Malcolm X and the Death of Liberalism
On suing the state, the "liberal fox", Islam's role in the world and the necessity of living fearlessly.
So do not fear them; fear Me if you are true believers. — (Qur’an, Aal Imran: 175)
Rather I receive your bullet-riddled body with honor, than news of your cowardice on the battlefield. — Traditional Pashto couplet
Death has been thick, lately.
If you stick your tongue out anywhere in America these days, the invisible particles of Gaza’s almost quarter million dead will precipitate on your lips and you can taste the bitter tonic of mass murder as you guzzle down your X-Large Frappuccino.
If life were an episode of Stranger Things, we are currently stuck in the Upside Down.
Luminescent particles of the souls of the dearly genocided haunt the air. It cannot be escaped. The monsters are in charge. Terror reigns but an eery “normalcy” abounds. A pervasive banality of evil. The air is heavy with machine-like decadence, spiritual death, moral decay, mass strangulation.
Welcome to America: Imperial core. Festival of insanity. Drums for foreign wars and deep fried drumsticks. Outraged, incensed liberals do not shed tears for dead children: they hysterically request “mental health days” over the return of Trump and vengefully go back to drinking Starbucks to spite the Palestinians for being exterminated. They see not that they are the mirror image of MAGA supporters, only with Planned Parenthood hats instead.
We’ve replaced underhanded fascism with overt fascism, that is all. As if fascism were never here to begin with. How easily we forget, in the words of Dr. Cornel West, “the painful truth that is there is no Donald Trump without Barack Obama [and Biden], no neofascist stirrings without neoliberal policies.” As if a liberal presidency did not fund an ongoing genocide, live-streamed on our phones daily. For onlookers from the Global South, Americans and their politicians conduct themselves very childishly. The American bubble is simultaneously amusing and terrifying, as if the mass tantrums of liberals do not dictate the life and death of vulnerable communities of peoples being erased on the other side of the world.
One thing is for sure, though. With the demise of the heartless Biden administration, the experiment of American liberalism is firmly dead: Trump won because the Democratic voter base simply did not turn out. The party could not offer Americans anything more than tone-deaf platitudes, Beyoncé and virtue signaling. When it came to the concern of actual human life and bombs shredding refugee camps to bits, all it had to offer as a platform was this inane retort: “be quiet, I am speaking, just vote for a mechanical woman of color instead of that scary orange man, OK?”
Liberalism has always been more dangerous than other, more overtly fascist ideologies because it is a lazy semblance of progressivism, not progressivism itself. It is a mirage: illusory, fake and narcissistic because it makes people feel good about themselves without urging them to introspect. It pretends to be the party of those who are good, but at its core—underneath its shallow veneer of pretend righteousness—it has no firm anchoring in reality or transcendental depth beyond its delusional self. It is precisely its pretend nature that makes it so lethal: the semblance of truth is always more wicked than than outright wickedness. And while the twin-headed beasts beget one another, semblance of truth is infinitely more culpable for its insistent, unaware arrogance.
So for some sanity, anchoring and grounding in these cartoonishly evil times, I find myself retreating to the wisdom of my prescient teachers and ancestors and often catch myself thinking: “WWMD? What Would Malcolm Do? What would he say?” What would the great shahid of American Islam say in this moment of pervasive evil? Now that his family is finally suing the CIA, the FBI and the police for his assassination, what does this moment mean for his enduring legacy, his reckoning?
Of course, Malcolm prophetically called out the existential danger of the “liberal fox” a long time ago:
But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the "smiling" fox.”
Beyond the confines of the American bubble, elHajj Malik/Malcolm also went to Gaza and saw something quite special there. He said the same thing about it that was conveyed in the previous viral post God and the Concentration Camp. He said:
The spirit of Allah was strong in Gaza.
Malcolm also visited Sudan, which today is also a site of unspeakable onslaught and horror, where Sudanese women commit mass suicide to escape being raped to death. In one of his diary entries, he wrote of the “quiet confidence” of the Sudanese people and added, “I never cease to be impressed by the Sudanese.” As I write this, Sudan is undergoing a genocide too, but by a “Muslim” government, no less. The UAE, which also destroyed Yemen and Libya, and is now funding the murderous RSF forces for reasons similar to those of Netanyahu: to break Sudan’s dignified, “quietly confident”, Prophetically rooted Islamic character. Genocide for “a cultural change.”
Similar to the spirit of Gaza—where “the spirit of God” is vivid—the Sudanese peoples’ natural affinity to godliness and virtue drives these devilish colonizers and traitors-in-Muslim garb crazy. These maniacal state terroristic forces are on a rampage now, hellbent on destroying the spirit of true Islam that lives in the Palestinian, Yemeni, Sudanese and other oppressed peoples.
Malcolm spoke of the white liberal fox, but it is unclear he had the pleasure of meeting the “Muslim Zionist fox” variety. He did however speak of “20th century Uncle Toms” and said of them: “[you] think you're going to solve your problem by pleasing [the Master], you're only making the problem worse.” What do MBZ, MBS, Sisi, Abdallah et. all represent if not the 21st century bootlicking Uncle Toms of Uncle Sam and co.?
And while Elhajj Malik visited Mecca and loved Islam’s unifying vision for humanity through his life-changing hajj experience, what would he have said about the state of Mecca and Medina today, holy cities that are under the occupation of a hellish tyrant who relishes in torturing and bone-sawing clerics, journalists, scholars and writers? What would he do knowing that the security apparatus there can jail you for wearing a Palestinian kufiyyeh or detain you for publicly praying for the liberation of the oppressed?
