The West's Spiritual Pillaging

But that's what they've always done. And you won't find a single area in life in the West. You won't find a single area in life in which they don't do this. They pillage, they ransack, they steal, and they ruin. They ruin who they steal from. And they even ruin what they steal. Wahi. Their bad intentions are like a long snake that slithers across their whole history. Like, have you heard of that whole movement? This is an example. Have you heard of that whole movement that was back around the turn of the last century? It's kind of a weird chapter in the West. Frankly, no one really talks about it that much, but it is significant.

I think that quasi-spiritual movement, you know, the sort of elite bourgeois mysticism and occultism that went hand in hand with colonization. You had Blavatsky, Bazant, those lunatics, you know, it was the basis of what's now the new age spiritualism of today. The westernization of eastern ideas and concepts and the perversion of those ideas and concepts, for distinctly western purposes. They did this for distinctly western purposes. Oh yes, the West did not just colonize land and bodies and resources. They colonized what cultures considered sacred. They reached into the metaphysical heart of civilizations and extracted whatever they found useful and they co-opted it. This was a calculated project of epistemic domination. Domination and pillage. They took the beliefs of the people that they colonized. They appropriated those beliefs and they used those beliefs to not only manufacture their own westernized versions which they would then use for their own purposes, but they also did it to negate and to invalidate the cultural ownership of those beliefs, the ownership by the colonized people.

Now, of course, for us, we're just talking about all different types of kufur from all around the world, but that's irrelevant to the point that I'm making here. The point here is that this was just another form of extractive ransacking by the West. And it's important to recognize that. It's important to recognize how they did and what they did and why. From the 18th century onwards, as the western empires spread across the globe, they encountered civilizations, old civilizations whose spiritual traditions were older and were deeper and were far more integrated into the fabric of daily life than the hollowed-out remnants of post-reformation Christianity and certainly more than the secularism of the so-called enlightenment. We're not just talking about, you know, museum relics or something to be cataloged. They were living, breathing systems of meaning. Systems that had sustained those people that had shaped their laws, their customs and governed them, governed their ethics for centuries. And again, it doesn't matter that we're talking about kufur here. The point here is that these were deeply rooted systems of interpreting life that had formed across centuries of experience. There's intricacy there. There's scholarship there, there's exegesis there and so on, developed over vast amounts of time. But the West did not approach these things with any sort of respect, not even with any honest curiosity. That's their superiority complex. Makes them incurably cynical. They don't think anything matters. Instead, they engaged in a systematic project of what you can call spiritual extraction, mining, repackaging, and ultimately distorting those civilizations' knowledge to serve their own ideological and materialistic ends. And it continues until today. Maybe not with the same brute force of colonial armies, but through the subtler and more insidious mechanisms of cultural hegemony, you know, appropriation and corruption, perversion.

The Enlightenment didn't just challenge the authority of the church. That's not the only thing it did. It gutted any semblance of spiritual life in the West. And that left them with an existential void, a void that rationality and reason and nationalism couldn't fill. The European elite had long since discarded their own scripture. But they still craved for some sort of metaphysical transcendence. You know, they weren't high enough. They weren't powerful enough. So just like Pharaoh, just like Pharaoh, they wanted their supremacy to be on an even greater level. And as a result of colonization, they turned outward towards the so-called mystic Orient, towards the timeless wisdom of the East, you know, towards the ruins of civilizations that they themselves had ruined and destroyed. Colonial expansion provided them the perfect pipeline for this spiritual looting. The same British officers who plundered Indian palaces also seized texts in Sanskrit, Hinduism, Buddhism and so on. You know, the ancient traditions of Egypt, of Persia, India, China, Mesoamerica. They were all treated not as living faiths but as anthropological artifacts ready to be reverse-engineered, ready to be stripped of their original context, ready to be repurposed for Western consumption. It's really quite grotesque if you think about it. And that's where you really start to see the emergence of western occultism, like some souvenir that a tourist brings back home to show their friends how well-traveled they are. You know, like these celebrities today getting tattoos in Japanese or in Sanskrit or in Arabic without even knowing what they say.

