Reawakening Our Spirituality: An Islamic Response to Modernity

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead” has often been understood as a celebratory remark. Hailed by naturalists as the beginning of a glorious secular age, it is a phrase of triumph. In an alternative context, however, the passage refers to the fact that because the Modern Project (roughly understood as beginning with the Renaissance and “The Age of Reason”) has dislodged God as the anchor of everything we do, from our economies to our governments to our social interactions, humanity is now left without a core to stabilize itself. This "freedom" is what has caused man to enter a state of flux where he does not know himself or his creator. Instead, he concerns himself with conquering the world around him. The Modern Project, which gave rise to modernity, is an imbalanced quest of seeking renewal. The word “modern” comes from the Latin adjective modernus, derived from the adverb modo meaning “presently, just now.” The modern world constantly incites us towards a very specific lifestyle. A lifestyle of consumption and greed supported by messages from the world of images, the world of media and advertising agencies. Advertisement comes from latin advertere meaning turning towards. We are literally compelled to turn away from our own selves and pay attention to the world of illusion around us. Messages in the modern world are ceaseless, unrelenting but also illusory. They are a call from the modern world to break from tradition and constantly reinvent and repackage the self. The focus is on modifying external appearances and buying plastic-wrapped environmentally destructive items. This is a very dangerous game, both for the self and the Earth which supports us. Philosophical modernity assumes that human beings are merely a higher form of animal life resulting from a long evolutionary process. However, the problem is that modernity flatlines the entire depth of our spirituality and spiritual potential. Instead of learning to transcend our limited rational ability and open ourselves up to the potential of quantum consciousness, modernity operates in a mechanical Newtonian worldview. This has an immediate and long-lasting impact on the subjective and existential experience of the social conditions modernity produces through culture, institutions, and politics. Modernism not only relegates our spirituality to the private sphere but also takes away our ability to understand said spirituality. When we pay attention to the world around us, we are paying a very hefty price. Our ability to understand our own selves is completely undermined and we neglect our spiritual life. We begin to accumulate spiritual toxins such as greed, lust, gluttony and also envy, jealousy, anger and pride. The symptoms are anxiety, fear, and hate. Some of us try to seek a cure from the modern world itself which was the source and cause of our dis-ease in the first place. The problem is, we don’t understand that we have spiritual needs and nourishment. Spirituality is a primordial reality and it has existed in every single civilization in our collective human history. It was a reality without a name practiced within local Indigenous cultures and ancient civilizations that developed sophisticated ritual practices. The purpose was to understand the self in itself and in relation to others, find meaning in suffering, prolong human life, and transcend limited human perceptions to arrive at universal truths. It was not about creating systems of knowledge but rather accumulating wisdom and using spiritual techniques and rituals to further this end. Communities that lived in close harmony with nature had an especially intimate understanding of themselves and the world around them. Spirituality played an important role within every human civilization until the early modern period. The subject of spirituality concerns the self. Our inner world is vast and incredibly complex. There are several parts that make up this self. For our purposes, we will focus on the nafs which can be characterized as the ego, psyche, or even breath. It gravitates towards immediate human concerns of survival but if left unchecked can pull us towards powerful destructive tendencies. This is the force that spiritual masters of old attempted to conquer. The nafs is simultaneously both weak and strong. When a glimmer from the other world, like special glimpses from the sacred holy realm or breezes from God appear, the inner self awakens. Then, we are able to use the power of the self to cultivate wholeness and prosperity that benefits humanity. It is in direct contrast with the modern program of cultivating power wholly for oneself. The Modernity Project keeps the self tangled in a web of lies until we lose sight of moral and universal virtues. When we master the nafs and our lower tendencies, we are able to put everything into perspective. We are able to interpret ourselves and others through a clearer lens. Then, we are able to push through and push back at these present illusions because they are just that, illusory and weak. It is only by pushing back that one sees what one is truly made up of. It is important to realize that the awakening of the inner self is not just “repackaged and reconstituted ego,” as Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad puts it. Modernity's constant suggestions to change oneself are just that, suggestions. They have no basis in reality and arise as the result of modernity’s fixation on the self. Even our quest for artificial intelligence and biological engineering comes from this self-obsession. Simultaneously, our present state of flux and anxiety is a result of not doing enough internal work. We are so focused on the external world through a desire to conquer the external world that we let our desires run wild. As Nietzsche points out, “what sacred games shall we have to invent?” We’ve shifted our focus from conquering spiritual peaks to gracelessly befuddling the physical world. Whilst it may seem to be a mundane metaphor, common phrases like “sport is my religion” stem from this desire to invent new sacred games. The result is a collapse of our inner psychic structure—we have created a monster inside ourselves and invited a messy, twisted internal life not dissimilar to Dorian Gray, the hedonistic character of Oscar Wilde. When we wake up, we see the disfigured monster for what it truly is. We have strayed far from our original purity, our original disposition, natural constitution, and innate nature. As a result, we have lost ourselves. In our quest to conquer the world we have forgotten to conquer our own selves. One of the effects has been a colonization of ourselves by both external forces and internal forces. Internal forces such as our hawa, describing desires and caprices which we have fashioned into gods, and shahwa, an animalistic appetite, have completely subdued and weakened us collectively. Psychology and psychoanalysis has attempted to understand the psychic landscape with limited success. These disciplines are still too entrenched in logical positivist denials of anything that cannot be measured and validated through experimentation. The closest they have come is an acknowledgment of man’s consciousness. That is too little too late. It is not enough to even begin to comprehend the complexities of the inner world of man. Through our desire to break from tradition we have strayed from our original state of well-being. Modernity is characterized by a certain dynamism that has found its way into our economy, governance, social relationships, and education, not to mention its destructive effect on spirituality. Modernity comprises certain attitudes, socio-cultural norms, and practices that are characterized by a rejection of the past. It is closely associated with the development of capitalism, individualism, hyper-consumerism, and a devotion to technological progress. The hulking and cranking machinery of modernity is in its last breaths before its inevitable and unceremonious death. Modernity has brought with it disillusionment, the environmental crisis, debilitating social inequality, and a deep spiritual crisis. Man has been brought to his knees, utterly humbled by his own creation. In a spiritual sense, this is a ripe moment, full of possibilities and openings. It has the possibility of becoming a moment of self-accounting and self-reflection. If done right, we can redeem ourselves. However, there is a long way to go. There are very real dangers haunting our collective being such as our wounded ego and damaged pride, and our ever-present and engulfing human social and environmental crises. Like the climber taking on Everest, one miscalculation and we can fall off the very steep cliff of existence into chaos and non-existence. As a result, there is a very urgent need to return to our roots and our traditions. To start with our most vulnerable, our old and young. They remain our responsibility and our future potential. We must firmly take hold of our ancestral wisdom and collectively move forward. In all spiritual communities, a spiritual hierarchy has always been preserved. Special guides and teachers preserved spiritual wisdom and would teach their communities spiritual and social governance. It is imperative we seek out spiritual teachers and learn from them the ways of taming the self. The spiritual milieu has been transformed but we can use this to our advantage. We cannot be divided along sectarian lines but rather we need to be unified in our spiritual quest. As our spiritual teacher, Mawlana Rumi (may God sanctify his soul) shares, How many paths are there to God? There are as many paths to God as there are souls on the Earth. As long as we flee from the self and strive towards the universal Source, we will surely find our way.