Thread by @HusseinAboubak

Nearly 15 years ago I started on a journey to understand modern Arab and Muslim antisemitism and the general pathology of modern Islam which I lived through in Egypt. I went through countless volumes of Islamic history, Islamic law, sacred texts, not so sacred texts, Islamic /1

philosophy, Islamic legal theory, Islamic theology, Islamic legends, history of Muslim societies, Islamic political thought, Islamic political history, Ottoman social hierarchy, linguistics, epistemology, etc. The more I read, the less things made sense. The more I learned, /2

the less I was sure that I actually knew anything. Eventually and after all of this I found myself back in the 20th century looking at the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb, modern jihadism and the more I looked the less I knew. I then found myself looking into the Arab Nationalism /3

Ba'athism and modern Arab intellectuals. I went through volumes of Sate Al Hussari, Michelle Aflaq, Costantine Zuriq, George Habash, Ghassan Kanfani, Mahmoud Darwish, Arab feminists, and many more. I found myself looking more towards Europe, USSR, Germany, and France. /4

Eventually I found myself reading the esoterica of Hegel, Fichte, Marx, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Gramsci, esoterica of fascism and Marxism, Heidegger, Sorrel, Sartre, Fanon, the Paris Left Bank, the Cold War, and finally things started to make much more sense. /5

I found myself learning about cults of death, cults of authenticity, redemptive violence, Marxist guerillas, revolutionary terror, quests for vanguards, international left, and cults of self realization through violent march of the spirit in history or alternatively through /6

the long march of liberation and revolution through the institutions, culture wars, and many untold and buried stories of cultural Red terrorism all over the ME. I know this won't sit well with all those who convinced themselves that 1400 years ago, some Arabian /7

scoundrel created the worst possible human evil ever and a permanent factory of death and destruction, but I admit I too once had the same conviction and I don't think this way anymore and I don't blame the most devastating and dystopian problems of the world I came from on /8

a 1400 years old religion, but on a 100 years old one. This is obviously not a topic for a tweet, even a long on, and I don't wish to exonerate the classical Islamic traditions from antisemitism, misogyny, authoritarianism, etc. but I totally wish to exonerate it from creating /9

a cult of death, unreason, self-worship, terror, dystopian tyranny, absolutist resentment, totalitarian hate, and raw unmitigated cruelty.

To understand any of this you have to completely and consciously exit the labyrinth of secular mythology in which modern history is entirely submerged and work your eay through the thick mist of ideology and "expertise."

Neither will this sit well with anyone with any kind of modern ideology who thinks that being a feminist means one belongs to the children of light, or fighting for decoloniality means fighting for justice, or that one's most noble mission is to fight capitalism or racism /

Or if one believes in celestial battles to the death between the metaphysical titans of Islam and Western civilization. Or that colonialism ruined the world of that "otherness" means just brown and black people.

(Forgot to mention I also had to dwell on whether Ghazali single handedly destroyed reason, mourn Mutazila, agonizing over Averroes, Ibn Baja, and Al Tawhidi. Suspecting a Neo-Platonic hit job. Critiquing the epistemological foundations of the Shafite usul legal theory, etc.)