principles we purport to espouse. To what exemplary
competence will they, these Imperial machines, and without difficulty sustain
such a will over Nous; my moves towards Post-Anarchisms; Your moves towards
Islam(s). It is a unique place, at the indivisible instant when Nous is
brought to an Imperial machines’ attention in so far as the Imperial
machines’ difficulty in territorializing, de-territorializing and capturing
Nous increases. After all it is the Imperial machines that seek to
expand the distances and spaces between us. Nous is manifested in Nous,
inscribed within itself from itself, and whose birth brings with it a thought
by Imperial machines whose only insight regarding Nous upon seeing it is
that ‘there is something more to them [Nous] than what is seen’. Nous’
carries with it two affirmations; simultaneously it plays two sides. An
affirmed offering in that it can only be understood from within, by those whom
choose to circulate ‘through’ it; I could be saying that I relate to You here
‘through’ You, to be more precise, a part of You for You are becoming You and I
becoming I. You and I, our individualized always becomings, are
always released in an affirmation of differences, a separation, belonging to
You and I; a resistance to assimilation.
The other affirmed
offering could be conceived of as a protection against the danger of
incorporation whereby our Nous is never identical to another Nous elsewhere,
due to the formers’ affirmation of becoming; no two friendships are
identical. It is in this way that Nous encrypts itself from itself
and others, amounting to a fusion of ties within itself haunting any instants
for introjections made by imperial machines. Nous is a negotiated
relationship of clinging
detachments.
To
a blind ‘we’ that ‘we’ become
“The playing of transgression and being
is fundamental for [the construction and] constitution of philosophical
language…[a language folded onto itself]- as if it were nothing more than a
small night lamp that flashes with a strange light, signaling the void from
which it arises and to which it addresses everything it illuminates and
touches.”
Michel
Foucault
Contrary
to your expectations this body of text has taken time, shuttling between
thoughts and now that I am nearing ‘the end’ I utter that all this creation,
this interpretation from origin to its in between, is but a stray hair denoting
a line of flight.
The disturbance that took place in both traditions, in these ways of living
here began at the instant in which both these traditions were born from
thoughts that work; working thoughts. Thoughts un-appropriated by claims like
that associated with property and thoughts that do not take up residence in
neither You or I. You, like I, are merely introduced here as strangers and
wanderers, always legible and always there. By fate or luck, You desire Nous
as parts of yourself betray yourself.
In a step
beyond me now, Islam(s) and Post-Anarchisms are the discovered and surfacing
becoming(s) which I have chosen to testify to thus far. But it is, as often the
case is, that there is no prohibition against me copulating like an animal and
thereby recognizing that these two conjoined modes of living are merely
discovered becomings. And it is so that I remind myself before You that “animal
copulation leaves behind itself no monument, no burial place, no institution,
no law that opens and assures any history” (Derrida, 1974: 12). Respectively I
am not naive to think that I am passively confined to these discoveries and
therefore as I must, attest to ‘being’ associated with all that resides yet
undiscovered, impatient to be discovered and all that is beyond discovery.
I possess no
abode to hide now so as to remain a secret, nor would I desire for such an
abode’s possibility. Such a wish corresponds to an avowed desire to distance Nous
and to attest to all the manufactured oppressions that I feel I detest. Such a
wish, even if but for an instant, in principal renders that I possibly belong
to imperial machines and that somehow this interpretation ‘belongs’ to me. On
the contrary, my name, and I believe I myself, am free. I believe only in God
and for me to testify to an Imperial order, my own self or even someone else
would imply that I have contradicted Tawheed. I am only left with
mourning solely God’s absence from our, God’s and mine, Nous. And so
the End becomes the beginning becoming an End.
As such the taste of the lemon and the words have coursed my veins…As such I
ate the words and lemon and spat the seeds…for when yesterday I supposedly
‘woke’ up I found myself sucking what you and they might call a ‘lemon’…now a
dried ‘lemon’…whose seeds are like these words which I just spat…perhaps now
they, the seeds and their company of words may sprout into inverted trees of
half red, half green and partially rotted black apples…As such my duty for now,
but for now, becomes fulfilled…As such my infringement upon good tastes comes
to a temporal beginning of something new…This was the vision I had sometime in
the afternoon…call it poetic terrorism if you like….all I propose to know is
that it was but a combat-like portrait of two dreams, redeeming one
another, because they are never complete and hence always partially
rotten…
If you
don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write about
it. But there are No castles on the Rhine to be enshrined here. Read this once.
Read this once. Read this once, tempt Nous, cry Brûle then Burn it.
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[1] The signifier Sankofa signifies the necessity that
“we must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward, so we understand
why and how we came to be who we are today”. Taken from www.sankofa.com
