“A World Out of Control” – Uthman Ibrahim-Morrison and Abdassamad Clarke

“And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.” Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent

Against the background of a geo-political situation that has been lurching out of control for some years and a financial system that has suffered fantastic reverses that are widely anticipated to be eclipsed by what is to come, a number of events have been unfolding. We are living in a time when history appears to be accelerating towards its destination. Wars, natural disasters, industrial catastrophes, mass murders, public scandals, financial crises, terrorist attacks, popular uprisings, assassinations… the kind of momentous occurrences that used to define an epoch, a decade or a year, now visit us on a weekly, or almost daily, basis. We have chosen five apparently disparate, but equally emblematic, events that have converged upon us in little more than a single week, each of which warns us in different ways of a dark nihilism that is rapidly engulfing everything we have come to regard as our culture and civilisation. Indeed, if one were to take the analogy of a snake consuming its own tail, then all that now remains to be swallowed is the jaw itself. It is our conviction that the relationship between these different factors is not entirely arbitrary, and that the restoration of the lost point of equilibrium is the key to understanding and recovery.

Necessarily there must be a balance of the forces involved which implies a fulcrum, a still locus that determines the other factors while itself remaining unmoved. And since our picture is certainly not a reassuring one, it must be that this fulcrum is perhaps an arbitrary one and is itself the cause of the imbalance, and that if the human race is to have any hope a real pivot must be found, which will result in the restoration of not a static balance but a dynamic one. Contrary to Nietzsche’s dictum, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” we reckon it is time to look long and hard into the abyss and call it by its name: nihilism.

The Oslo Massacre

Predictably we begin with the Oslo massacre. In the cold light of this recent outrage, the closing lines we quote above from The Secret Agent, the iconic political story written over a century ago, appear chillingly prescient. However, apart from telling us that the threat facing us is far from new, the lines seem to throw little or no light at all on the mindless slaughter of the young Norwegian innocents, that might help their grieving parents, relatives and friends, now in desperate need of an explanation, to begin to grasp what has happened to them. The murderer burst into the limelight and stunned the world as much with his calculating equanimity as by the enormity of his crimes, crimes which have left commentators reaching for every conceivable explanatory narrative from skulduggery by Mossad or NATO to Freemasonry and the Knights Templar, for goodness sake! We have dwelt at length on this first matter since his psychopathic condition is more emblematic of the age, being echoed in the slaughter of the innocents across the earth in a variety of apparently unconnected ways, for in what way other than degree is the Allies’ foreign policy any different from Breivik’s murders?

He has published his thesis, which on examination is typical of the age: cut-and-paste. A strange northern man fed on a diet of cut-and-paste hatred from a coterie of suspect people – Robert Spencer and Melanie Philips et al – who know each other and keep dual citizenships and who deflect hatred from themselves on to others less fortunate than themselves. People who ought to know better, people whose ancestors’ sufferings should have caused them to pity and have compassion on the less fortunate, but who instead have an implacable hatred for these others. And this orderly assassin imbibed their toxic sludge and did what he did, laying out a thesis for the future of Europe: free it of these brown-skinned invaders, unaware apparently of the white man’s depredations, the slaughter of the native peoples of the Americas and Australia, the survivors’ driven on to the poorest land in glorified concentration camps, of Vasco da Gama bursting into the Indian Ocean with pillage and rape, of the millions forcibly seized from Africa and sent half way around the world, those that is who did not die on the journey. Unaware of the high-level protocols that brought these other people here as labourers for the jobs no-one else wanted to do, or of the refugee fall-out from the activities of the puppets installed by Mammon in foreign lands, various foreign policy forays and from the excesses of globalisation. Unaware indeed of the unfolding human disaster of famine in the Horn of Africa, or of the million dead of Iraq.

He is unaware that the backdrop to his insane performance is the slow-motion inevitability of an apocalyptic international banking collapse that has uncovered a widespread sovereign debt crisis and a world devoid of any remnant of humane governance or sovereignty, national or personal. Independence and autonomy have been displaced by national and personal indebtedness. Individuals and nation states alike are at the mercy of credit rating agencies – the attack dogs of the supranational banking oligarchy. He is unaware that the destructive potential of banking usury worldwide has been taken to unimaginable levels of efficiency by mathematical and technological innovations, totally subverting the forms and functions of wealth, money and commerce, and reducing governmental processes to a function of the ‘money power’ of the banking elite. The rapacious consumption of the earth’s natural resources is driven on at an ever accelerating pace by the exponential growth of fantasy wealth produced by the combined mechanisms of fractional reserve banking, compound interest and 24/7 trading of intangible financial derivatives by automated algorithms.