So you had what was called at that time, turn of the century, the Theosophical Society in Europe. I think it was based in the UK. It was founded by someone called Helena Blavatsky, 1875, and it was one of the first sort of organized efforts to really codify this spiritual plunder. And then Blavatsky was followed by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, who was a pedophile. And they claimed to reveal or to know some secret doctrine, some universal wisdom hidden beneath all religions, all global religions, all world religions. But in practice, Theosophy, which is like a combination of the word theology and philosophy, in practice, it did two things. One, it reduced living doctrinal traditions to just metaphors. Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and so on were all stripped of their theological substance and repackaged as allegories, allegories for some deeper esoteric truth that the actual, you know, believers in and practitioners of those faiths couldn't actually understand themselves. So the second thing they did was to elevate themselves to become some new spiritual aristocracy. The real wisdom they claimed was not accessible to the ordinary believer but only to the western initiate, the enlightened elite who alone could decipher the hidden codes and the hidden meaning in these ancient texts and these ancient faiths. You see that's the whole history of the West. That's the that's their whole history. That's their whole modus operandi. Like I said, they steal and then they claim that what is yours is actually theirs. And then they even claim that their stealing of your stuff made it better. The arrogance. I mean these people, Besant, Blavatsky, even Leadbeater, they're still talked about until today as if they were master teachers of some great spiritual truth. No, they were imperialist frauds. They were narcissistic cult figures who diluted and polluted centuries-old belief systems of colonized people in order to exalt themselves over those same colonized people. I don't even know what kind of a category of crime that is.

But you'll notice when you look into these people's writings, when you look into their books and their works and their speeches and what have you, there's one religion that they never messed with. And you can guess which one that is. Yes, Islam was conspicuously absent from their grand synthesis of all the eastern religions. Why? Because Islam was and remains a faith that refuses to be co-opted, to be paged or to be domesticated. Islam wasn't built like that. Unlike Hinduism or unlike Buddhism and so forth which had already been sort of fragmented and demilitarized under colonial rule, Islam retained not only its theological coherence, its legal rigor, its political force, but its teeth. It could not be appropriated by the West without provoking resistance. You can't get away with that with Muslims. Theosophy's structure was inherently elitist. It spoke of hidden great masters, secret hierarchies, cosmic initiations, and deeper truths and whatnot. All of these ideas basically mirrored imperial thinking, but in a sort of metaphysical framing. You know, the spiritual order replicated the colonial order. The white European would now not only rule the land but the very cosmos itself. does not tolerate that nonsense. No, like I said, you can't underestimate this this weird moment in the West, this weird phenomenon that happened in the West because it oozed out from there into all sorts of other areas, not the least of which is psychoanalysis, especially Carl Jung, but you'll find all sorts of figures in the West who basically can trace their lineage back to the Blavatskys and the Besants and the Leadbeaters. Alan Watts, for example, Ginsberg and so forth. I mean someone like Aleister Crowley, the Satanist, just took the next logical step where Theosophy offered wisdom. Crowley offered the open worship of the self. He said, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." His system was less a spiritual path than a sort of a metaphysical manifesto for elite individualism. So western, I mean I've said it before, there's no real difference if you think about it philosophically, there's no real difference between "do as thou wilt" and the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Proudly borrowed freely from Egyptian mythology, from Kabbalah, Tantra, you know, ceremonial magic from all different cultures. But he never engaged any of those traditions on their own terms. Instead, he weaponized them. He used their symbols to try to dismantle moral boundaries, to try to reject institutional religion, and to declare the self as the ultimate sovereign. Well, that's very democratic, isn't it? Crowley's spirituality was one of aristocratic libertinism masquerading as spirituality. What the Blavatsky had framed as esoteric enlightenment, Crowley framed as a sort of cosmic rebellion. It's very American. But both of them serve the same function, which was to provide western elites with a sort of metaphysical justification for rejecting both God and rejecting the spiritual heritage of the people that they colonized. And that's what you have to understand. This wasn't just some fringe bunch of eccentrics. No, they served core imperialistic interests by claiming to understand the true essence of say a Hinduism or Buddhism, to understand it better than its adherents. The colonizer posed as a benevolent reformer rather than as a conqueror. And by filtering global religious traditions through invented western esoteric frameworks, the colonizers were able to dictate how those traditions would be studied, how they would be taught, how they would be perceived. When your sacred texts are all called metaphors, and your prophets are all called myths, and your rituals are all reframed as nothing but psychological symbols, you're spiritually disarmed. I mean, you can literally discern, like I said, the thread between a Leadbeater and a Jordan Peterson. They're the same.

