To Be No Longer Sane
6th June, 2026
What we need is not a change of air, for the problem is not where we are, but who we are. The spectre[1] not only haunts Europe, but the entire world. You know it too, all too well. When you get up, unwilling. When you put on your cold shirt, unwilling. Then you eat your breakfast, unwilling. Then you proceed to your j*b, unwilling. How far can man really go, unwillingly? It is not the very work that you do, perhaps you even love what you do, and maybe the corporations you enter are amazing, and the people you meet there are welcoming. But you feel it regardless, the insanity of a normal day.
This is not an article on the mundane life of a common man, however. This is an article on the insane life of a common man. I want you, as a common man, to imagine yourself in three different scenarios, relating to three different constructions, to become much more aware of the magnitude of the insanity that we display on a daily basis. Perhaps, you will come to appreciate that the unwillingness to continue is the result of a deep spiritual murder. I, for one, refuse to be insane any longer.
Poverty
You are a poor man, you are married and have some kids at a house that you are renting, and rent is due. Your grandfather taught you your family’s craft: carpets. Thereafter, you gather your carpets that you made yourself, hoping to sell some throughout the day. The ride on the bicycle to the market was long, and the day was hot, but you made it, and there are a lot of wealthy people thankfully. You show your wares to a person, who simply ignores you, gets out of their car, and goes about their shopping. Fair enough, they probably didn’t need a carpet. Maybe the entire ordeal would be made more pleasant had there been less heat, and the pavement was cooler, and the cars honked a little less at you. You spot a woman just about to leave, so in a state of visible distress, you offer her to buy a carpet. She simply yells at you for blocking the way. That’s fine, maybe she has some place to be. It seems everyone has some place to be but you. The day is ending poor man, and no one needs your carpets even now. What will you do? Beg? No, you’re too upright to do such a thing. Then again, poor man, what choice do you have? The thoughts of hunger, thirst, electricity, education for your children and obligations to your wife cross your mind. You have made nothing, and your carpets are needed by none. Need, as you have noticed, had little value in the place you were standing. How many people did you see throughout the day, getting out of their cars, and fulfilling a need they had? In that place, the only one seeking something they needed was you. Yet, for some reason, what people wanted always triumphed over what you needed. It’s not like you’re begging them for money!
But the painting has not yet seen its final stroke, so you must now become the man in the car. You just got off from your job, and the nice thought of buying a refreshing bottle of coke just crossed your mind. Why not, after all, you deserve it! Instead, there is an irritating man blocking your car door?! You wish they worked a little bit harder instead of begging on the street. They are always after your hard earned money, although the times are difficult. He doesn’t know you yourself have got a house to run. Besides, there is absolutely no moral blame on you if you do not give him anything, let’s just focus on that bottle of coke for now, it’s a hot day anyways. Allah will give him whatever is sufficient for him. You storm off into the store, come back in your car, and have a nice sip. The thought, however, still lingers in your mind. You look out the window and see him still begging other people such as yourself. The thought grows higher and higher in your mind. There is, however, no justifiable reason for you to give him money, or buy his carpets, as you rightly convinced yourself. For all intents and purposes, that man may just be making more money than you through his begging. Finally, it is Allah Himself who instructed us to not give everything away, and I do not have a lot. He said:
And do not make your hand [as] chained to your neck or extend it completely and [thereby] become blamed and insolvent. (17:29)
Oppression
You come home, and Khamenei is dead, you just saw it on the news. Whatever your difference with him was, the last knight of the free world has perished, and there was nothing you could’ve done about it. It is simply better to turn off the news. On your Instagram, however, you see the same thing, it is even more stark. The graves of the children of Palestine have flowers sprouting from them. What a distasteful thing to see, is it not? You wonder if anyone will ever stand up to this, and you wonder if any state has the courage to challenge them. Courage, as it seems, is lost to history, or to capital. You know very well that the state is responsible for dealing with this, not you. You, instead, are courageous, because you are going to go against all odds and make a company. You will escape the 9-to-5 rat race, and you will give hundreds of people more jobs, and you will solve problems and provide real value, to finally build something that outlasts even you. You are courageous, and this great undertaking is something to occupy your mind with instead. You know this is true because you, being deeply religious, understand the Sunnah of the Beloved Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon Him. It is simply a sunnah to have a business, to be strong and rich, at least that’s what you’ve heard from the scholars on Youtube!
