The Catastrophe of One Generation: A Cultural Holocaust in the Making

The generation born in the 1980s and 1990s stands as a fragile bridge between a world lost and a world looming – a generation that did not merely encounter modernity, but was engulfed by it. They are now raising children without being raised themselves by a living tradition. These men and women, now parents, were the first to be shaped not by awraad fatiha, but by Shahrukh Khan, Honey Singh, Enrique Iglesias, and the algorithmic chaos of social media feeds. The names of their childhood are not those of saints or scholars, but of actors, influencers, and unanchored ideologues.

Raised in nuclear homes away from the hearths of grandmothers whispering Quranic lullabies, away from the dargahs, the village masjids, and the rituals of remembrance, they were instead educated by university syllabi soaked in Marxism, feminism, skepticism, and the pseudoscientific cult of progress. Their exposure was not an encounter but a replacement. They did not sit in circles of dhikr but in seminars of deconstruction. And now, they are raising the next generation – one whose moral compass is calibrated not by haq and batil, but by what offends or pleases the algorithm.

This rupture is not gradual; it is catastrophic. In merely one generation, the entire semantic framework of our society is getting shifted. When a Kashmiri child once asked, “What is good?” the answer lay in the gestures of an elder, in the adab of seating, in the rhythm of prayer, in the smell of wazwan prepared on a wedding day with barakat. Today, when the same question is asked, the answer comes from a YouTuber, a Netflix script, or a shallow TED talk, echoing “follow your truth” – a concept alien to the Islamic metaphysical reality.

This generation does not know what it has lost because it was never taught what it meant to have. This is what can be called “epistemological severance” – not just ignorance, but the inability to even recognise what knowledge once meant. It is not the decay of knowledge but the death of the very structures through which knowledge was once possible. If the cognitive structures change, all meaning, as was understood once, is lost.

Miniscule Injections: How a Civilization is Dismantled Without Firing a Bullet

The destruction did not come with tanks or armies. It came with “miniscule injections” – subtle, invisible, potent. These were ideological viruses, carried through lyrics, sitcoms, “neutral” university textbooks, and NGO-sponsored workshops. Ideas such as “question everything,” and “live your truth” entered uncritically, not as subjects of study, but as axiomatic truths. This is what Antonio Gramsci foresaw and what I affirm: hegemony is cultural before it is political, that is, a people are first made to accept new values and ways of seeing the world through everyday symbols, media, education, and norms, long before any formal laws or political revolutions occur. Once the culture submits, the politics naturally follows.

These “miniscule injections” worked not by direct confrontation with religion, but by first dismantling its shield – culture. Culture was mocked, stripped naked, and reduced to backwardness. When the daughter stopped wearing pheran because it was “uncool,” and the son stopped kissing his grandfather’s hand because it was “creepy,” it was not just a fashion change, it was the tearing apart of symbolic continuity, the beginning of nihilism. And when culture is stripped, religion lies vulnerable, naked in the storm, unable to speak its language, because its language was culture.

The most damning tragedy is that this new generation considers its rebellion to be Islamic. By rejecting “cultural” Islam, they claim to defend the “real” Islam – stripped of its rituals, its adab, its beauty, and its memory. This is a false dichotomy. There is no Islam without its cultural clothing. Culture is not a mask but a manifestation. What Shariah teaches in theory, culture enacts in practice. Modern Muslims now bend religion to their whims or abandon it when it cannot be bent. One by one, the institutions of Islam become hollow: the masjid becomes an event hall for nikah ceremonies, nikah a contractual formality, Hajj a holiday package. And worst of all, family – the first madrasa, the primary transmitter of Islam crumbles.

Once the backbone of our moral and spiritual ecosystem, family is now another casualty of individualism. The shift from extended to nuclear families is the removal of a load-bearing wall. Without grandmothers, uncles, and cousins living in the same space, the child is left alone to be educated by devices and institutions hostile to Islam. The transmission of adab, taqwa, and communal responsibility ends. Parents themselves, formed by nihilistic institutions, cannot give what they never received. The very foundations of maqasid al-shari’ah, the preservation of religion, self, reason, lineage, and wealth, stand violated when the family dies. And feminism, under its extremist avatars, hastens this death by deconstructing the roles that held families together.

