The Esoteric Deviation in Islam

From the book:

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The thesis of this book

The capitalist also wants salvation, or at least he does not want to be seen as criminal.  The problem is that to give the capitalist salvation or to make him not a criminal, religion has to be transformed.  The transformed/reformed religion would either accept capitalism or have nothing to do with capitalism.  The latter idea meant that religions and politics/economics have nothing to do with each other: they are two separate domains.  In this view, you can be a perfectly decent religious person in your own religious domain and be a nice capitalist in the mundane world of capitalism.  The religion that results from this trans-mutation, we can call it a capitalist religion, because everything, every law, every precept can be changed except capitalism itself.  The mechanism in which this trans-mutation took place is an esotericisation of religion.  Esotericisation of religion does not lead anywhere (except perhaps to a syncretism), it simply means the introspection of the religion into itself in the form of principles and figurations open to renewed exegesis, a form which, despite its many faces, will invariably justify capitalism. 

We maintain that capitalism is a crime.  We are obliged to tell the capitalist puritan, who thinks that he is good because his personal sexual morality is uncorrupted (usually meaning his wife is well behaved), that to visit the bank is a crime forty times worse than sexual intercourse with his mother.  And just when he is about to shout in despair that he is not a criminal, we can tell him, �Look, there is a way out of capitalism.  You have not seen it and this is something to meditate on, but that is all right.  The time has come to abandon this pagan religion and join the only religion that offers you a way out of this criminal capitalism, that is the religion of Allah called Islam.�  �But I thought Islam was something else,� he will object.  �No, that esoteric religion that has been sold to you and to the world since the fall of the Khalifate, is a deviation from Islam,� we will reply.  The sign that Islam is back will be its victory, in the form of the creation of a Dar al-Islam where Islam in its entirety will be established (no capitalism, or bank will subsist) and the Khalifa will have been restored to rule the Muslim people.

The economic/political event of the last three hundred years was the creation of the modern state.  No other event matches the singularity, standing and repercussion of this event.  The state was born from the fusion of government and banking.  Governments realised that the tremendous power of banking could be theirs.  And instead of fighting against it, they decided to absorb it.  The governments became banks, and in this usurious trans-mutation, the modern state was engendered. 

The new capitalist entity undertook the issuing or licensed the issue of banking money or paper-money by the authority of the state law, and against religious law.  Even Christian law forbade usury.  Issuing paper-money provided a new instrument of tax collection much more efficient that anything known before, and it also redefined foreign relationships, as soon as the states discovered that dumping their rotten currencies on foreign countries had the same effect as taxing foreigners and was cheaper that sending conquering troops.

Reflection on this extraordinary usurious event forces us to make the following initial observations:

-         By embracing the banking system, governments became capitalist entities which we call states.

-         These capitalist entities, and therefore capitalism, demanded a new identity from people.  Religious identity was secondary to the identity of citizens or subjects as taxpayers and clientele. 

-         Erasing religious identities was called toleration and became a legal matter in all new constitution and new legal systems of the new states.

-         The process of reducing religion to common grounds that can be acceptable to the majority (to all mankind) is what we cal esotericisation.  This process was in conformity with and supported by capitalism.

-         The matter of identity is a key issue of great importance.  In Islam, the Deen is the dominant identity.  Nationality, race and class are non-issues.  Nationality vanishes under Khalifate, race dissolve with polygamy, and classes disappear with the establishment of the guilds. 

-         Dissolving religious identity can be done in two ways.  The agnostic way: �all religions are false� or the esoteric way: �all the religions are true�. 

-         Dissolving religious identity means that the predominant identity is elevated to the realm of the unquestionable and becomes orthodoxy.  To question the matter of tax payment or the acceptance of a national currency is out of the question.  It is considered an error. This is therefore an orthodoxy. 

-         In Islam, economic identities are debased in conformity with Islamic law.  The poor, the slave, the freeman, the rich, the master and the apprentice all share common grounds that allow interrelationship and change.

-         Islam is government without state and commerce without usury.  The arrival of Islam will imply, automatically, the destruction of the banking system and its service industry: the state.

We believe that if this event is not properly understood, it will be impossible to formulate an alternative to this form of kufr.  The problem is not kufr, because kufr will always be kufr.  The problem is the inability to distinguish kufr.  We need to find out, after a hundred years of failure, what has gone wrong with us.  Allah has promised victory to the Muslims and yet for one hundred years we have been the victims in this world.  Since we cannot blame our religion, we have to blame ourselves.  We need to know what we have done wrong.  This is not an easy question to ask, let alone answer.

