Hamaad ’s Reviews > Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe > Status Update

"Nature is not merely useful, and hence worth saving, it is sacred, a concert of God's signs,
inviolable and glorious."

"Pusillanimously submitting to the Outsider's social gaze"

Just got Mohammad Hijab flashbacks lol

Amid the Pharaonic world-arrogance of biocidal capitalism, the Ishmaelite underclass, despised by left and right alike, stigmatised as foreign, or phobic, or sexist, or terroristic, continues to love God, in other words, to be normally and traditionally human.

"Higher still than the gazing at nature and good architecture and the hearing of harmonies, the supreme object of love in creation is humanity; so that restraining the self from the egotistic and forbidden dimensions of human love is
the action of a mujahid"

Whereas de Tracy and Marx saw society as a
regulated structure of essentially hedonistic and self-serving minds bound together for material benefit, revelation invites us to bow the head before pure Compassion, to see the world as luminously phanic, and in consequence to be moral agents and to serve others irrespective of personal gain.

Muslims are endlessly instructed to integrate into "European values". How can this be, however,when Europe(...) clings to its shadow side, populated by ghosts of its violent xenophobic past(...) Perhaps,instead of surrendering to demands for assimilation, Muslims on this troubled continent should take on the role of exorcists, seeking to cast out the continent's myriad unclean spirits.

"When the majesty of Muslim monetheism and the beauty of its narratives appear in worthy English, or French, or Danish verse and prose, the defences of anti-immigrant zealots and 'counter-jihad` protestors will be crucially enfeebled, for as Iris Murdoch observed, beauty has an 'unselfing' power."

Superficially Muslims look like outliers and
visitors, even though deeply they belong, because they belong to God. Equally superficially, the secular 'indigenous' seem to belong, because of a genetic inheritance, and because they hold the key to power and status and accept the regnant social beliefs; but in
their depths they are alienated....to be alienated from meaning is effectively to be alienated
from everything.