The Catastrophe of One Generation: Part II – The Symptoms of Collapse

When a society severs its roots from fitrah, the collapse is not a silent disappearance but a loud and agonizing implosion. Let us now see how the epistemological rupture, cultural discontinuity, and familial disintegration now manifest, visibly, measurably, in the neuroses and crises of modern life: mental illness, alienation, gender chaos, and spiritual simulacra masquerading as mysticism.

When the family collapses, the self collapses. Mental illness is not just a personal affliction; it is a social commentary. The World Health Organization reports a 25% increase in anxiety and depression globally since the pandemic. But for the Muslim world, this isn’t just fallout, it is culmination. The self, as defined in traditional Islam, is not autonomous but relational, it is nafs, tempered and trained through communal life, worship, and submission. The Qur’an declares, “Verily, in the remembrance of God do hearts find rest” (13:28). What then when remembrance is replaced by notifications, and dhikr by dopamine?

The Quranic model of wellness is holistic: the mind, body, and soul are in harmony when aligned with divine purpose. In contrast, the modern secular mental health model isolates man as a bio-chemical machine whose angst is to be medicated, not understood. The tragedy is worse in our Muslim youth, who have inherited neither the stability of tradition nor the clarity of modernity. Their anxiety is not due to a single trauma but due to a shattered worldview. It is not sadness but soullessness. Suicidal ideation, even in Muslim-majority societies, has risen sharply. Studies across South Asia show increasing cases of depression among youth, particularly among those detached from religious practice and familial support. They are not depressed because they are poor. They are depressed because they are purposeless.

Social Alienation: Disconnected from Roots, Disoriented in Life

Alienation is the lived experience of cultural collapse. It is when a Kashmiri child in Srinagar speaks better English than Kashmiri and knows Taylor Swift but not Lal Ded. Alienation is when a man no longer speaks the language of his father’s house. It is the psychological pain of detachment from the symbols, rituals, and shared stories that made existence coherent. Marx called alienation the detachment of man from the product of his labor. But what we now face is worse, the detachment of man from his own being.

This alienation manifests in three distinct forms:

1. Temporal Alienation: Modernity makes us live in the “now” – devoid of tradition (past) or telos (future). There is no continuity, only immediacy. A society without memory is a society that cannot mourn, cannot repent, cannot correct itself.
2. Relational Alienation: The nuclear family, as we saw earlier, isolates rather than connects. Urban migration, secular education, and feminism have eviscerated the extended family. Men are not men anymore, because there are no fathers. Women do not know womanhood, because there are no mothers. The elderly rot in homes; the young grow up in rooms lit by blue screens.
3. Ontological Alienation: A being disconnected from his purpose is not just lost—he is dangerous. He seeks not to reform the world but to set it on fire to feel its warmth.

Gender Confusion is the next battleground: When Essence Is Denied, Chaos Reigns

If man is a being with no essence, only desires, then gender becomes a costume. That is the epistemology of secular liberalism. Once you destroy the notion of fitrah, gender follows suit. And the initial symptoms of this you see in clothing our young choose to wear – the gender neutral clothing. The Quran says: “And He created the pair, the male and the female” (53:45). But to the modern mind, even this verse is offensive. Gender confusion is not a biological issue – it is philosophical. It arises from the same idea that the self is not something given, but something constructed, if this construction is applied elsewhere why not here? This idea, popularised by Judith Butler and radical gender theorists, is now injected via schools, cartoons, and NGO pamphlets into the veins of Muslim societies.

This generation is migrating, it is doing its hijra. But the hijra of this generation is not towards Madinah, but towards moral ambiguity. In Muslim schools, gender-neutral pronouns are being introduced. In homes, parents are not imposing gender roles. The function of masculinity, to protect, to provide, to lead, is pathologised in every second Clubhouse room and Twitter space and frequent op-eds. The function of femininity, to nurture, to preserve, to beautify, is vilified. The result is confusion: boys who are passive, girls who are aggressive, families where roles are reversed, marriages that are collapsing, and a society that cannot reproduce itself.

Having destroyed religion, the modern man now wants its comfort without its discipline. This is where Pop Culture Mysticism emerges—a grotesque hybrid of spirituality, consumerism, and self-worship. Instagram gurus, “spiritual influencers,” meditation apps, and Sufi aesthetics sold at lifestyle stores, these are not pathways to God but products for consumption. The rise of “wellness” is a compensation for the death of worship. The prayer mat is replaced by other mats, salah by “mindfulness.” This mysticism is a mirror, its only god is the self. There is no fana, only fashion. No Shariah, only vibes. No discipline, only hashtags. It is a desecration of tradition masquerading as transcendence. True mysticism, as embodied by Sheikh-ul-Alam, by Imam Ghazali, by Rumi, is a painful journey of surrender. Pop mysticism is a sugar-coated denial of that path.