In living through this bleak moment, when we ask “What Would Malcolm Do,” we are attempting to restore the lessons of an exemplar that held on to a notion of principled humanity in a time of rampant inhumanity. In this time when evil is so proliferated, so multiplied, that it seeks to destroy Oneness, and all that is good and holy, we must anchor ourselves in the words and deeds of those before us to resist the moral rot. When injustice is so pervasive, it is in the air, we must hold on to enduring, life-giving wisdom that can help us withstand the weight of systemic callousness. Malcolm, of course, warned of this time of trickery and double speak:
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
As an unapologetic black Muslim leader who was hunted by the security state, he intimately and uniquely understood systemic injustice. He came face-to-face with its sinister, vicious fangs and paid the price of his soul to defy it. Like Imam Hussain, Imam Shamil and the many Muslim shuhadabefore and after him, rather than let the proliferation of evil pulverize him into a state of paralysis, he chose to gain power over evil by dying at the altar of himself. He wasn’t a Sufi in the literal sense, but he was smart enough to kill the world of forms before it killed him. He conquered the Kingdom of Fear within and vanquished it outside of himself. He instilled fear in the state apparatus and they exterminated him for it, granting him the status of eternal life.
When Malcolm moved in the world, it is important to remember that he foresaw his murder. He spoke and acted like a man who was dead—a shahid (a martyr)—already:
I'm a man who believes that I died 20 years ago. And I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.
In essence, Malcolm still lives: martyrs don’t die. He fulfilled the prophetic injunction of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ who advised: “die before you die.” He—like the people of Palestine—embodied the shahada (witnessing) of la ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad Rasul Allah. That there is nothing in this world truly worthy of worship other than the One. Embodying the shahada in action offers a model of what true, transformative tawhid (Oneness) can do in the world: it can outlast all tyrants.
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
―Soren Kierkegaard
When tawhid is internalized truly and properly in the individual heart, it activates the potential to resist evil and transform the collective whole. When one realized individual like Malcolm X “dies before he dies”, there is simply no calculus in which his life went in vain. He wagered his life for the truth against the forces of fear and became a true khalifa (inheritor) of God on earth. Through that lived experience, he left a blueprint of how to stand defiantly in the face of systemic injustice, militarization, supremacy and the living vestiges of slavery.
That is a blueprint that is worth holding on to. Because they wouldn’t have killed him if he didn’t possess a blueprint worth fighting for.
Before his assassination, he traveled to Mecca, to the UN and other international organizations to take the plight of the black American to the world stage and was arguably killed for those collaborative efforts. State terrorists will do everything in their power to quash and suppress the spirit of alliance among the oppressed. State fundamentalists are enemies of the true spirit of brotherhood of man, of repressed communities yearning for dignity and freedom.
Now, tyrannical state efforts to strangulate this rising spirit of global liberation have reached their zenith: we are at a point where genocide has become mere background noise in our daily lives. The powers-that-be are counting on our despair and desensitization. They want us to feel like all resistance is futile. They want us to feel threatened by the idea of us being in a burial shroud next if we dare to speak up.
It is precisely because of this brash intimidation, that it has become our collective duty, more than ever before, to resist the resignation and carry forth the baton of Malcolm’s unifying vision. After all, he saw that anti-black animus and anti-Muslim animus as stemming from the same devilish source of arrogance and supremacy. Malcolm’s model for human liberation thus came from his understanding of Islam as a model for human liberation:
Individual liberation—> Communal liberation —> Global liberation —> Ummatic liberation —> Universal liberation of all humankind
In his autobiography, he said:
America needs to understand Islam because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam.
Malcolm is right, that at least theoretically, Islam has the untapped potential to be the gift America—and this humanity—so sorely needs. But as long as Muslim societies worship at the polytheistic altar of the Nation State, that beautiful vision will never be realized. In order to be true Prophetic bearers of mercy for all of human kind, Muslims must mentally and spiritually unshackle themselves from the tyrannical clasp of the Kingdom of Fear. In order to realize ElHajj Malik’s Qur’anic vision of an Islam that possesses an antidotal remedy to American culture and race wars, Muslims must seize this moment of liberal collapse and lead the way in transcending neo-jahiliyya nationalistic, ethnic, sectarian divisions.
For Muslims in America, the responsibility is doubled: if liberalism has proven itself to be a failed experiment, Muslims must rise to the duty of resurrecting the spirit of true Islam: an Islam of principle and moral courage. Muslims in America (and in the “West” more broadly) must resuscitate Islam away from performative piety and suburban respectability politics. If the last few months have shown us anything, it is that this world is tired of hypocritical systems, the theatrics of sociopathic politicians and the soothsaying rhetoric of mainstream media and institutions. Islam is likewise tired of Muslims by name only: those who are pious, go to the mosque and give their zakat(alms), but shudder and cower at the first hint of discomfort or sacrifice. If you ask Gazans what hurt them the most, they will all say it is not Israeli and American bombs. It is the cowardice of kin.
Humanity at large is sick of the semblance of “good”—the fake, mass produced, cookie-cutter version of “good” that if you scratch it, bleeds fascism. Humanity is yearning instead for the true good within all of us to be realized, to be actualized. For a return of the Real. That moment will never come so long as we let this cadaver of a dying system dictate our version of reality.
Like Malcolm, we must declare this world dead before it kills us. We must conquer the illusion—this monster—that is this Upside Down moment and quash its illusory fear. Because on the other end is a return to Reality. A return to love. A return to Oneness. Outside of the One, there are no others. No false dieties. The Real can’t be faked or forged, obliterating darkness and deception.
The Real never dies.
لا إله الله الله
So over you is the greatest enemy a man can have and that is fear. I know some of you are afraid to listen to the truth-you have been raised on fear and lies. But I am going to preach to you the truth until you are free of that fear.
Malcolm X
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