"Make Iberia Great Again"

An invitation to join our imaginal al-Andalus

Cross-posted from Al-Andalus Tribune and Al-Andalus Tribune Substack

I saw her not with these eyes of clay,
But with inner gaze born of love’s own ray.
Al-Andalus—shimmering face of the Real,
Unfolding where only the heart can kneel.

She spoke in symbols, in shadow and flame,
Each form a mirror, each name His Name.
There, time imploded and veils grew thin—
I walked through her gates and stepped within.

Not lost, not gone—she is always near,
A world between worlds, incandescently clear.
To know her is to see through the veil—
To dwell where the lovers of God prevail.

Selections from the Al-Andalus Tribune:

Jerusalem in the Qur’an: The Most Prophetic Book of Our Time? (Sheikh Imran Hosein)

Fragrance Fatigue: Are We Overdoing Odorizers—and Ignoring Toxicity?

The War on Islam: Why the West Fears Islam (Enver Masud)

Humanure compost toilet: A better way to go

There Are at Least 30 Dajjals—and Sabbatai Zevi Was One of Them! -David Musa Pidcock

The new webzine takes its inspiration from al-Andalus, medieval Islamic Spain, whose implosion under Inquisitions and Crusades 500 years ago is widely mourned, not only by Muslims, but by people from all backgrounds who appreciate artistic and literary excellence, religious and ethnic pluralism, and good weather. (Actually the Iberian/Maghrebi weather is still pretty good, but it was even sunnier back then…)

The Al-Andalus Tribune brings together the avant-garde of truth tellers and visionaries from the Muslim world—people who are often ignored or censored by mainstream publications—alongside less controversial folks celebrating what Islamicate culture once was, and what it could become. Our lodestar is the “earthly paradise lost” of Andalusia, the “ornament of the world” as Maria Menocal’s book title puts it:

In Menocal’s terms, borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andalusia was a “first-rate” place because it, like Fitzgerald’s “first-rate intelligence,” was blessed with “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” Menocal extends Fitzgerald’s point by arguing that at its best—and it was at its best in Andalusia—medieval culture “positively thrived on holding at least two, and often many more, contrary ideas at the same time. This was the chapter of Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance, and it is this difficult concept that my subtitle attempts to convey.”

The Islamic world’s biggest problem right now, besides Zionist genocide, is sectarian obscurantism—monologism—the refusal and rejection of the voice of the Other. Muslims can’t unite to save Palestine because they are divided into quarreling nations and sects. To solve that problem, we need to make an extra effort to sincerely seek out good (or at least interesting) ideas from people from other perspectives, and to unite for the common good even with people we don’t fully agree with. In short, we need to become better listeners, more Other-oriented. We need to change ourselves first, and then our nations will follow. “Indeed, Allāh will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.” (rendered from Qur’an: 13:11).

This Other-orientation was one of the most noteworthy characteristics of the Prophet of Islam, peace upon him, who was cherished as Al-Amin, the trustworthy arbiter between competing factions, because he could set aside ego and give full justice to others. Indeed, Islam means submission to God, the ultimate Other. You ought to get outside yourself every time you pray, otherwise you aren’t doing it right.

Letting go of your ego’s party line and exposing yourself to the diversity of ideas and visions at the Al-Andalus Tribune isn’t just religiously and spiritually correct. It’s also stimulating—far more interesting than locking yourself into a cyberbox with people of the same school of thought, and then competing to see who can pose as the ultimate paragon of orthodoxy.

The Avant-Garde of “Western Islam”

Andalusia offers a brilliant example of what Western Islam once was, and an inspiration for what it might become. The Arabic word for Morocco is al-maghreb, the west, and has always referred to the western Islamic lands. Al-Andalus, the lost lodestar of that Islamic West, may not be geographically quite as far west as parts of Morocco, but it’s where European Islam began and blossomed. Al-Andalus hosted the avant-garde of European civilization for more than four centuries, roughly the same period that the rest of Europe slogged through the Dark Ages.

Today, liberal Western civilization is collapsing. People are arrested for having the wrong opinions, censorship has become the norm, the rule of law is ever-shakier, democracy has given way to oligarchy, technology dumbs us down and hollows us out, and a great spiritual vacuum has arisen in the space vacated by religion. Polarization and politicized hate have proven poor substitutes for faith. A new Dark Age or jahiliyya is descending on us.

Yesterday’s Western avant-garde led the war on religion and spirituality. Today’s Western avant-garde—our part of it, anyway—envisions Islam as a potential solution to the problem of failed Western liberalism.

Note that Western Islam is not synonymous with “liberal Islam.” In fact, liberal Islam is an oxymoron! Political liberalism holds freedom as its highest and only transcendent good. In other words, it worships freedom rather than God. In Islam, God is the only transcendent value, the only worthy object of worship. All lesser goods, including freedom, are dependent on Him.

The people we see as the Islamicate avant-garde are not liberals, as you will discover as you peruse these pages.

Solutions?

Our utopian nostalgia for al-Andalus, a place some say never was and never will be, is itself a solution of sorts. If the present seems hopeless, the future even more so, then who’s to say we shouldn’t yearn for the mythic glories of a shimmeringly alluring past? Think of it as a kind of meditation, dhikr, remembrance through expansion of consciousness induced by sounds and rhythms, faraway echoes of an impossibly beautiful place and time, when lovers of God gathered in gardens to share exquisite tastes of epiphanies they had barely glimpsed, but into the full presence of Hu they vowed a shattering return.

Alongside the attitude-adjustment “solutions” of Other-orientation and mystical nostalgia, there are plenty of ways that Muslims, Islam, and Islamicate culture can help envision real, practical solutions to pressing problems. Take fiat currency—please! Take it and throw it in the Guadalquivir River, the Al-Wadi al-Kabir, and replace it with commodity currency, namely the gold dinar and silver dirham, as Umar Vadillo, Imran Hosein, and other wise Muslim voices have been saying for decades. (We’re also open to listening to currency reformers like Michael Hudson and Ellen Brown who share our loathing for usury but propose a different solution.)

Real solutions to the problems of the present and future sometimes do involve a return to the best practices of the past, like its ferocious and categorical rejection of usury. So much of the modern world is toxic—not just the currency, but also the sewage systems and chemical fragrances and abandonment of trust and responsibility (amana) in favor of police and prisons and a digital panopticon. If you want to go all the way, the final solution to the problem of modernity might just turn out to be a one-way trip to a Muslim Village of the type envisioned by Sheikh Imran Hosein, where rural isolation and low-tech self-sufficiency could help you survive the malhama kubra or Last World War. But that’s a pretty extreme solution to an even more extreme problem, and besides, the malhama keeps getting postponed, so in the meantime maybe something less than a complete rejection of all aspects of modern civilization will suffice, and insha’Allah be forgiven by Allah SWT.

So please join our imaginal Al-Andalus! Subscribe to the Al-Andalus Tribune Substack and feel free hang around the Alhambra gardens, a.k.a. the comments section.

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