He is also unaware, besides his obvious psychopathic condition, of being a victim of the general ignorance of all of this and of any history beyond yesterday, any geography and politics beyond a parochialism we more normally associate with Americans whose ignorance of the world and its people, it is argued in a recent book, caused a totally unnecessary Cold War and an even more unnecessary invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and general destabilisation of much of the world today, because commercial interests of the time have reduced educational institutions to training centres for the skills they need to keep on making money make money. So even very well ‘educated’ people can hardly remember further back than the 20th century.

The Death of Amy Winehouse

Never before in recorded history has any system of mass control been so successfully applied on so vast a scale. In exchange for democratically bestowed constitutional rights to pursue wealth, sexual fulfilment and commercially programmed tokens of happiness, widespread populations have been comprehensively reduced to economic enslavement while distracted by the consumption of mass produced goods and entertainments. The death last week of Amy Winehouse, a talented popular singer, was sudden but hardly unexpected. Her lifestyle was suicidal in the extreme. She was a fanatical consumer of ‘recreational intoxicants’ who was fanatically consumed by society’s appetite for celebrities, culminating in the atheistic spectacle of public grief and a minute’s silence. She is Breivik’s extreme feminine counterpart, but whereas the Norwegian represents the extreme of maleness, a cold analytical rationality devoid of compassion, she represents the abandoned and exploited female at the mercy of her own emotions and furthermore, cut off from accessing that vital dimension of womanhood that would hold men back from the slaughter of innocents.

The self-immolating arc of her brief moment in the spotlight, whatever the coroner’s verdict, ended in her blowing herself to pieces in our midst, although the fans and hangers-on crowded about her at the time would safely get away with shedding their tears rather than their blood, unlike Breivik’s poor victims, leaving the media, the music industry and her own coldly calculating father to pick over the forlorn remains in order to manage the process of secular beatification and postmortem profiteering.

Her life was sacrificed to the modern cult of celebrity where human lives are bartered and sold like any other commodity. The public watched transfixed, longing for catharsis, as she degenerated in front of us physically and mentally with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. She was caught between the depraved excesses of addiction and the twisted self-denial of self-harming and eating disorders; the latest expression amongst young females of a nihilistic abnegation of modern life as women. It is no accident, therefore, that Hollywood is on hand to supply the traumatised masses with all manner of escapist fantasies – there really is no business like show business.

News International

In the Houses of Parliament, the grubby world of journalism lies exposed for all to see in its ruthlessness and sordidness. The worst of its people suddenly rounded on by those who had served him so faithfully for so long, both the politicians and the others. Here a tawdry specimen of a man, who had clawed his way to the top of the dung heap, piling loan upon loan, determined to reach the top, and now that he has reached it, he lacks the discrimination to realise that everything that reaches a top must plumb the depths. And yet in his face the old man’s knowledge of the imminence of death and the grave. What was it all for Rupert? You have had your moment. Oh, the children of course. That justifies everything. Who cares about all the other children in the world? Everyone can understand the crimes committed in the name of one’s own. All that exposing people and stripping them naked, both literally and metaphorically, was for the children. But what world have you left your children, Rupert?

Murdoch and his ilk are apparently a fulcrum of our story, they balance the scales. They put the blond murderer of the north in one pan and tell us what to think about it, both what happened and how we should understand it, and they put the immigrant from the ‘Muslim world’ – whatever that is – in the other pan and tell us how to look at that. But do they not both belong in the same pan, together? Are these nervous immigrants, with their culture that is under threat, really the dialectical opposite of the Norwegian? We need to be able to understand the forces here and their relative weights and balances because, as we have seen over recent years, there are countless lives at stake. So, we have the corporate media standing for Liberty and in one of the pans of her scales are, let us say, right-wing fundamentalist Norwegian murderers who are too literate for their own good but, not literate enough to be of any benefit to the rest of us. In the other we have an amorphous immigrant community out of which, apparently, emerge young men intent on doing serious harm to themselves and everyone else, and ‘moderate’ smoothies, whom we simply do not trust. We do not trust them, and we are Muslims. The more they say that Islam is the religion of peace, the less we believe it, since the others, who can quote the reasons why Islam is the religion of war, seem to have just as good a case, if not a better one!

Truth lies bleeding on the pavement, and our ordinary sense of justice and indeed our addiction to detective dramas means that we have a deep-seated belief that the murderer can be found, that it is not doomed to remain a mystery. So why should a BBC documentary on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, that cost millions of pounds leave us confused with a welter of opinions, none of which convince us, whether those spouted by Muslim pundits or Jews, Christians and atheists? Why do we imagine that we can hear the sound of axes being sharpened before each pundit steps forward? We will return to that documentary later as perhaps the most important of our five themes.