We can now see that capitalism, in order to establish itself, deviated the religion, in other words, it modified the religion for its own purpose and existence.  This capitalist deviation we have called the esoteric deviation, because of the way it manifested itself.  It did not deny religion, it simply isolated it in a �religious zone� which had nothing to do with economics.  A type of spirituality was developed that suggested that spiritual awakening was divorced from social responsibility.  In the name of Tasawwuf, an esoteric version was promoted that spoke of the freemasonic concepts of �tolerance�  and �the brotherhood of mankind� instead of Shariah and Jihad, or else they esoterically transformed these latter two concepts so that they accepted the former ones.  In its extreme forms they did not find it necessary to follow the Shariah to be as esoteric Sufi, such as in the movement of Inayat Khan.  In some forms it made a conscious effort to create another religion such as Subud or the bahai movement.  None of these esoteric deviation movements considered economics a spiritual problem, and therefore, accepting the crime, they falsified in the process the nature of the spiritual path.

We will demonstrate in this book that the so-called Islamic movement of the 20^th century was born out of active and militant freemasons and that the whole movement was tainted with freemasonic thinking, which means the thinking of the West with a twist.  This thinking not only affected their ideas but also their way of operation.  We shall demonstrate that from the freemasons Al Afghani and Abduh, there is an uninterrupted �isnad� or transmission, teacher to student, that reaches to our time.  We shall demonstrate that these people were all interrelated, knew and learned from each other.  They spoke using the same symbolic language, the same symbolic concepts and codes all leading towards the creation of a �new Islam� (which is not possible) consisting of the islamisation of the pagan way of life whose greatest symbol is the absurd �Islamic Bank�.  We shall demonstrate that another freemason, Rene Guenon (Abdalwahid Yahya), the great reformer of freemasonry of the last century, who became a Muslim and started a new school of perennial philosophy, also brought a deviation into Islam.  And we shall demonstrate that these two freemasonic movements reached a final nihilism in the last part of the 20^th century, and not only merged their words and deeds but, in their pragmatic quest, became assimilated into the pagan way of life which they started out by criticising.

Our thesis is that Islamic reform and what is now called Islamic revival, is not what they claim it to be, a return to the Islam of the First Community or the Salaf.  The idea that the �reformed Islam� is a return to a pure Islam and that the people responsible for this reform are unquestionable heroes is far from the reality.  Rather, Islamic reformers and revivalism represented a political struggle for control of the state and its institutions.  They did not intend to eliminate the state and the banks, that is to say, capitalism, but to take control of them and Islamise them by adapting or reforming the Shariah to justify their political aims.  This political struggle for state control involved an interactive response to the changing circumstances of capitalism, which gradually forced this movement to become more and more pragmatic in pursuit of a political outcome.  Their attempt to attain state control was an overall failure.  When some states declared themselves Islamic states, and their legal and institutional machinery and banks were �Islamised�, the evidence of their failure was manifest. They had sold out the Islamic living model and totally become assimilated into the capitalist order.

Islamic reform has not solved our problems. It has failed to produce a single leader who can show us a path to victory.  The reason for their failure is a profound deviation that made them think that Islam needed to be reformed or modernised.  The twentieth century was the reformer�s century.  The reformer�s program was instrumental in the breaking down of the Khalifate and the overall deterioration of the situation of the Muslims.  The blueprint of Islamic banking was not a neutral matter, nor even a misconception, it was an instrumental tool for the advancement of capitalism and the covering up of the Islamic model so that it would never emerge.  Their Islamic reform is Islamically criminal and deviant.  Unless we identity the original perpetrators and remove them from our horizon, they will be ghosts haunting our future.  We need to do this in order to move on.  This book aims to remove these ghosts of the past.

This book, we hope, will clear the ground in order to plant new seeds, to build a new community, to establish new goals, to create a new leadership and, with the help of Allah, restore Khalifate, inshAllah.  The key question that stood before this book and, we hope, will stand even more after this book is: �Can there be an alternative to capitalism?� In answering this question, many people are bound to discover Islam in a way which has not been available to them before, for to us, capitalism is the present day face of kufr. 

In the process of writing this book I was obliged to examine the writings of these people who held these deviant ideas.  I have quoted extensively from their texts in an attempt to present their ideas as much as possible as their authors intended.  Thus, we can see all these authors together, and can recognise, perhaps for the first time to many, that they all share a �primordial deviation� intimately related to freemasonry.  A particular effort has been made to identify their symbolic expressions and find their true meaning by exposing recurring patterns often involving several authors. 

It is important for us to clarify that these people are not the problem, and they are certainly not the solution.  As I have pointed out before, the real problem is not these people, but capitalism itself.