“Misbelief”
Where are we and what to do?
Muslim religious institutions no longer have the means to remedy this misbelief, which sometimes degenerates into terrorist acts killing innocent people all over the world. We are not talking about the former atheists of Saddam Hussein’s former army, converted into international organized crime and become drug traffickers and mercenaries of death and who are at the head of DAESH.
There are minds in the Muslim community who have a belief, even if it involves believing in the filthy, and who cannot, if we analyze the psychology of this new form of religious distortion, be an ordinary belief but quite simply an inversion that we have called “misbelief”.
Let us say summarily that belief is the principle of knowledge, it is “the first condition of reason”; according to us it is not reason “which is the foundation of belief”. For us, belief is “the action of the self on things.” It is real, total and lived knowledge. Belief is “the possession of things by the self, the union of the self with things. (…) True knowledge, personal knowledge and not imitated.”
We first need a knower who first posits his own person as acquired; he therefore needs an apperception, he must believe above all in his own reality before knowing things. Before knowing, man must believe in his own existence and in his own sensory and intellectual capacities.
Belief is therefore much more fundamental than knowledge. We will have to come back to all this in order to devote a separate study to it. From what has just been said, we easily understand that a good part of Muslim youth cannot have a belief in the sense of foundation of knowledge since there is a loss of self. , a misunderstanding of one’s being, to the point of seeking to annihilate oneself as a being through suicide.
A good number of mosques in France have, and this is the sign of the times, become purely and simply propagators (often despite themselves) of “misbelief”. Hence the absolute necessity of an outline of the psychology of this “misbelief” in order to remedy the evil of this new century. The task is difficult and perilous.
If we want, for example, to revive Islamic theology, the work is so gigantic that it brings despair to the most courageous among us. When we find ourselves in front of the “magnum opus” of Imam al Acha’ri, of Nasr-Dine al Tusi, of Imam al Jubba’i, of Ghazali, of Juwayni, of Imam al Razi or a Baqillani, it is enough to be dizzying for those who know these “giants” of Islamic theological work.
It is not enough to go before the media to repeat one’s mantras saying that “we must thaw the ideological glaciations” or “come out of dogmatic fences”; It’s so simple to say but so difficult to do. It takes on the part of the daring revitalizer a certain genius and a knowledge that is both real and profound of Muslim theologies still operative today despite effective obsolescence.
If we now turn to the most effective discipline despite its relative obesity, which is jurisprudence (fiqh), the building is even larger given its volume, which means the work that awaits us. Finally, if we enter the abode of Sufism to try to breathe into it its original momentum, we are on the threshold of discouragement, because it is the bottomless ocean before which we dare not dive for fear of not returning.
Those who say on television sets – “all we have to do is reform Islam” – without really knowing the immensity of the task are at best “false prophets” and at worst liars. Also, one may wonder if there are men in France courageous enough to take on the task? Will we have in the French Muslim community a Maurice Blondel, a Gaston Berger or a Michel Henry to come in order to continue the work initiated by Iqbal, Topçu, Draz and others?
Hakim FEDAOUI
