Notes from the Margin: On Chains, Mirrors, and the Burning House
The practice of isnād in the Islamic intellectual tradition reflects Islam’s communal transmission rooted in the ummah. Without a living community, the continuity of Islam is undermined. Isnād preserves knowledge through chains of transmission, resisting the modern trend of radical individualism, where individuals view themselves or their echo chambers as the sole arbiters of truth. This self-centeredness distorts Islam’s very structure, which is oriented not around the ego but toward God as the ultimate qiblah, reminding believers that authority, meaning, and transformation emerge from the collective integrity of the ummah, not from self-isolation or one’s echo chamber and biases.
The chain of hadith transmission is important because the self is an unreliable narrator. Because, if left to curate its own truths, the ego will inevitably arrange the furniture of reality to suit itself. According to Isnād, truth is a collective inheritance, not a private possession. No single soul, no matter how articulate or passionate, can be the sole custodian.
We’ve forgotten this, and worse, we remember it selectively, as a weapon against others, while quietly building our own unexamined chains, circles, feeds, and mutually validating grievances. Some may refer to it as a community. Some call it solidarity. To be honest, we should just call it what it is: an echo chamber with a songkok.
The qiblah points away from the self, toward something absolute. Islam’s central tenet is a shift away from the ego’s throne and toward the radical oneness of God. The tragedy of Muslim political and community life today is that so many who claim the tradition have quietly reversed this geometry, creating spaces, organizations, coalitions, and even causes that orbit not God, the ummah, or ‘adl, but the self’s need to be recognized, validated, and central; their very own qiblah has been reoriented toward praying very loudly toward their own reflection.
Let us now speak plainly about advocacy, as plainness has become rare in these spaces, and plain speech is now considered aggressive.
There is a type who enters a cause in the same way that a soldier enters a photograph, taking great care with the angle of light. They are articulate and know the language. They can move in crowds and truly understand the grammar of struggle. Watch them, and you’ll notice that they’re drawn to visibility with the instinct of a compass needle. When a cause is obscure, their attention wanders, but when cameras arrive, they follow. The cause is genuine, but the suffering has become a platform on which a reputation is built.
Speaking truth to power has become a revered phrase. But who investigates the interrogators? Who keeps an eye on those who keep an eye on others? Power does not exist solely in states and institutions. The interrogation of power begins with the small politics of which voices are amplified and which are managed; it exists in who is invited to the table and who is thanked for their passion before being shown the door. Power resides in the almost never-made explicit decision of whose suffering is legible and which is inconvenient.
When advocacy becomes a stage, the people it claims to represent become collateral. The structures that cause suffering are ignored because examining them could disrupt relationships, lose platforms, reroute funding, and never be too cold to attract followers or too hot to threaten alliances. People whose struggles are immediate and whose dispossession is not theoretical are held close enough to provide moral credibility while remaining far enough away to prevent any real disruption. The most dangerous type of corruption is that which speaks the language of righteousness. The truly venomous thing has the face of an ally.
A harm that continues to persist is difficult to identify. It is the harm inflicted not by foes, who are, in a strange way, clarifying, and who, if you’re lucky, are principled and worthy of mutual respect, but by those who position themselves as neutral, as above the fray, as the measured adult in the room.
So-called neutrals withhold information, access, and recognition not out of hostility, but with such subtle condescension that you will spend years wondering if you are paranoid or perceptive. They speak kindly of your potential in your presence and manage it carefully in your absence. They offer you positions with titles but no real function, not because they believe in your abilities, but because it is easier than explaining why they don’t.
Neutrality in the face of inequality, slander, and criminalization is never neutral. It is a posture that benefits whoever already has leverage. To be “neutral” on whether a minority community should have political representation is equivalent to voting for the majority.
