This Prayer May Be Your Last

A Reflection on the Islamic Center of San Diego Shooting by MM Salem

You’re in one of those local coffee shops where the barista pauses mid drink to tell you the latest tea. A friend of yours left moments ago before your arrival with her recent ex. The barista knows the situation, and so do you, so you exchange a cheeky look before she takes another order.

The childish spirit of the moment took you away for a second from the reason you opened this note — your shoulders relax and now tense at the matter at hand — how to process a shooting at a site of worship. Full transparency, ever since you learned that the language you prayed in made you tranquil and others erratic, you enter every house of God with the belief that it will be your last. Where others see beautiful glass windows and entrances with open space, you see an opportunity for horror. When rows of worshippers bow in submission, your ears follow the pace of sudden movement in corners. You know there’s no red dot on the ceiling suggesting a blind spot to run to. These walls whisper: come one and come all, and sometimes the devil follows close behind.

Tawakul reminds you not to look for the devil.

Yet, even with that reminder, you’ve always been distracted by what’s out of place; what doesn’t quite sit well; what makes no sense; what demands your attention without a right to it. A clinician calls it anxiety, a sheikh says it’s waswasa, whispers from an unwelcome presence, a friend jokes about intrusive thoughts, and you think it’s just caution and rational thinking.

God asks you to leave caution to Him. 

The devil reminds you that for every person, evil trails behind them.

You know there’s four angels close by too, so light must overpower fire, but these days you’re not so sure.

Ever since you learned that the language you prayed in made you tranquil and others erratic, you enter every house of God with the belief that it will be your last.

Playing these truths in your head several times, no closer to concluding the conversation in your mind. The irony being you never felt this concerned in the coffee shop you’re sitting in writing this. Everything’s political, but they somehow deemed coffee safer than worship. That’s because they exist in coffee shops, and for every place they do not exist in, they seek to eradicate the sacred. Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks:

The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of “a certain world,” forever after lost to him and his. When that happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that he could not identify, so little used as he is to such reactions. Somewhere beyond the objective world of farms and banana trees and rubber trees, I had subtly brought the real world into being.

“The real world brought into being” still remains a fiction for the public that sleeps tonight. A public that has endangered our lives by their own lethargy. They may be shocked, may give you glances of sympathy as you pass by them ordering your drink. They call it ‘strange,’ a tragedy, but their acknowledgement does not indicate their defiance. I cannot help but think of Aime Cesaire in Discourse on Colonialism:

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples…”

Before it was houses of worship, it was their children’s schools, before it was their children’s schools, it was the pillaging and destruction of civilizations around the world to create the fortress of the North and buttressing the South for the purpose of racial domination on the basis of exploitation. The fortress undisturbed allows for lethargy in all its forms. Lethargy because if they are untouched by neither racial domination, nor capitalist exploitation, this all seems distant to them. Another house of worship, another school, another country, and never another signal of a social breakdown of their own doing.

The fortress beckons violence because it formed from irrational violent ideologies incompatible with life itself, and proponents of this ideology gained the cannibalistic power to continue to recreate the world as they want to. There’s no sense in trying to find reasonable paths forward without interrogating its root and the root doesn’t start with a person born in 2008 with a gun. As Fanon reminds you,“…the family is a miniature of the nation” and, “…there is no disproportion between the life of the family and the life of the nation.”

Before it was houses of worship, it was their children’s schools, before it was their children’s schools, it was the pillaging and destruction of civilizations around the world to create the fortress of the North and buttressing the South for the purpose of racial domination on the basis of exploitation.

The continuation of violence from the same age group, regardless of decade, points to an issue of the world they exist in. We exist ‘outside’ of the world they were promised, and when confronted with this broken promise the white man as Fanon writes is “rocked backward by a force that he could not identify…” And what was promised that is no longer attainable for them? Everything. No certain prospects for a future, a stable career and rich social life. The two murderers were not the main beneficiaries of capitalist white supremacy, as Du Bois argues in Black Reconstruction, whiteness for them is nothing but a psychological wage – pride from weak fiction. Never given the world, defeated and arrogant from this fictional promise, the murderers took out their violence on who white supremacists continue to scapegoat — the alien, the foreign, the different in all its forms. 

What is Islamophobia?What does white supremacy fear about Islam, you wonder. What do they fear about you? 

You do not fear them because they did not create this world, though they act as if they rule it, and for that reason, they fear you. They fear you not as an individual, but as a representation of a nation forever forthcoming. As Ibrahim ibn Adham reportedly said, “if the kings and their sons knew what we experience of spiritual pleasure and happiness, they would fight us for it with their swords.” They fear that in your form, ibadah, values, and plentiful shades of several nations under one, that you can bring “the real world into being.” 

Yet, the real world after horrific moments begins to look more or less the same. 

There are several lethargic arguments that come to fruition in the aftermath of the public’s sleepy neglect; all trying to find reason behind the irrational. These arguments are cut from the same cloth: one will say there’s something wrong with American children, they are isolated, angry, online, and playing video games, because somehow an 18-year-old is only a child when white. They will then say that there needs to be gun regulation, even when confronted with a legal purchase; nothing about the failing culture and yet all in for regulating the results of it.

