THE DESTITUTE A DISCUSSION ON THE SPIRITUALITY OF POVERTY

The Destitute: A Discussion on the Spirituality of Poverty

By Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

Opening

"[Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings.]"

"[In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.]"

"[All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and blessings and peace upon the Messenger of Allah, and upon his family and companions and whoever is loyal to him.]"

The Empty Plinth and Modern Meaninglessness

We've strolled down the road recently to Trafalgar Square. You'll see that the empty plinth is empty no longer. You may recall that after the Napoleonic Wars, they erected images of various victorious generals and admirals and other worthies, and after the First World War, Edith Cavell was added, but there's one plinth that is empty, but empty no longer because a few months ago Boris Johnson unveiled the Cockerill.

Anybody seen the Cockerill? This is an enormous 20-foot high fiberglass blue Cockerill that stares myopically down Whitehall in the general direction of Westminster Abbey. The only nice thing about it is that it is a quite fetching ultramarine blue. Around it there's the usual tourists and children playing, but what there isn't is any indication of meaning.

It's by Katharina Fritsch, who's a reasonably well-known German sculptress, but what does it mean? We know what Admiral Nelson signified, what Jan Smut signified, what Edith Cavell signified, but what is this fiberglass Cockerill doing on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square?

Well of course, as anybody nowadays will tell you, it's there because we have nothing else to fill the plinth. The national imperial narrative is at an end, and the religious narrative which it replaced is certainly at an end, so we might as well fill the space with a fiberglass Cockerill. Why not? Does it signify anything? Well blue used to be the color of heaven, but of course not any longer.

Cockerills even used to indicate proclamation, enunciation, something new, but of course it doesn't mean that either. What it means, like everything else in modern art, is that meaning itself is at an end, and what we're doing is really enjoying the enormous free void that has been opened up by the departure of ontology, metaphysics, religion, ethics, everything that used to restrict and restrain us.

The End of the Enlightenment

This is an interesting time to be alive because it is a turning point probably more drastic than the Enlightenment itself. It's the end of the Enlightenment, we are post-Enlightenment now. The Enlightenment kicked God off the plinth and replaced him with human beings, our glorious selves. We were to be the measure of all things from the time of Hume through Diderot to Dolbach and Kant.

That was what modernity would be. To be modern was to be ungodly and to make man the measure of all things, but if what we have now is a fiberglass Cockerill, the Enlightenment surely is at an end. So what do we have? We have what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity.

Liquid Modernity

This is his new book, which many of you will have looked at, Culture in a Time of Liquid Modernity. He begins with Bourdieu's observation that culture used to be there in order to give people a sense of what class they belonged to. People would listen to opera to reassure themselves that they belonged to an elite. People would sing football songs to reassure themselves they belonged to the working class. That was the principal function of culture. It was about class.

Nowadays, however, in our time of liquid modernity, we don't really belong to classes any longer. We might go to the English National Opera one evening, but the next evening we'll go to a football match. We might have a pizza tonight, but tomorrow night we might go to string fellows and it's all mixed up together and that's the nature of what he calls liquid modernity.

That also is a sign of the end of the enlightenment paradigm. There is no more high culture or low culture. It's all mixed up together and the only thing that keeps it going is this extraordinary energy that has been unleashed by the absence of meaning.

The Modern Condition

That's a pretty enormous energetic void and we're all in this cauldron together, bubbling away, because it's really mobile. The late modern is really alive and technology keeps us literally mobile. There's a new phone every six months and we have to get it otherwise we're last year's men.

Everything is moving, but the only thing that keeps it moving is the fact that it's not going anywhere. We're not utopians any longer. We're no longer part of a story. We don't have a narrative, religious, national or class or anything any longer, but there's always something new and even when old stories are allowed to obtrude, they have been gutted, eviscerated, hollowed out. Russell Crowe as Noah for instance. Fine, you can make a million billion dollars out of it, but on condition that you take the meaning out, then it can be modern.

To be modern, to be successful, to be the object of participation in the modern or the liquid modern capitalistic process, you have to take out the meaning, you have to take out the eschatology, you have to take out the God bit of the Noah story and then you can fire up the synapses in the brain because what a great story.

The Muslim Response

That's where we are. That's the condition in which we as Muslims find ourselves as kind of spectators because to the extent that you're really Muslim or I guess Catholic, Jewish, something else, you can't jump into that cauldron and enjoy the fizzing and the bubbling of the thing that's constantly moving and that is trading on the absence of meaning and narrative.