To be “neutral” about whether to use whatever leverage you have to correct an injustice is to choose the injustice, because the truth is that the glass ceiling is unaware that it is a ceiling. A much more identifiable pattern deserves to be named without hesitation: the passive-aggressive double standard. When the same action, question, or assertion comes from within the protected circle, it is welcomed, championed, and perhaps even celebrated; however, when it comes from outside that circle, from someone who is already slightly othered, slightly too unconventional, or slightly too much, it is pathologized. It was framed as aggression. Recast as ambition. Labeled as the behavior of someone with something to prove.
Recognizing such a pattern does not indicate paranoia. It is clarity. Clarity, in a world dedicated to managed ambiguity, is its own form of resistance.
O believers! When you converse privately, let it not be for sin, aggression, or disobedience to the Messenger, but let it be for goodness and righteousness. And fear Allah, to Whom you will ˹all˺ be gathered. Secret talks are only inspired by Satan to grieve the believers. Yet he cannot harm them whatsoever except by Allah’s Will. So in Allah let the believers put their trust.
- Surah Al-Mujadila 58:9-10, Qur’an
The Qur’an warns against najwa, secret deliberation, whispering coalitions, having private networks of interpretation become substitutes for due process, how a person’s perception hardens into a verdict without the accused ever being consulted, and how the story circulates and calcifies long before the subject is ever given the opportunity to speak, resulting in a back-channel construction of reality.
This is the mechanics of organizational exclusion in Muslim Student Association spaces, and it is important to be clear about it because it uses Islamic vocabulary without being Islamic.
You’re not told you’re on the outside; you’re just no longer inside. Decisions are made, positions are filled, alliances are formed, and narratives are seeded all without you, vaguely against you, and always under the guise of “for the sake of the community.” When you seek to address it, your seeking is reframed as evidence of the accusation: you are power-hungry, attention-seeking, and un-Islamic in tone. The system creates its own justification, and the accused who seeks redress is thus doubly condemned.
This is not unique to Muslim Student Associations; rather, it is the behavior of any group that misinterprets its own unity for virtue. The painful, specific difference is that these spaces invoke God while practicing it, Shura while practicing oligarchy, Ukhuwwah while practicing exclusion, and Ummah while serving their own echo chambers.
When the gossip leaves the organization’s walls and spreads through the networks of allied organizations, when your name appears somewhere before you do, already damaged, already framed, the perpetrators wash their hands in a particularly Islamic-flavored display of innocence. They stated that they will stop if they have already been spoken to, that they mean no harm, and that they understand you have been misunderstood. However, rumors persist because accountability was never performed; rather, reputation management was disguised as tawbah.
When the harm was caused by their projections, insecurities, or social calculus, the obligation to apologize falls on the perpetrator, not the victim who was harmed and then blamed for the bruise. Moral liability, as the tradition well knows, follows intention rather than perception.
Now, let’s look at the other side of the room, there is an ideological formation called Madkhalism-Wahhabism, call it a specific strain of Salafism, or to completely sanitize their labels from the bloody history of Wahhabism, they’ll just completely refer to themselves as Salafi, but let’s call it the transnational petrodollar project of religious transnationalism that has standardized Islam in the image of Wahhabism sponsored by the Al-Saud family that has traveled across the Muslim World. It arrived in Southeast Asia, as it did elsewhere, carried by returning students, visiting clerics, funded institutions, and the gradual replacement of local legal traditions with a desert universalism that deprives everything it touches of historical context.
What structural role does it play? It does two things at the same time, and its genius, if we call it the systematic impoverishment of an intellectual tradition, is that these two things appear to be diametrically opposed.
First, it ritualizes. It reduces Islam to a practice of their interpretation, which they only see as correct, to aqidah as a credential, and to worship devoid of civilizational, ethical, or political significance. It polices the outside world with extraordinary zeal, while creating a community with almost no capacity for political self-understanding. Yes, we can pray. Justice is politics, and politics are bid’ah.
Second, and this is where the contradiction becomes policy, it yields to power. The Madkhali-Wahhabi position on political quietism is a doctrine of submission to existing authority, however unjust, disguised as Islamic prudence. It does not challenge the Westphalian state system, imperialism, or the structures that cause Muslim suffering around the world because challenging power is considered “fitnah.”
