So far, by and large, the Muslim Rum have tried to make use of the existing infrastructures (mosques, Islamic schools, Islamic centres, Zakat funds, magazines and newsletters, etc.) to make their contribution to the enactment of Allah’s Din in this age.
Overall, this approach has not yielded important results.
It cannot.
Those infrastructures are run through the funds and prevalent numbers of ethnic groups that have migrated to the West and its satellites in search of the dunyā.
By doing so, they have imported the corrupt knowledge and practice of the Dīn of their countries of origin, which have moved further and further away from the classical vision of Islam:
– The deviant modernism of the “Salafi” movement;
– The equally deviant socio-political modernism of the Ikhwan;
– The narrow tribalism of Subcontinental Muslims with their diluted and antiquated Hanafi fanaticism;
– The Shiite myth and its expansionist program.
Unless they wholeheartedly subscribe to one of those imported evils (in which case they simply fade into the prevailing norm), the Muslim Rum are simply passengers (and victims) in those organised spaces.
There is only one solution:
Establishing and running themselves (whether with a hegemonic, steering or exclusive role) those spaces, those infrastructures.
For that, the following is required:
– Bidding farewell to their amorphous cosmopolitanism, their rejection of nationhood, and developing a conscious sense of national and continental cohesiveness;
– Pooling their resources together beyond personal animosities and factional divisiveness, and developing organisational skills and the ability to do business, generate wealth and fund their own projects.
If they do not do that, they will become irrelevant spectators or marginal actors.
To date, only some of those things have been implemented by small ideological tribes (the Naqshabandis, the Murabitun, etc.) on an inevitably insular and scattered basis, and their precariousness means they might fold up at any time. By their intrinsic nature, they cannot be functionally open to all the Muslim Rum adhering to the traditional path but offer only miniature situations for like-minded people.
Shaykh Ahmad Ali Adani (Enrico Honnorat)
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