As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa raḥmatullāhi wa barakātuh dear friends, Jumuʿa Mubāraka !

I pray that you are all well ! It is my duty to inform you that I have taken the decision to leave Twitter, and will do so by the end of the day. It has been a delight, a joy, and an honour to spend time with so many of you discussing some of the great issues of our day over the past seven months or so.

I personally need to focus on my writing, teaching, and study, but I continue to think of Twitter as a tremendously positive phenomenon, despite its shortcomings, where an alternative quasi-consensus on crucial aspects of our comparative worldview as Muslims has the potential to develop, outside of the control of mainstream educational and media frameworks. May I shout out to some of the accounts I have most enjoyed reading here, accounts like the indomitable and much missed

@Evollaqi
(may Allah hasten his return!), Mawlana @Asim_TAA, Mawlana @ShamsTameez , dear Dr. @JosephLumbard, gaming legend @shahidkamal , our beloved Shaykh
@DrShadeeElmasry (on whose live programme I shall be appearing tonight, inshallah!), that great, dusky and mysterious analyst @IbnMaghrebi , the brilliant young thinkers
@AvdullahYousef
,
@_titanslayer_
,
@SimsimMaturidi
,
@D1mashqi
,
@Yozora_Glory
,
@ZSalmean
,
@safwanSpiker7
,
@mogheess_
,
@mrsophisticatd
,
@LuqmaanWaqar
, and
@realWaleedAhmed
my dear colleague, the scholar and dāʿī
@freemonotheist
, respected thinkers and analysts
@ImamTomFacchine
and
@jalalayn
, the inspirational
@alieforza
, my dear Cambridge friend from the olden days, the scholar
@ayusuf_c
(and so many others, no lesser in stature, and please do forgive me if you didn't happen to spring into my senescent mind just at the right moment!).

And of course, our connection, even across Twitter, will continue through the living account of my dearest friend, that venerable and inimitable Other Mulla,
@movetomuscat
Fi amanillah — and please keep me in your prayers, always ! and @Debayo_delaw , @emptyingthecup @EbnomerTaha , @ArchonAvalon , @Nabzii_7860 , @HadramiSamurai @MBitcoiner @IbneKhan01 , @GhostViperX09 @aqilazme @newbynewling , and so many other greats !

IMĀM AL-GHAZĀLĪ’S SIMPLE METHOD TO TRANSFORM OUR PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER from his Mīzān al-ʿAmal (paraphrase) (We have massive egotism problems on social media, which manifest as bad adab, shamelessness, and being unaware of our own ignorance – I hope this can help us!): (1) “The route to the purification of the soul amounts to accustoming oneself to carrying out the actions that one sees issuing from purified souls, by imitating the actions of those purified souls, until when those actions become habitual by being repeated for a long time (2)

The internet is the ultimate rejection of essences; so much of it is the concretisation, in a new, ‘external’ world, of the perspectival relativisation of all things. It is the concretisation of self-determination, in a constructed level of being. (1) Things can be created there; ‘essences’ can be ‘designed’, they can be made actual by simply combining into a whole whatever aspects of the imagination we wish. It is the place brought into being to serve as the willing manifestation of postmodernity’s dream, (2)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
"Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life (1) and who bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an authority, which they themselves hold venerable,(2)

ON “SCIENCE” A Twitter thread by Hasan Spiker.
We don't have "rijāl al-dīn" (a priestly class, nor even "clerics") in Islam, we have al-ʿulamāʾ, the possessors of knowledge. (1) So, all of the discourse about "religious" scholars sticking to religion and "worldly" scholars sticking to "the world" is a bit sad, even if it does reflect contemporary reality (2)

THE SELF-REFUTATION OF PHYSICALISM IN 13 PARTS
A Twitter thread by Hasan Spiker ! Physicalists say "consciousness is an epiphenomenal byproduct of biochemical reactions in the brain", and are thereby faced with the problem that their own statement is "just" a byproduct of biochemical reactions in the brain, and must thus confront two insurmountable problems(1)

It is such a tragedy that so many of our young people, especially women, are being deprived of marriage. We must at all costs protect the family. This is the Ark that conveys us safely across the stormy seas of the postmodern pseudo-religion. (1) Recognising its precious sacredness protects us from the scourges of homelessness, loneliness, selfish individualism, economic-neoliberalism-induced poverty, and the philosophies of arbitrarist freedom, such as LGBTQ+ ideology, which are rapidly fragmenting Western societies (2)

People ask how to bring up Muslim children in this age and especially in the West, and they want lists of rules. That is a catastrophe just waiting to happen. I've seen it again and again. The only thing that works is to instill experiential īmān in their hearts by (1) taking them to visit the ṣaliḥīn, maqāms, the Holy Places, and gatherings of dhikr, and in all that, give them a sense of caring community of real, uplifting īmān. Even if they go astray for a while, (2)

Evolution is false.
The putative "empirical evidence" for it only yields the ultimate non sequitur.
Intelligibility cannot arise from unintelligibility.
Darwin was a great fossil and butterfly collector.
He also had a truly sub-philosophical mind. (1) There used to be scientific consensus on the ether, phlogiston, and the steady-state theory. Evolution is much more dogged, however, because there is so much at stake ideologically. (2)

A'IMMA OF OUR TIME
(Let's not talk about tajdid until we have people of this caliber, inwardly and outwardly, walking in our midst again) (image from our website sunniorthodoxy, currently in development) From right to left Shaykh al-Islam Mustafa Sabri, Shaykh Badruddin al-Hasani, al-Sayyid Qusayy Abu al-Si'd (my own murshid), Pir Mehr Ali Shah, Emir Abdalqadir al-Jaza'iri, Shaykh Yusuf al-Nabahani,

It is one of the great ironies of our age and the past two hundred years, that the Wahhābiyya who do nothing but stridently bluster about bidʿa, commit and have committed more bidʿa than any other group in the history of Islam (1) One of the main ways they have done this, is by limiting the believer's legitimate free expression of their dīn. Look at the questions asked of their so-called muftis; things like "is it bidʿa to say "jumuʿa mubāraka"; "is it bidʿa to kiss the Qur'an"? (2)

One of the great ironies of appearance and reality is that it is the West and Westerners who are in chains and unfree, and the Muslim world and Muslims who are unbound and free ! It's all because of the distinction between Divine and manmade laws. (1) Muslims recognise that manmade laws are conventional, and that there is leeway, scope, and latitude there, as well as a great deal of mercy. It is the Divine laws which are unnegotiable. But in the West, manmade conventions, in lieu of recognition of the Divine,become absolute(2)