Meanwhile, the structures that have oppressed, fragmented, and exploited the Muslim world persist. And this is no surprise given that Wahhabism is also a product of the West, and as the contradictions and bloody genocidal history of Wahhabism recur, they have the audacity to sanitize Wahhabism and its founder, blatantly disrespecting the Muslim lives lost in Takfiri massacres, and to continue to support such ideology is to amputate the Muslim community inside and out.
Quietism is not a neutral theological position, but rather a political stance that benefits those who fund it. The petro-state monarchy exporting this theology is selling both weapons to the West and theology to the East. The “apolitical” Muslim is, in the most functional sense, the most deeply political Muslim, albeit in service of a politics they believe does not exist.
Gulf petrodollar networks, institutionalized through schools, mosques, and Muslim student associations: by reducing Islam to rituals and prayers while ignoring its civilizational, philosophical, and political dimensions, they simultaneously depoliticize Muslim societies and make them more manageable by authoritarian governments. In this sense, Islam has become purely private and apolitical, as an ideological expression of dependency rather than neutrality.
This is why the spread of Wahhabi-oriented institutions in urban areas, as well as their active pipeline to educational institutions that produce Wahhabi-oriented scholars, is essentially an act of epistemic capture. When a Muslim student association systematically channels students toward a narrowed, puritanical, apolitical, and ritual-centric reading of Islam, while actively discouraging engagement with the sultanate histories, legal traditions, and Islamic philosophy that constitute the authentic inheritance of Muslim communities around the globe, it is reproducing dependency at the level of knowledge; thus, when militant Wahhabis and Salafis, such as those of ISIS, emerge,
And because all they have is the Wahhabi version of Islam, they lack the intellectual arsenal required to defend themselves against ISIS, because, unlike the sanitization practiced by Quietist Salafis, they cannot deny that Wahhabism is the problem itself, and no self-denial version of the same ideology would actually deradicalize it from its khariji orientation. The Muslim student who cannot articulate the political philosophy of Islam, who has never encountered Al-Farabi (رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ تَعَالَىٰ), Ibn Khaldun (رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ تَعَالَىٰ), who misreads Ibn Taymiyyah (رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ تَعَالَىٰ), is taught to perform takfir against Al-Ghazali (رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ تَعَالَىٰ), is taught to treat the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ’s birthday as an innovation and to regard the founding of Saudi Arabia as fundamental to Islam, and who has been taught to regard any intellectual and politically engaged reading of Islam as innovation or extremism, is a Muslim student who has been epistemically colonized.
And this is where honesty forces us to complicate ourselves. Amidst all the polarizing currents, whether inside or outside the Muslim World, there are a few nuances worth pointing out, such as the brother who’s oriented in a certain strand that I find reductionist may also hold a generosity of spirit that the “decolonial” activist who weaponizes Islam as an aesthetic does not, or the sister whose framework I disagree with may treat a stranger with a much better adab than certain progressive and performative Muslims louder, more visible, and looks more credible.
The postcolonial university is an institution that arrived with Western civilization’s civilizing mission and has never quite left, presenting itself as neutral as a universal language of thought. It presents itself, most dangerously, as the sole available vocabulary for comprehending what is wrong with the world.
The rule-based international world order in which a specific mythology is taught, absorbed, and reproduced by students who lack the intellectual tools to recognize it as mythology. The “rules-based international order” is invoked without irony by students who have not been asked to notice which rules, in what order, and for whom the rules are selectively applied. The Westphalian state system is presented as a neutral fact of modernity, rather than as a specific European solution to a specific European problem that has been violently universalised.
As a result, some Muslims are familiar with Fanon but unfamiliar with Ibn Khaldun. Who understands intersectionality but not maqasid al-shari’ah? Who can deconstruct whiteness but has never heard of the Sultanate legal traditions from which their ancestors derived their sense of justice? The captive mind, as the late Dr. Syed Hussein Alatas (رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ تَعَالَىٰ) described it, is captured not by ignorance but by a specific education that produces graduates capable of criticizing the system using only the system’s own language.
