Once upon a time, the so-called “inner world” used to be one’s relationship with God, or some other higher power/spiritual tradition. In relation to this, I was asked recently why the crisis of poverty is not only so persistent in America but also so rampant,
one must consider the retreat of religion from the public and private space. Our private spaces are no longer concerned with the Almighty but with, what Paul Roberts calls, “our aspirations and hopes, our identities and secret cravings, our anxieties and our boredom”.
Simply put, the poor and underprivileged are having to compete with our aspirations for upward mobility, our veganism or yogaism or perhaps even our pornography addictions, and perhaps most of all, our anxieties about what we don’t have and our boredom with what we are already
drowning in. Most importantly, as Muslims have become increasingly secularized, so too have true social justice issues fallen off our collective radars and we find ourselves increasingly reflecting this malady.