You have to be a concerned spectator and that's our predicament. Everybody's saying, come in, it's great fun, there's nothing else going on, the cauldron is where it's at, be cool, but we're saying, well, no, we actually rather like having a narrative, having a story, having life after death, having meaning, having profits, and so there's this polemic. They can't stand us because we as Muslims are the ones who most conspicuously don't jump into it to join the party.

We're not very happy with it. We don't like the erosion of even fundamental aspects of identity. If anybody here has recently joined Facebook, you'll notice that even a few weeks ago, when you joined Facebook, you had to pick your gender and it was male or female. No longer. Now you get a choice of 50 different genders. Why? Because even the enormous corporate megastructure and power of Google and Facebook have to collapse when these new identity politicians have their say and so nobody can be offended and anybody can choose whatever sexuality or gender or fundamental human affiliation they might choose because that's part of being yourself.

The Crisis of Identity

We can't define the self any longer. We don't believe in the soul. We don't even believe in anything much that is selfhood. The neuroscientists continue to pick away at that, but still, be yourself, pick your gender. Muslims are not into that and that means that we are kind of orphans or concerned spectators and everybody is shouting at us for not playing the game, for not really believing in the game, but to the extent that we're believers in something higher, something within, we can't play that game.

The Economic Dimension: The End of the Gold Standard

This takes us on to the issue of economics which is a kind of parable for everything that's happening now. 1914 is the year which is referred to in Raphael's book as the time when this crisis was triggered. 1914, the beginning of the Great War, the beginning of the end of the old system. If you read for instance the autobiography of Osbert Sittwell who came of age in 1914 and how he recalls how everything changed so fundamentally.

The final sunlit summer of Edwardian England replaced by this incredible meat grinder, genocidal, efficient, industrial, nationalistic thing. That's when the old order really ended but it's also the year, not so many people were aware of this, when the gold standard started to crumble because Germany came off the fundamental transformation then at the beginning of the sort of genocidal mega conflicts of the 20th century because wars come and they go but we're still off the gold standard.

What does that mean? From a Sharia perspective it means that we are decentered, that meaning has gone, that there is no referentiality, that whereas once and you can see even the ancient Egyptians loved gold, it's axiomatic in all human cultures, the Aztecs, the Chinese, gold is there, it's the material of heaven because it's to do with sun just as silver is to do with the moon, it's to do with the cosmos itself.

The Nature of Modern Currency

Inherently valuable because not just because people like it but because it's inherently scarce and because it's untarnishable and has this incredible symbolic astral value. We come off it in 1914 and then America and England come off it and then you have Bretton Woods and the creation of this new world which again is kind of post enlightenment because here there is no measure of all things, instead money is what we think it is worth. Instead it's all fiduciary, it's all smoke and mirrors.

How do I know that this five note in my pocket is worth five pounds? Well it's not worth an equivalent amount of gold intrinsically although I could exchange it for gold if I wanted but it's not linked to gold any longer, it's just because the banks are telling me that it's worth five pounds and even that as you can see fluctuates and it's the forex exchanges and money, it's kind of a very brittle thing, it's the essence of what the modern world is about.

Bitcoin and Virtual Currency

So the end point of this, 100 years after that beginning of the end of the gold standard, we have things like Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin? Well you have to take it seriously, you can even go online to Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic website and buy a ticket to go to outer space paying entirely with Bitcoin so it's real on some level and it's capitalized, I don't know, over a billion dollars, it's real but what is it? You can't even touch it, at least I can console myself by touching the five pound note in my pocket and knowing that I can take a bus home but Bitcoin, it doesn't exist at all and it comes and it goes and it its value is as volatile as the system has to be when it's not linked to anything real, anything tangible in the real world of scarce minerals, it's just somebody's story, it means whatever the market thinks that it means.

So as it were a pun from Fort Knox, we go to Mount Gox, Mount Gox is this biggest for Bitcoin exchanges which collapsed recently and just discovered that somebody had hacked its virtual site and all of the Bitcoins have been stolen and so we've got an email saying sorry your pension has gone and Bitcoin doesn't actually exist in any legal world because it's not the national currency of any country so it's gone, it's gone.

The Instability of Modern Economics

The economy now is in a very weird situation because after the collapse which was really a classic kind of river bubble in the noughties when the subprime mortgage racket in America was finally exposed, getting really poor Americans into catastrophic levels of debt just so that you could bundle these toxic debts and sell them on the stock exchange, horrible stuff, hundreds of billions were lost and so banks collapsed and governments had to step in by getting money from where? Not from gold and silver, the Bank of England in London down the road is still sitting on bars of gold but they didn't get it from there, they got it from kind of inventing money, quantitative easing, printing money, the Fed prints 55 billion dollars worth every month and they say oh we've made more money, here it is and of course the stock market goes up and the standard and poor 500 goes up 23 percent even though real incomes are not increasing and inflation is there but still strange, a bubble built on the back of a bubble.

