Against the World: Towards an Islamic Liberation Philosophy

We live in an age beset by an idolatrous trinity: the state, the self, and capital. It is a world best characterized by the emergence of unnamed "second-creators" who create new realities that subvert the possibility of liberation and with it, the death of politics. It is an age of fitnah or normalized domination. The ummah is in a state of crisis but with crisis comes opportunity and the ability to chart new futures. The age of fitnah is entering a new phase, and the mythos perpetuated by these second-creators and their metaphysical horizons are crumbling. In 2008, an ideologue of Pax Americana, Zbigniew Brzezinski, penned an op-ed warning the incumbent president of a "global political awakening." Four years after Brzezinski's prescient warning, the Arab world witnessed a wave of revolutions, toppling the long-standing dictators Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. The ummah entered a state of vibration and with it, new possibilities. These events are nothing less than miraculous, not in the sense that they disrupt natural physical laws but in that they disrupt and rupture the ostensibly "natural laws" that constitute and legitimate the global hegemonic order.