Thus, in our current hoo-ha, we do not even know where to begin in examining the lies. We are rather like the little boy when he removes a rock and watches with appalled fascination as creepy, slimy, slithery things unaccustomed to the light of day scurry away to their hiding places. But how did we get to the point that something that can be justified in war has now become the quotidian reality of our public representatives, our media and our intellectual class? Are we now in a permanent war, that clearly long predates the ‘war on terror’, being lied to by whom we do not clearly understand for reasons perhaps for now beyond our comprehension? The on-going scandal around the Rupert Murdoch media empire has the public and the media transfixed. Here Conrad’s professor stalks the land as purveyor and manipulator of information, both making and faking the news, with the same steely coldness devoid of compassion for mankind, wreaking untold havoc and being knighted for it in the process. His very bread and butter is comprised of the work of the assassin and the suicidal woman; without them he has no story and thus no business.

East African Famine

The spread of famine in north-east Africa has not been understood if seen merely as a natural disaster. The demand for energy to maintain economic growth is destroying the biosphere while devastating asymmetrical warfare is declared by the debt-financed governments of the industrial North against the disposable swarms of the overpopulated global South. These are wars in which the rule of law and all civilised military and humanitarian conventions are tossed to the four winds in spontaneous submission to the mandatory imperatives of the global banking order. The destruction of southern infrastructure and the expenditure of military hardware required to accomplish it both provide welcome prospects for the order books of the military-industrial economies of the North. No consideration here for moral equivalence – only the limited but costly northern casualties are worth counting, while southern deaths are of little financial consequence and too commonplace to calculate. In objective utilitarian terms, northern humans are more valuable because their birthrates are low, their populations are shrinking and the inordinate investment in time, energy, money and resources that is required in order to rear, feed, clothe, medicate and educate a single individual to adulthood (even before taking into account the prodigious expense of training and equipment for military preparedness) is astronomically disproportionate when compared to his counterparts in the teeming South.

Somalia is a clear enough illustration of how attempts to defend national sovereignty from ‘humanitarian’ intervention by the International Community has precipitated the complete breakdown of civil institutions. The infamous 1993 Battle of Mogadishu did not only become a Hollywood propaganda vehicle (Black Hawk Down) which announced a satisfactory 50:1 kill ratio in favour of the Americans, but the battle was also issued as a game for PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox, for even more mass entertainment! That the pursuit of spin, recreation and profit can justify such indifference to considerations of human dignity is sufficient indication of modern society’s deep spiritual malaise. The intervening years of instability marked by continuous conflict and now drought and floods, have led to the most recent UN declaration of famine in the region as a whole where 11 million may starve to death, 4 million of which in Somalia alone, where a quarter of the entire population has already been displaced by hunger. Needless to say, the fault is being laid at the door of Islamic insurgents who are preventing our aid from reaching those most in need. How can such people be worth as much as we are?

It is worth noting that this question has come closer to home, as budget cuts and austerity measures, the political repercussions of foreign policy excesses and the latest world banking debt crisis, have resulted in a spreading atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, anger and social unrest which is also encroaching on Europe and America – this has been particularly evident in Iceland, American states such as Wisconsin and in the southern Eurozone countries which have been singled out for special attention by the credit rating agencies.

The Life of Muhammad

And finally, last week’s broadcast of the final episode of the BBC’s self-styled “groundbreaking” documentary series on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, which has been screened to strangely muted response from Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Full of ambiguities, no one knows whether to applaud or boo. But certainly it succeeded, if success it could be called, in rendering its subject irrelevant if not actually threatening, and that is crime enough.

Pity these poor people! How humiliated they must feel on an hourly basis to so sell the very honour of truth so cheaply. Desperately plundering the tradition to find sanction for their betrayal. And all of this documentary’s ‘stars’ are academics, journalists and pundits and not a voice of Muslim intellectual authority among them. What did Rageh Omar and his friends think they were doing, these immigrants and their alien religion and their TV biography of the Prophet, peace be upon him? Clearly, in order to make their documentary they will have been made to crawl before the enemy – this Norwegian and behind him Robert Spencer who is so often cited in his repellant thesis – pleading: “Look at us, we are just like you really, we will even say ugly things about our Prophet, we will let hostile, sceptical and outright disbelieving people such as you step forward and defame him, and we will in all seriousness repeat your absurd ahistorical nonsense and treat it as if worthy of respect, but perhaps venturing a timid defence for the home team, an alibi. We will relegate our careful and critical culture of reporting and sifting facts and events to being ‘Muslim tradition’ while the floundering modern pseudo-historiography, which is nakedly the handmaiden of the imperialism that is still subjugating white, black and brown men – except now in the guise of banks and corporations rather than as troops – will be allowed to advance utter speculative nonsense and plain opinion as if it were scientific history of the highest order.”