The peak of this absurdity occurs on October 7th, when the mythological fabric of the Western Imperial World Order is revealed, and everything that follows reveals, with sudden and terrible clarity, the entire architecture of the “civilized world’s” double standard. Some conflicts are governed by international law, while others are referenced in footnotes. “Terrorism” is used consistently, with a focus on geopolitical interests rather than principles. Human rights are a franchise that certain powers have trademarked. And in universities across the postcolonial world, supposedly educated, supposedly critical graduates, many of whom had Latin honors, were unable to question the framing they had been given because they had been educated into a specific blindness and mistook it for sight.
This is colonialism’s most lasting achievement: not the seizure of land that can be returned, but the seizure of the question. Controlling which questions are permitted gives you control over what reality can be named.
Here is the provocation I cannot avoid:
The Wahhabi project and the Western liberal project, which in Muslim spaces frequently wears the costume of “woke” progressivism, converge in opposite directions on the same result: the depoliticization and domestication of Islam.
Wahhabism deprives Islam of its civilizational depth, reducing it to ritual observance and producing a devout but politically inert Muslim whose Islam poses no structural challenge to the power structures that cause Muslim suffering.
The Western liberal framework, including its progressive, woke, and intersectional variants, marginalizes Muslim voices. It welcomes Muslims to the table as representatives of an identity, not as carriers of a different civilizational epistemology. Islam becomes one identity among many, one complaint among many, and one aesthetic among many. The Muslim is included as a symbol, a percentage point, and the face in the campaign photo, but the framework and its assumptions about what politics is, what rights mean, and what sovereignty looks like are fundamentally unchallenged.
Both modes produce Muslims who practice Islam without seeing it as a comprehensive framework for understanding justice, governance, knowledge, and human dignity. Both modes result in communities that can hold a rally but cannot articulate a civilization. In the deepest sense, both modes are colonial—one from without and one from within.
The student who applies rainbow colors to an indigenous pattern and calls it progress has not decolonized anything. They simply exchanged one Western export for another. Biological reality has not progressed simply by being contested. And the demand that every space affirm every ideological framework or risk being labeled “backward” is not liberation. This is a new orthodoxy, and all orthodoxies have inquisitors.
This is not a defense of cruelty. It is a defense of honest thought. The tradition has its own resources for kindness, complexity, and human dignity that do not necessitate the importation of a framework developed under completely different conditions and for entirely different purposes. The most subtle manifestation of the captive mind is to assume otherwise.
There is an irony that sharpens with familiarity: the more devoutly observant a Muslim space presents itself, the more brutal its internal politics can be. The adab is performed publicly; the gossip travels privately.
When someone raises concerns about governance, nepotism, opacity, or the disparity between declared values and actual practice, the response in a healthy organization is engagement. Reframing is the response in an organization that has mistaken comfort for principle. The questioner becomes the problem. The question has shifted from what is actually happening here to why you are so power-hungry, why you have main character syndrome, and why you are acting un-Islamic.
This reframe is not accidental. It is a sophisticated defensive maneuver that is all the more effective because it is performed largely unconsciously. Inexperience in leadership, combined with an inflated sense of moral authority, results in a particular brittleness: criticism that should prompt self-examination instead triggers a closing of ranks, a hardening of narrative, and a proliferation of private consultations in which the critic is discussed in length without being consulted.
And unaddressed criticism festers and spreads, not because the critic spread it, but because unresolved problems do not go away. They migrate. They resurface in new forms. They create the next disillusionment, the next departure, and the next generation of Muslims who question whether the community is a home or a performance.
The greater jihad, as defined by tradition, is the war against oneself, regardless of how revisionists interpret the term. Against the nafs, which prefers to be right over true. Against the part of you that tallies complaints, nurses’ resentments, and practices the perfect response to an argument that no one is actually making anymore. Against the desire for vindication, which is nothing more than the ego’s hunger disguised as justice.