You get up early the next day to go to the governmental office to get your business registered. It has been the second week you’ve been visiting that dreadful office: no fans, barely working air conditioning, long lines, and disgruntled officers. You take your token and wait in line just like always, the employee that’s supposed to handle your case isn’t there yet, he’s just outside the office chatting with his girlfriend. At that moment, you see a military officer walk in with a dozen guards. All employees direct their attention towards him. He doesn’t take a token, goes right past you to the handler, hands him a file and says, “Get it done by tonight”, to which he nods and offers him a cup of tea. The officer leaves, his file gets processed. Although you feel disenchanted by what you see, you know this is how things have always been run. Higher people in society have a right to be treated in respect because you know the hadith very well:
'Treat people according to their status" (Abu Dawud)
Ignorance
In the course of that aggravated waiting, you scroll through your phone and read the story of a guy who assaulted a woman in a university. Too bad, you think for yourself, at least it wasn’t your daughter. Maybe parents should keep a check on their daughters, keep them safe, and not send them to a university in these strange times! Additionally, if you were there, you might’ve done something about it. Oh well, you were not there, and worrying won’t change what happened, so it is better to not worry about it so you don’t suffer twice in your mind.
Some time before bed, when you get home, you have a great habit of listening to some lectures on things that interest you, mainly philosophy and Islam. You have, however, lately felt that you never progress in your religious knowledge. You search up a thing on the internet, and you get a hundred different videos on it, all from the same scholar, and in all of them, he’s saying a hundred different things! The more concerning thing is that there is no content at all about helping the poor, or paying for the sick, or protecting the weak. You find no videos about disturbing high profile protocols, natural conservation, exploitation of labour, substandard manufacturing, and the like. It seems as if no one has a problem with your vote going to waste, or judicial processes being bypassed, except only when their own institutions are involved.
You wonder, perhaps, that all the things that are relevant in your life, that should eventually matter to you, are entirely absent from the discourse. The government is being threatened by the scholar because his masjid fund is reduced, but he has nothing to say over the in-action of the state on your brothers and sisters in Sudan. There are no threats in that regard, not even an article. You wonder, maybe, about why that is. It is fine, a scholar’s job is to teach you how to pray, and you have a pretty good idea about how that works. Or so you think. In any case, you don’t lose anything by knowing what socio-political intents does Islam aim to achieve.
To Say “Enough!”
The problem, my friends, is not the commonality of your actions, but the insanity of your decisions. I can only assume that the pictures I showed above made that apparent for you: in the cold view of morality, you know what is correct, the problem with you, however, is that you have lost your mind. Not only that, but this is what is expected from you. The abysmal machine must keep running and it does not matter what you or I have to say about it. I only request from you to read whatever I write next with a patient mind.
In all three scenarios, which I am sure you all have personally enacted in some form or manner, there are some common sources of discontent: pride, exaltation of the self, and a sense of independent achievement. I will not be talking about these. You all know pride is bad, and that your own self, independently of Allah’s help, is nothing. You’ve watched hundreds of lectures on it and read thousands of pages. Instead, I want you to focus on the coercive nature of the forces in each paradigm of the problems: in wealth, capitalism coerces the narrative. In an oppressive system, the dominant political force coerces the narrative, and in ignorance, the vocal minority of the maintainers of knowledge coerce the narrative in favor of whatever benefits them. Their hold is so strong, in each case, and the coercion is so effective, that a normal man like you will see absolutely horrifying and insane things each day and will dismiss them as normal, everyday happenings.