The community of Muhammad, peace be upon him, must take its stand at the fulcrum itself, indeed we think that is our natural place, not because of a wish for power, but because the fulcrum is the place of balance and stillness. When the world is thrown by instability, it is not for us to be in one or other pan of the scales. This is the mistake of the people who made the documentary on the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. As the last Prophet with a universal message for all of mankind until the end of time, he represents the fulcrum of history. It is by standing with him, that you can understand all the commotion, the ups and downs. His revelation, the Qur’an, deals with it all, both on a macro level and humanly. So we object strenuously that Rageh Omar et al allowed Islam to be placed in peril and placed in a pan of the media’s scales. The only scales that are worth considering are the scales of justice, but what justice do we have with Mr Murdoch and his ilk? Those are not the scales. How dare we place such a one in such scales!? What justice can there be with a variety of pundits, Muslims and non-Muslims, being given their fifteen minutes of fame to put forward various half-digested theses, the sum total of which can only cause indigestion and indeed indignation? Is that all that democracy is worth? Interest groups with shadowy agendas and even more shadowy associates and funding and their covert power ambitions, putting forward their lies and twisting words and stories to fit their sicknesses? Surely, we have arrived at the summit of nihilism when Muslims themselves conspire to remove Muhammad, the keystone of existence, from his rightful place. What clearer sign that the species as a whole is at a loss?

These are urgent questions, and as the reader can see, we have as yet no answer, and very serious things are afoot and it behoves us to treat them earnestly. Everything we know about history suggests that things are going badly wrong. Everything we know suggests that this is certainly not inevitable and that the choices we make matter. We are not doomed to descend into the maelstrom of nihilism and civic slaughter. Indeed, we will ourselves be responsible if we do so. Our Norwegian was not doomed to do what he did, but he chose very carefully. Look at the calmness with which he hands over his guns. An operation concluded. Cold and strategic. And now many people are grieving and how many more people are trembling in fearful anticipation of what the future holds?

The anonymous nihilist who goes about primed to explode “in the street full of men” is presented to us as a source of deadly terror who can strike anywhere at any time, so that the streets become a place of fearful vigilance where the ordinary citizen, ignorant and defenceless against the ubiquitous threat, submits willy-nilly to the frighteningly intrusive surveillance of the enhanced security apparatus of the State and its arrogation of ever increasing powers of arrest, detention, imprisonment, ‘rendition’, torture and elimination. Where, then, does it leave the bewildered and besieged man in the street when government agencies, the banks, the military, the media and corporate interests conspire to deprive him of his personal sovereignty, safety and ultimately, his life?

We have looked for the fulcrum in these affairs, since balance and justice are the urgent necessity of the time, and we have moved from the apparent centrality of the media to the real centrality of the market, whose irrational operation and exponential growth fuelled by compound interest and fractional reserve banking and all the mechanisms called leverage are making the world spin out of control. This is the nihilistic endgame in which it is no longer the desperate, self-loathing anarchist, but rather, the State driven by the ‘free-market’ which has transposed itself into the nightmare reflection of the terrorist’s suicidal extremism by negating every cornerstone of its historically legitimate purposes, and is plunging the whole of society, debt-strapped and disorientated, down towards a futureless and meaningless ground zero; an invisible ‘black hole’ of spiritual and moral relativity left by secular humanism where God is crushed, the light of knowledge is trapped, justice is forgotten, history is at an end, and since there is no future, prophecy has no purpose… except for a vague memory somewhere… of a man called… Muhammad?

Our documentary makers have colluded with the market in reducing the Prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, to a mere actor in the drama of the current world meltdown. In making a documentary for the market, they have rendered peripheral the only sane fulcrum left to us in this darkest of times, and this is not accidental. This peripheralisation is no accident. Because the Prophet of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, came confirming the prohibition of usury, something that was carefully omitted in the documentary’s coverage of the Last Sermon. He came with a religion that encompassed the mosque and behaviour in it, but he also established a real free market, i.e. which everyone could enter at no cost, and then he regulated it. He could regulate it because his way brings a completely different principle to that of greedy and nervous acquisition: money and wealth as means to worship Allah, money acquired in order to spend it in the ways of good. Generosity as the core of a way of life in parallel to prayer. And he, peace be upon him, embodied that to a degree that has never been equalled. If his companions competed with each other in this generosity, Umar bringing a half of all his worldly goods to give away and Abu Bakr outdoing him by bringing all of his worldly goods, yet he, peace be upon them, outdid them all effortlessly, for he was the most generous of humanity without exception. Islam is today the ‘enemy’ because it regulates the market and because it is a challenge to the meanness of ‘greed is good’, to the very spirit that drives the market that drives the slaughter, and which cannot and dare not face the mirror. Islam is the only hope in this time of nihilism.  La hawla wa la quwwata ila billahi ‘alliyil ‘adheem.