The articleWhat’s wrong with us Caucasian Muslims? touches on a very important aspect.

Unfortunately, the tragedy of Caucasian Muslims (and only Caucasian Muslims!) whose Islam is of recent coinage is that they enter as loose individuals and not as communities (families, clans, tribes, tribal aggregates, villages, nations), unlike the historical pattern of acceptance of Islam in the past.

As we said previously, there are two phases to it: the phase of destruction, “the la ilaha”, so to speak, that separates such an individual Muslim from the sea of post-christian kufr around him, coloured by a strong component of arrogant feeling of Western superiority over the rest of mankind. We have experienced it in our milieu of origin. This phase is a positive, purifying one. It filters out of the new Caucasian Muslim any racial conceit that severs him from a sense of affiliation to a much vaster ummah, a Prophetic nation where the Prophet, Sallallahu ‘alayhi wa-Sallam, is our spiritual father while not being the physical father of any one of us.

The problem is the undue prolongation of this necessary phase. New Caucasian entrants in Islam often get stuck in it, rooted in deep dislike when not detestation of their original seed, which they associate with kufr 100% (and that is a clear error)), unable to move into the second phase, the one so-to-speak of “illallah”. There are many reasons for this, including the financial dependence of a number of them on their kafir families of origin in whose houses they live an underground Islam hidden from parents and brothers or overtly opposed by them.

We thus witness this overpowering impulse to run away, literally and metaphorically, from that environment and get assimilated into the cultural reality of an established Muslim ethnicity (Arab, Senegalese, Indian, Turkish, Malaysian etc.); which manifests in the prevalent choice of spouse (but also in dress, food, customs, mindset and so on).

Nothing of that sort, ca va sans dire, happened with our predecessors from Eastern Europe, Bosnians, Albanians, Tatars and their like.

There is thus a deep schizophrenia in contemporary Caucasian Muslims that has to be addressed; something you do not find among their Afroamerican or Caribbean counterparts. There is quite a deal of hypocrisy, too, since their vocal rejection of any “ethnic identity” does not stop them from making extensive use of the national network (passport, visas, welfare and pension contributions, civic infrastructure etc.) of the countries they live in, which is based on citizenship parameters. Ironically, while they develop this resentment against their original seed, always ready to run it down by words, their Muslim brethren from established Muslim regions, Gambians, Afghans, Syrians, Somalis, Bengalis, are braving perils to rush to the West.

The only way out of this paralysing condition is to embrace our original seed and consciously nurture and develop a sense of cohesive national identity as Muslims emerging from it and transcending its historical limitations.

The most effective Islamic groups in the West that have retained a positive connection with that seed, such as the Murabitun and the Naqshabandiyyah, have fallen however into the mistake of solving the problem through the creation of artificial, “ideological” tribes that trace their lineage to a spiritual founder/ancestor and develop ties of quasi-kinship on that basis.

All of this is a delicate topic that has to be tackled with tact, not aggressively, while eschewing at the same time deep-rooted emotionalism.

It goes without saying that an Islam projected as being hostile or antithetical to one’s original seed, which must either be replaced with another, “exotic” identity, or absorbed into an undifferentiated, amorphous supra-national one, cannot go down well with the generality of Caucasians.

How could a da`wah be effective among its target when it is premised on the fact that “there is a problem with your nation and you are required to exit it?”. It can only succeed among individuals scattered here and there, who are prepared to endure isolation from their original environment; and that is what we witness now. It cannot succeed with larger segments of the population. In the past, effective da`wah was always founded on recognizing and honouring the anthrolopological distinctness of the addressees thereof, and bringing it into harmony with the essential Islamic tenets. The existence of an ummah, on the basis of which we will enter the Garden, Allah the Exalted willing, does not entail the non-existence of tribes or nations.

As for the argument that Islam does not forbid marriage across races, that is indeed a truism. No school theorized that more than the Madinan school of Imam Malik. Traditionally, that healthy stretching out has been the exception to the norm capable of renewing and refreshing a blood otherwise afflicted by stagnation.

Shaykh Ahmad Ali Adani (Enrico Honnorat)

One Comment

  1. Kelly Schneider says:

    “coloured by a strong component of arrogant feeling of Western superiority over the rest of mankind”.

    White people do not think they are superior over the rest of mankind! Period! It is just something that you think!

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