The other will say the community needs to adopt self-reliance, forget trust in the state, as the state is the trigger and the bystander. These online mourners want to prepare a community against an unidentified evil — preemptive and absolved by their writing and thinking. They, like you, like we, are too well read and a little daydreamy to ever do what we say the ‘community’ should do because we have no skill in it— strategists without organization.

Fanonian in our words. American in our actions.

As Ibrahim ibn Adham reportedly said, “if the kings and their sons knew what we experience of spiritual pleasure and happiness, they would fight us for it with their swords.” They fear that in your form, ibadah, values, and plentiful shades of several nations under one, that you can bring “the real world into being.”

 No plan, no strategy, no organization nor party loyalty, instead offering neoliberal individualism by repackaging trust in the private sector’s penetration of civil society as community fortification. Except, state abdication is not just a mentally or locally organized action, you cannot abdicate from the state while still existing in it. As Walter Rodney writes in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “…the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.” A liminal space reinforces its own fragility by obscuring the instrument— ultimately, a weakened treaty, a nonpeace, until violated.

Last, and loudest, are those wedded between the two poles of regulation and fortification. This group believes that we can moralize, shame, and somehow convince the sleepy public to see the value of our humanity — as if that was ever in question. This group leverages laws; hate crimes have higher penalties. This group leverages policy; they take your representative to dinner before backing their campaign. This group readied themselves for the media with a set of redundant calls for actions. This group has been bestowed by the state with a set of acknowledgements of their great power from degrees to donors. This group could perhaps leverage their power and networks to legitimize the worldbuilding of mourners, if they weren’t so comfortable with the validation they received and afraid of anything different in breadth.

These three distinct associations: (1) trust the political will of civil society to move the system to regulate evil, (2) abdicate from the system to establish a liminal space away from the state (3) and make civil society and the political system see us, so that evil cannot recuperate — no matter where you find yourself, perhaps a mix of all three, you’re experiencing your own case of whispering waswasa. To find sense or a pattern in the gaps of what is the breakdown of social trust and the reproduction of American Nazism each decade, you too think that there’s some logical set of actions to pull from this. And if reason was in the room with us, then perhaps there could be. When the people perpetuating such violence do not recognize it as a result of their own fabric, how can you reason with their irrational behavior?

You cannot strategize against evil without belief. 

Unlike the rest of the social media posts you see, there’s no one-size-fits all action suggested here. What you do know is that this country, like any state, benefits a select few, and if someone does not find themselves among the select few, they desperately attempt to join them or eradicate the scapegoat. 

You feel like a goat. That’s why you’re writing.

However, there’s a holiday commemorating a sacrifice coming up, and if that holiday teaches you anything, it is to trust that it is not your reason, but your belief in that: the reward for good is good (Q 55:60). 

You cannot strategize against evil without belief. 

Trying to do so leads to a spiritual burnout when it moves irrationally and with no logic behind its reason. Fanon states, “I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I. Out of the necessities of my struggle I had chosen the method of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational. And now how my voice vibrates!”

And did the voice reverberate, that of an elderly man, friends with those who were killed at the San Diego Islamic Center and closest to what occurred, when he smiled on camera and wished to have died as a martyr too because what is a more beloved sight to our Creator than defending the innocents — a guaranteed paradise. An irrational statement to those in disbelief, but the most reasonable reaction to living in a world without reason for those who trust Al-Wakeel, The Guardian, The Disposer of Affairs.

Will the lawyers, policy advocates, and online mourners ask this man what should be done next?

Are the living Muslims among us still aiming to become Mu’min? Are we reminded of the difference after what the martyrs have shown us?

And trust did vibrate in the men who rushed to save innocents, and teachers who shielded children. It was not quick thinking, but a reflex of their faith, devotion, and an embodied honor only Allah swt can bestow who saved lives. An irrational disposition to those whose thoughts freeze in the heat of the moment, but second nature to the devout. I cannot help but remember, “there exist other values that fit only my forms” and how these forms of ours, tawakul, our ibadah, defies the evil that perpetrators aim to spread. 

Are the living Muslims among us still aiming to become Mu’min? Are we reminded of the difference after what the martyrs have shown us? 

In the next few weeks, lawyers, mental health workers, and religious leaders will meet with impacted communities offering their support in rooms having difficult conversations. Policy advocates have one more case, another testimony, in a list of citations for a brief delivered to their representatives. Community organizers will also have an additional memory for their members to increase planning for the inevitable. Each treating this moment as an exogenous shock– a chance to exact new change – and with each shock comes change, and sometimes, that change means more or less the same thing. In between those moments, there will be a lot of analysis and noise too, media coverage until there’s none at all — and in the cycle of it all, you’ve written this reflection no one will have time to read, wondering if it’s safe to go to jummah this Friday. 

Shoulder to shoulder; feet to feet. 

Tawakkul ‘ala Allah

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