There’s a brother on Substack who apparently publishes exclusively via “podcasts” [1] and I appreciate the candidness that they seem to evoke although I haven’t listened to any of them except the one that I am linking to today.

I left a comment there that I want to keep here for the posterity of this blog:

As salaamu alaykum.

I’ve enjoyed this series of yours from afar and this is the first time I actually sat down to listen to an entry. It was worth it.

Humanity is less curious about life and the world around them today than it was in the past; Everyone feels involved and interconnected with everything in the world as it is portrayed through objects and events, and at the same time detached from each other as humans; People are anxious—or careless at best—in this complex age; Non-Muslims and Muslims alike, sadly!

But the lack of curiosity, as I feel like you eluded to here, is what bothers me the most. And I think I get why people feel this way.

The stakes are so high. The annals of tradition are so rich with insight and direction that you really can’t help but question and wonder about how it all relates to the present. But questioning and wondering about present-day problems…maybe is treated like a sign of incompetence. And everyone wants to portray themselves as perfectly competent and in control to whatever extent they think they are able to, which is by and large only an intellectual sort of competence rather than a practical kind. So we write, talk, shout and think out loud in confidence for head pats and back rubs.

You can make a decent living like this if you turn the right heads.

But this sort of performative resoluteness or what I want to call “anti-intellectual intellectualism” is antithetical to the spiritual discontent that is evident throughout society. We cannot “intro, body, conclusion” our way out of these problems! Or at least that format is not enough alone. Or at least today to achieve spiritual renewal through text and speech you have to pack millennia of the human experience into a corpus to get your point across in the way that it needs to be felt to evoke any change. But it’s not like we don’t have the resources to try. However I do sense a lack of boldness in that respect.

I hope this makes some sense. I don’t know what else to say.

Thank you for sharing this. I look forward to what comes next and I hope to get to listening to what you’ve posted already.

Wa-salaam

«

It isn’t enough for me to know that one thing is right and the other is wrong because it’s already been proven. I like to know the reason and circumstances surrounding how that came to be.

I do think there is a sort of short-sightedness—even among people who I have lots of respect for—to settle for conclusions and be less enthusiastic over contexts.

«