Every day the topic of issues of identity are mentioned as being the root of many problems in society. And it is absolutely true and it is not a new problem. Every generation looks at changes in society and says the same thing. But in modern times, these problems are accelerated and intensified due to the pace of change and the constant feedback through media, and particularly social media. The focus is intensified. Political identity, cultural identity, and now even gender identity, which is most likely a symptom of the intensification of the general crisis in identity.
Identity crisis actually derives from something deeper, from what Simone Weil, in discussing France in the 1940s, calls “uprootedness” which she defines as the destruction of ties with the past and dissolution of the community, where people lack a meaningful relationship with their environment. It is a progressive business, with a lack of identification with religion, with local community and, finally, with family, until you end up with the nuclear family and ultimately the singleton. This can be traced back to a process which began with what she calls the second Renaissance.
The first Renaissance was the revival of the interest in Greek and Arabic texts of Plato, Pythagoras and sources which enriched the existing spiritual tradition, more or less from the 12th to the 14th century. What Weil calls the second Renaissance, which is what we tend to think of the Renaissance itself, went to Latin sources and on to science, humanism and the undermining of the spiritual. Weil’s view of history centres on the perception or the sense of the Divinity. The second Renaissance makes the human being the measure. So it is not just a matter of cultural factors. It is something more profound in the human being. It is a lack of something: which is recognition of the Divine. Instead of seeing creation as a manifestation which indicates the Creator, you see it as a merely human project and a resource.
There are various reactions to this sense of loss of identity. The French replaced their prior identity with that of being citizens. Patriotism then becomes the focus of identity. As the Americans drew on the French, and upon the Romans, patriotism became the new idol. Weil also noted that the Romans bequeathed to us the idolatry of the self in the form of patriotism. It enhances self-esteem and demeans and denigrates anything that lessens this self-esteem which is expressed in a manner which appeals to one’s vanity. There is aggression towards what is not part of what enflames that vanity. The Romans tolerated any sort of religion as long as its core spirituality did not challenge the fact that, basically, you were slaves of the state. Even if you were no longer an actual slave, but a civis, you were still subject to the whims of the emperor. If you were a slave to God, then a problem arose because part of you was not controlled. Hence the attack on early Christians which only stopped when Christianity was co-opted by the state and mixed with Constantine’s sun worship and Mithraism. That’s another story, but it is part of the Roman process. The attacks on Islam are also part of this process. A practicing Muslim is a slave of Allah, not a slave of the state – and is hence subject to that same sort of antagonism. He poses an existential threat to the system.
Weil says:
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”
She notes that there are two reactions to the condition of uprootedness. One is lethargy which results in self-indulgence. It is also the condition of slaves. The other is violent, typically leading to anarchism or fascism, or, in the case of Da’ish, both together. This does nothing to help the situation. It is really a sort of social tantrum. The uprooted wants to uproot others. So we have violent slaves throwing their toys out of the pram.
So how to get out of this spiral of the absence of real identity stemming from an ongoing traditional situation? Shaykh Abdalqadir says in a recent talk at Dallas College:
“Whatever the social structure is, you need a social structure that works. And what you have to ask yourself is, ‘What is the social structure in which I can function and in which nobody can force me what to think?’ It follows from this that there is not anybody that you can force to think the same as you. And at the same point you have to find commonality that connects you so that you are not alone. If you look at my book I recently published, at the beginning of the text on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when all that debate was going on, one of the writers said, ‘I think it is shocking that a frenchman doesn’t have a common factor with another frenchman, but he has a common factor with his religious equivalent’. In other words they are connected through their religion. And it is the same today. Basically what you have is an atheist community by and large that does not believe in anything. They all have an inheritance or a memory of something that was the early religion. That is true of those whose grandparents are Muslim and those whose grandparents are christian.
You are faced with immediate problems of where you are and what you plan to do. If you think of something called career, you must not get caught up. A man spends all his life studying economics and by the time he has finally mastered it he finds the whole financial system has collapsed, the currency system has collapsed, and he is left with nothing. You may have a structural idea of how society should be organised, and yet you have again taken for granted the way society is structured with all its contradictions, it will let you down in the shortest possible time. So it all comes back on yourself, it comes back on you, it comes back on who you are for yourself but I am not talking subjectivity. I am talking about the very essence of your identity. It is something that you can’t explain or express in a way that is satisfactory.”
He says that it can take a lifetime to work out. So this is obviously something that does not have an easy answer. The process is both internal and personal as well as social because it involves connections with others.
In talking about the nihilism we are living in, Shaykh Abqalqadir said in his address to the Ernst Junger Symposium in 1989:
"So I have taken on a social identity as an electricity consumer, a road user, as now a television watcher – all this without understanding my reality. The rulers of the infrastructure are the rulers of the individual. The state dominates all men in a new slavery which is chosen and voted for by the masses. They want it. There are no classes now, in as much as they all life under the dominion of technique. It is in this that the fullest nihilism is expressed."
The answer to this this, as Junger mentions, is, to go to the forest, Der Waldgäng, which is the non-temporal. For us, as Muslims, we recognize this as meaning to turn to Allah. Shaykh Abdalqadir calls the individual that Junger calls the Waldgänger (Forester); the new Bedouin. These terms are all representations of this idea of the individual finding his or her identity in relation to this world, and that entails finding his or her relationship to the Divine, to Allah, in a profound transformative way. After this transformation, the human being becomes a transformative force himself because the sum is greater than the parts. Once the Prophet ﷺ had Companions رضي الله عنهم the project took off. Part of the core message of Shaykh Abdalqadir’s teaching has been addressed to this issue which leads to the establishment of Islam – after you have the people to do it. In the course of this, he has approached the spiritual needs of the human being and the political needs of human beings.
And lest we go off on the wrong track in this, we have the Sunna, to show us back to the middle ground. Just a brief example of that are few hadiths about what constitutes community:
“Whoever fails to have compassion for our young and respect for our elderly and fails to command what is right and prohibit what is wrong is not one of us” (Tirmidhi)
“The one whose main concern is this world has nothing to do with Allah, and whoever does not fear Allah has nothing to do with Allah, and whoever does not care about the Muslims is not one of them.” (Hudhayfa)
“He who calls to tribalism is not one of us. He who fights for the sake of tribalism is not one of us. He who dies following the way of tribalism is not one of us.” (Abu Dawud)
"Whoever bears arms against us is not one of us, and whoever cheats us is not one of us." (Muslim)
The sunna keeps us from going off in an extreme into another form of nihilism with an Islamic label.
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