The shift from divine revelation to secret knowledge transfers power from the actual community of believers and scholars to a self-appointed spiritual elite who are literally not even learned in the scriptures and in the texts and in the traditions that they're pretending to interpret. Just like Jordan Peterson, this legacy of spiritual empire building is everywhere. Like I said, in the so-called new age movement, which is just a descendant of Theosophy. It reduces Buddhism to mindfulness, Christianity to, you know, positive vibrations, love and so forth. Hinduism is just yoga or tantric sex or karma. You know, you can see it in the UN-endorsed interfaith initiatives that they do, this push for sort of universal spirituality that flattens theological distinctions in favor of liberal humanist platitudes. You can see it in corporate wellness programs, you know, repackaged Hindu, Eastern Buddhist meditation as a form of stress relief, stripping it of all metaphysical meaning. I mean it's all over the place in western pop culture. You know, you see the Egyptian iconography, Eastern mantras and so forth all just being a kind of aesthetic backdrop, spiritual imagery emptied of any spiritual consequence or meaning. No appreciation, no understanding of the context or the history or the culture that those things came from. In each case, the goal is the same: narcissistic spiritual performance without submission to God.

And yes, that is at least part of why Islam is still demonized, still excluded, you know, tokenized only as Sufism in these frameworks, because it's the last major world religion that remains whole. Its creed is unbroken. Its scripture is unchanged. Its metaphysical structure is intact. It can't be syncretized. It can't be metaphorized. It can't be relativized. And because Islam still demands submission to a sovereign God, it remains the final bulwark against the total metaphysical colonization of the human soul by empty western rich people. This is why the West's spiritual empire builders avoided Islam then and why they fear it today. You know, Nietzsche said God is dead. But the West didn't kill God. They killed belief in God so that they could then cast themselves as his substitutes. They pick and choose from all the other religions, all the other traditions, you know, a verse here, a myth there, you know, and then they mix them all up in a blender and make a spirituality smoothie. I know that's what they do because that's what I was doing before I came to Islam. Take from this one, take from that one, and then willfully make it mean whatever you want it to mean for you, your own interpretation. That's self-worship. is just pillaging and ransacking and looting of other people's religious heritage, other people's religious traditions and beliefs. And yes, like I said, we're talking about all different types of kufur from an Islamic perspective. They were westernizing eastern kufur. Okay, that's why they were even able to do it because all of that's kufur. But you do have to understand what they were doing and why. So that you will understand that the only antidote to that is uncompromising submission to actual revelation. And the only tradition that has survived that storm, that colonial storm intact is Islam. That's why they avoided it. And that's why we have to defend it today. Not just physically, but cosmologically. And not just as Muslims, but as witnesses against this particularly nefarious aspect of empire that wants to own even your soul and your understanding of reality and what reality is and what existence is and why it is. They want to own all of that. And you have to understand that they've been at this for a long time because no, it wasn't always westernizing eastern kufur.