The Quranic Response to Economic Instability

This is where revelation comes in and why Muslims are not like those who do not know. The Quran says this in a very discriminatory way, let's be frank about it:

"[Are those who know equal to those who do not know?]"

Our economics has to be rooted ultimately in the naqdain, gold and silver which have intrinsic scarcity and this kind of boom bust mad speculative cycle, human greed, building and building castles in the air until it collapses again and usually it's the poor old bus collector who doesn't know what's going on, who loses his money because he doesn't get out in time, usually the weak, the poor who suffer most in times of economic collapse and the elites have salted away their gold stocks somewhere in Zurich and they're all like a horribly iniquitous system, is getting worse and worse but the prophetic model is not that.

The Spiritual Response to Material Uncertainty

What I'm saying is that if you have access to revelation and you do believe in the ultimate gold standard, you do believe that values are not just relative in this smoke and mirrors world which modernity has created for itself, but are rooted in absolute principles, discernible albeit sometimes with a lot of argument through revelation, then you're not playing that game at all and when there's a crisis you will have some sort of stability.

Look at those poor souls who sunk all of their pension money into bitcoins only to get the email from mount gox in tokyo saying sorry but somebody's pinched all the bitcoins and there's no court that has jurisdiction and you're out of luck, now the one who believes only in the smoke and mirrors of dunya in this fiduciary system who believes in the fundamental presumption of modernity which is that human worth is to be measured on the basis of earning power is going to be shattered, suicide rates always mount when there's a recession.

But what about the person who has tawakkul and who believes in (تِجَارَةً لَّن تَبُورَ - tijaratan lan taboor) who accepts this extraordinary ironic deconstruction that we find in the quran of mercantile language to refer to the really important transaction, din means a transaction which is not human beings being greedy with each other and but paying their taxes but means instead human beings acknowledging that they have a source and an author and a designer to whom they are accountable and before whom they will appear.

The True Measure of Worth

Who is not going to ask us well how many bitcoins we have, you can be pretty sure you don't need to find the explicit dalil in the quran and the sunnah but you're not going to be asked how many bitcoins you have in your wallet at the yawm al qiyamah it's not an issue, instead we're old-fashioned and archaic enough to say that it's human quality that matters, excellence of soul, fada'il.

"[The Day when neither wealth nor children will benefit [anyone], except one who comes to Allah with a sound heart.]"

What counts at that point, the incredible wrinkle at the end of time when time itself stops and things become clear at last, what happens at that point is the qalb salim is what counts, if the heart is sound, full of dignity, sacrifice, duty, patience, compassion, the traditionalist averts you, basically you're all right and that's what the believer aspires to even if you've lost all of your pension thanks to the wizards at mount gox, it doesn't matter so that's the certainty that diana, that religiosity gives.

The Relevance of Religion in Modern Times

That's why religion is not less relevant but more relevant in times such as our crazy times, times of liquid modernity where everything is whizzing about and there's no settled narrative for anything, where human beings are constantly being buffeted by powerful winds and we need some sort of reassurance and the only real assurance the heart craves is that there is hope, that there is meaning, that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that light is (نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ - noorul samawati wal ard), light of the heavens and the earth.

The Virtue of Tawakkul

So instead what do we need we need this virtue of tawakkul that is the only alternative to the kind of prozac fueled anxiety culture which is increasingly oppressing humanity and the muslim world as well let's not moralize about that muslim world is also freaked out by this thing and there are big modern art museums in the gulf and elsewhere one hopes that they're patronizing modern art because they understand what it is in other words it's an extraordinarily powerful denunciation of what happens to the soul when it loses touch with meaning.

The True Investment

Well a final moral point if you want to put it in a really safe investment our stocks and shares who knows quantitative easing is going to taper and maybe not that gold well it's low at the moment in about gold property well it's a bubble where should i put it simple nasiha put it in the only bank that's never going to fail which is the sadaqah bank how about that give it that's the message of zakat and sadaqah give it and give it and give it and then you can be sure that you'll get your dividends at the end of life after retirement which is longer than retirement itself actually if you think about it that's where we should be investing.

And that's another of the counter-cultural and strange things about our economic system which is that we factor tithes and alms giving and charitable giving into the whole system more axiomatically than any other civilization does.

Conclusion

So this is an important book thinking about the meaning of the measure of our wealth is something that we need to do and de-essentializing and as it were de-idolizing money which is the great measure of everything in today's world is something that we really need to do you don't even need to be particularly theological to see that in itself it's not something that's worth anything any longer.