The difficult work, the work with no audience, no platform, and no post engagement, is the work of facing both possibilities at the same time. Is this righteous anger or wounded pride? Is this a principle or a personality? Am I looking for justice or a win?
The Sufi masters recognized that the journey inward is not a retreat from politics. It is a precondition. The person who has not examined their own nafs will perpetuate the pathologies they claim to oppose in every community they construct. The activist who has not asked what they want from their activism, what need it fills, or what wound it heals, will eventually weaponize the cause. Not because of malice. Simply put, humans fail to know themselves.
The truth does not ensure acceptance. Sincerity does not protect against slander. One may reach out with genuine goodwill only to be told that doing so is an act of aggression. One may lower their voice and be accused of shouting. One may make every reasonable accommodation for another person’s perception only to discover that the accommodation has been reframed as evidence of guilt.
The most difficult lesson to learn is that you have no control over the narrative that others create about you. You can only control the truth of your actions, the purity of your intentions, the sincerity of your tawbah when you genuinely err, and your refusal to apologize for things you did not do simply because it would be convenient for others.
History does not vindicate in real time. It rarely vindicates at all. What it occasionally does, slowly and imperfectly, is outlast the petty politics of the present moment and remember who showed up and who performed their presence. Who served the people and who served the story about serving the people?
People you meet in these spaces are truly rare, and they redefine what you thought was possible. Who arrives without first checking to see if the cameras are present. Who speak the uncomfortable truth not because it strengthens their brand, but because the alternative, managed silence, strategic ambiguity, would cost them something they cannot afford to lose, something internal with no market value.
I’ve met several of them. I’ve also met, and this is the confession that costs something, the version of myself that I wished to be before fully comprehending what it entailed. The version that was drawn to the right places, spoke the right language, and felt the pull of the right causes, but hadn’t yet learned to question its own motives with the same sharpness that it did everyone else’s.
And I’ve met the most difficult kind of person to account for: someone whose advocacy is genuinely motivated but whose choices consistently trend toward the spotlight; someone whose intellectual gifts are genuine but whose deployment is inextricably linked to the question of who is watching; someone who is committed, contradictory, and human in the same way that we all are, which is to say completely.
What do you do with the allure of someone whose fire you see as both a gift and a danger at the same time? Perhaps you maintain a safe distance. Perhaps you are admiring the heat from across the room. Perhaps the jihad is not only a war against your own lesser self, but also a discipline to resist being consumed by what is magnificent in someone else while they are still burning.
We are on parallel thrones, orbiting the same sun, which is not any of us, but rather the tradition, cause, and truth that is greater than our ability to fully embody. Perhaps all we can do is keep turning toward it.
There is a version of intellectual and spiritual life that is clean, affirming, and yields consensus. You say the right things, associate with the right people, and never push the chain of transmission until it becomes uncomfortable. This version has a lot of followers. It is also, in my experience, mostly ineffective.
The version worth living in is messier. It entails saying what you actually see, even if what you see involves people you are supposed to protect, causes you are supposed to serve, or communities you belong to. It entails the discomfort of being the one who asked the question that no one wanted to hear. It entails the slow, uncomplicated work of maintaining integrity in the absence of recognition, not because you don’t want it, but because you’ve learned that allowing the desire for it to drive your vision will distort it.
Recovering this and insisting on it in the face of forces that want to flatten it is not nostalgia. It is the most radical possible position. Radical not in the sense of spectacle, but in the sense of root: returning to the source in order to comprehend what is actually happening in the branches.
The Ummah is not a metaphor. It’s a responsibility. Its integrity necessitates that we be open about what corrupts it, including our own role in that corruption. The isnād should hold. The chain must be unbroken. And this means that each link, each person, must be who they claim.
Not perfect. Not without jihad. But sincerely, with the focus of prayer set on something beyond the mirror.
“A choice for the better is an exercise of freedom. It presupposes knowledge of good and evil.”
-Prof. Dr. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (حَفِظَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ تَعَالَىٰ)