At any given time, man is burdened by the decision to act, and at any time, it is not sufficient for him to say to Allah that virtue for him, at that time, was not convenient. As such, as Islam demands, all actions must aim to reflect what is true and good. However, we find that our dispositions detest that, because we love the immediate and hate the hereafter. As Allah says in His book:
No! But you love the immediate, and leave the Hereafter. (75:21-22)
And the immediate benefits, almost always, manifest themselves in the dominant coerced narrative we find ourselves in. So when it comes to money (or more broadly, economy), the immediate benefits are the benefits of a capitalist economy. So, that bottle of soda is indeed YOUR right, and it is irrelevant how terribly burdened that man selling carpets is, he will never be able to justify his needs in front of your wants, your justifications will always triumph in favor of the system. That is simply what it is designed to do. But now, as you read this, you can clearly tell the foolishness of your actions. What difference does a bottle of Coke really make in the eyes of Allah, exalted be He, over making things easier for that poor man? Do you really believe that Islam, the final religion spread at the hands of the most perfect creation, has no preference over your bottle of soda or helping that person? That’s insane! Even more so, and I will discuss this more as well, that the vocal minority of scholars have formalised this insane attitude of yours by quoting the verse (which you used as well):
And do not make your hand [as] chained to your neck or extend it completely and [thereby] become blamed and insolvent. (17:29)
Whereas the scholars of the soul, those who have managed to defy all coercion and become lights of guidance, such as Imam Abu Bakr al-Jassas al-Razi, said that this verse is not a prohibition of spending all your wealth in the path of Allah, but rather, the prohibition of spending when you are susceptible to blaming yourself negatively in doing so, when for example you or your dependants have a real need of that wealth. He goes on to mention that many of the sahaba spent their entire wealth in the path of Allah, and the prophet did not stop them, because this prohibition is not for those who trust in Allah[2]. In that manner, it will always be better to spend your wealth to make things easy for others than to withhold. An economic system designed around this principle will always be more “islamic”.
Similarly, we have been led to believe by the vocal minority that we cannot, and must not, develop any feelings of resistance to our state. I wonder, however, that it cannot be that when corruption spreads in political order, Islam demands us to remain as we are and do nothing about it. In this manner, corruption will always spread, unless active measures are taken to keep evil in check. Therefore, Islam will then eventually pave the way for its own inevitable extinction. Bear with me as I say this, that religious permissibility has always revolved around institutions of power. Before, a caliphate seemed to be the normative religious position. Then, when kings and hereditary lineage came, kingship became the normative religious position, and then when democracy came, suddenly Islam was the most the democratic religion in the world. The same goes for socio-economic models, be it feudalism or capitalism. And that which is subdued is always under religious critique in favour of the powerful: communism is un-islamic, for example, whereas the same religious justification given to capitalism can be given to communism. So in this manner, the disease spreads farther and farther, and man becomes insane by the minute.
Why is it, and may Allah have mercy upon you, that our leader Hussain even attempted what he did? The problem that he went out to fix haunts the muslims ever since: illegal usurpation of power. He knew that if he yielded to the illegitimate forces of his time, they would set in stone, as they have. And he gave his life for it. How is it that you cast a vote and suddenly in the morning someone else wins? How is it that you are constrained by these laws, but the man in the uniform has to take no heed to any of this? It is not, therefore, normal to see my own son get his head cut off in front of my very eyes, and I dream about running a business in that instant. I refuse to be insane. How is it that a daughter of mine gets assaulted in a university and I think of keeping her at home, instead of the person who did it? You know it is only a matter of time, you are safe only by a stroke of luck. The guy next to you can keep his family safe, he is rich and powerful. But you? You can do nothing, and the wolves are out to eat someone. If not him, then you.
I have to come to see now, these liberal freedoms are chains, these utilitarian decisions are weapons, and these national interests are idols. And my dear friend…I simply cannot put this statue in front of me any longer. This crescent and this star, they have become the apparatus of my oppression. I am dying to hold my children in Palestine, and to rescue my parents from the torture camps, and my brothers from Iran, and my sisters in Kashmir. I am dying to say, “Enough!” to the tyrants of the world. I am not this land, and I am not these borders, and I am not this green and white. This cold heart I cannot bear, and these eyes I cannot close. All the poor in the world may take from my wage, all the weak may seek my protection, and all the ignorant may share in my knowledge. I simply cannot live under the shade of tyranny and insanity: I must say enough. I hope that is who Allah legislates for me to be.