Christianity itself is nothing but the colonization of the message of Prophet Jesus. Long before the Theosophy came along and mined Hinduism or Crowley came along and mined Tantra, the West had already perfected the art of spiritual appropriation by mutilating the original message of Prophet Isa, Prophet Jesus. You know, the original followers of Jesus, it was a small persecuted community in Palestine upholding strict monotheism, rejecting idolatry and awaiting and working for divine justice. And when Rome co-opted their faith, Rome didn't convert to their teachings. It converted their teachings into something else entirely. The Romans didn't become Christians. The Christians became Roman. The radical anti-imperial message of Isa, a prophet who condemned excessive wealth, power, hypocrisy, that message was gutted and remade into a state religion that sanctified wealth. It sanctified power and hypocrisy. Those pagan idolaters changed monotheism into trinity. The uncompromising, the oneness of Allah that was preached by Isa was replaced with a convoluted theology borrowed from Greek philosophy, borrowed from pagan mystery mystical cults. You know, the simple prophetic message of submission to Allah was buried beneath layers upon layers upon layers of metaphysical abstraction until the man who had preached, according to their own book, "The Lord your God is one God," was himself declared to be a god. Can you imagine how far? Can you go? It went from an anti-empire message to empire's handbook. Isa, according to their book, said that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. That's according to their own book that they're reading until right now. But pretty quickly, you had bishops wearing gold. You had popes commanding armies, violent armies. You had kings who ruled tyrannically by so-called divine right. No, the religion of the oppressed became the religion of the oppressor. You see how they do? They went from divine law to selective morality. Isa upheld the revelations from before and he said in their book until now, "I did not come to abolish the law," but Pauline Christianity completely discarded divine law in favor of grace that conveniently allowed all the powerful to just sin without consequence while using moral rhetoric to try to control the masses. Even in their book today, in their Bible today, you still have warnings about divine punishment and urging people to be prepared to prepare themselves for the hereafter. But imperial Christianity turned faith into a transactional system where salvation could literally be bought through the church. Where suffering was glorified if you were poor, where the oppressed were told to endure injustice in exchange for heavenly reward. They turned a message of justice into a message of passivity in the face of injustice. Just as later western esotericists would strip Hinduism of its theology, reduce Buddhism to just mindfulness, the early church fathers stripped the message of Isa from its revolutionary essence and repackaged it as a tool of social control. You know, the cross, which was nothing but a symbol of Roman brutality, was rebranded as a divine mandate for conquest. Imagine the teachings of a prophet who stood against empire were used to justify empire. See how they do. The same forces that corrupted the message of Isa later went on to plunder all the sacred traditions of Africa, of Asia and of the Americas. That same intellectual arrogance that turned monotheism into a trinity because that's what they liked. They turned yoga into exercise, Sufism into poetry, meditation into corporate productivity hacks. But alhamdulillah, Islam remains unbroken and unbreakable. Islam still says there is no God but Allah subhana wa ta'ala. It still demands justice, not complacency. It still rejects the deification of man, whether we're talking about papal infallibility or new age self-deification, or the idea that self-knowledge constitutes knowledge of God or any other such nonsense. No, if you don't know that you're nothing but a slave of God, then you have no self-knowledge whatsoever. And the Muslims are the ones who can tell you who you are. The Muslims are the ones who can tell you what you are. Why? A Muslim who doesn't even know you has more knowledge about you than you have about yourself. That's why the West fears Islam, not because it's foreign, not because it's Arab, not because they say it's violent or terrorist or what have you. It's because it's the uncorrupted echo of the message of Isa. In the same way that Rome couldn't tolerate the real Isa, the modern West cannot tolerate the real faith that Isa taught because they can't tolerate anything that denies their own delusions of supremacy. Oh, it's just an unspeakable irony when the West ever talks about equality. Well, they're absolutely obsessed with trying to prove or trying to establish their superiority. And when they can't prove their supremacy, and they can't, well, then they try to just negate and nullify everything that proves their inferiority. Do you understand? They negate any measurement of value that they come up short in and they do that through relativism and so on. You know, the whole interfaith narrative, for example, the interfaith narrative is religious relativism. It's the same old devaluing, the same old disrespecting of other people's beliefs because they don't have any beliefs themselves to speak of. So suddenly all beliefs are equal, all have the same value, which is just this is just a way to negate value. In other words, it's belief relativism. It's nihilism. Nothing means anything. Everything is relative. That's their belie, that's their position. You only do that because religion and belief are areas in which you fall short. You know, they don't believe in financial relativism, do they? The rich and the poor sure aren't the same in their book, are they? Military might isn't relative, is it? You know, they don't see the US Army as being the same as a militia, do they? That's not relative. When a militia commits violence, it's a war crime. It's a crime against humanity. It's a human rights violation. But when the US or their allies commit violence on a vast scale, well, that's peacekeeping. No, they don't believe in relativism in areas where they don't fall short. They only believe in relativism in areas where they can't compete. That's what interfaith is all about. Relativizing religion because they haven't got a leg to stand on in that area. So they don't want distinct religions to have distinct value and they package that as tolerance. Tolerance to belittle and to negate the individual value of religions. They say that's tolerance. Tolerance to expect every religious person to just accept the notion that there's nothing special, there's nothing worth holding on to, there's nothing worth cherishing and defending in their faith. And that's supposed to be tolerance. That's the West's version of tolerance. Imagine, that's like someone telling you that you're being divisive, you're being intolerant because you don't accept for someone to insult your mother because after all, we're all equal. Your mother isn't special, so she shouldn't be

special to you. All mothers teach the same things to their children, after all. Right? All parents are equal. What kind of garbage is that? That's the—that's what your interfaith messaging and your interfaith narrative is about.

No, you people are obsessed with inequality. You are obsessed with supremacy. You are obsessed with, uh, devaluing, delegitimizing, and negating others. And you turn every religion, uh, into nothing but validations of these obsessions. And Islam does not accommodate you in that. Your colonization of our lands never conquered Islam, and your colonization of, uh, uh, religious traditions where you couldn't even find anything in Islam to exploit and to appropriate—because the only way that you could take, uh, you know, a whole basket of different types of kufur and call that, uh, basket of kufur universal truth is by, uh, excluding actual truth from the mix. Because actual truth does not allow you to exalt yourselves and to feign supremacy through some mystical, esoteric gibberish and to try to pretend that you're the lawmaker, you're the lawgiver, not just subjects and slaves under the law.

But Islam won't let you forget what you are. And Islam won't ever let you make us forget what you are. And that's what you really can't stand. [Music]