One Generation to Annihilation: The Catastrophic Clock Is Ticking

This is not gradual degeneration, it is a single-generation collapse. A child born today in a modern Kashmiri Muslim household, raised by parents who are products of Netflix, NGO feminism, atheist professors, and post-colonial guilt, will never even see Islam as a worldview. He might fast, but for health. He might give zakah, but for tax relief. He might marry, but like a business contract. What does Islam mean in a home where the language of religion is gone, the symbols are gone, the family is broken, the gender is fluid, the self is anxious, and the sacred has been sold? What will the next generation inherit? Nothing but fragments. Religion becomes nostalgia, not conviction. Culture becomes kitsch, not continuity. Morality becomes opinion, not order.

The Catastrophe of One Generation: Part III — The Philosophy of Resuscitation

Let us now pivot from the storm of critique to the architecture of solution. For no house is built upon lament alone. Let us now outline the philosophical core of the only viable way forward, only being the key word, the resuscitation of fitrah and the revival of religious sciences. These are not two separate paths, but one highway bifurcated by time and addressed to two domains — the heart and the intellect. We are not battling confusion with charisma, nor chaos with comfort. We are battling a fundamental metaphysical distortion — a reprogramming of the human being away from what he is into what he wants to be. It is a perversion of ontology, a mutilation of epistemology, and a betrayal of teleology.

Fitrah: The Ontological Anchor

In Islam, fitrah is not a cultural artifact; it is the essential ontology of the human being. It is the divine programming that tells man what is good, what is beautiful, what is true. The Prophet ﷺ said, “Every child is born on the fitrah. It is his parents that make him a Jew, a Christian or a Magian.” This tells us, at least, three things:

1. Fitrah is universal: it predates culture, but it also manifests through culture. The Hadith asserts that every child, without exception, is born upon fitrah – this universality is ontological, not contingent. But the fact that parents can alter it shows that fitrah is meant to be actualized through lived culture and upbringing. Culture, therefore, becomes the vehicle, not the creator, of fitrah.
2. Fitrah is formative: it is not merely a passive state but a potentiality that must be nurtured. The transformation into a Jew, Christian, or Magian is not predetermined; it is the result of social conditioning. This implies that while fitrah is innate, its realization depends on the formative influence of one’s environment—especially the parents as primary educators.
3. Fitrah is fragile: it is susceptible to corruption by ideological deviation. The ease with which the child can be made into something else indicates that fitrah, while divinely imprinted, is vulnerable to being overlaid or suppressed by false doctrines and deviant ideologies. The natural state can be concealed, if not obliterated, by systemic miseducation.

In contrast to Western existentialism (Sartre, Camus), which argues that existence precedes essence, Islam asserts: essence precedes existence. You do not create yourself. You discover yourself — through submission to the Truth that precedes you. This divine essentialism, as also visible in above quoted Hadith, contradicts all of modernity’s philosophical foundations:

• Against materialism, it asserts metaphysical reality. While materialism reduces the human being to biochemical processes and survival instincts, fitrah asserts that man is born with a soul oriented toward the transcendent – a divine imprint that seeks truth, beauty, and goodness beyond material explanation. The Hadith affirms a precultural spiritual essence that cannot be reduced to evolutionary biology or economic utility.
• Against skepticism, it asserts epistemic certainty through wahi (revelation). Where skepticism endlessly questions all sources of knowledge and denies final truths, Islam grounds certainty in wahi, a revelation that aligns perfectly with the fitrah. The Hadith’s implication that children are innately disposed towards the truth, but led astray by external influences, supports the idea that certainty (yaqeen) is not only possible, but natural until corrupted.
• Against feminism and individualism, it asserts divine role, not chosen identity. Fitrah dictates that roles, responsibilities, and moral orientations are divinely structured, not constructed by personal whim or social consensus. Feminism’s rejection of gender roles and individualism’s emphasis on self-definition are undermined by the Hadith, which attributes changes in the child’s identity to external deviations, not internal authenticity. Man becomes corrupted when he tries to invent himself, rather than uncover who he already is.
• Against nihilism, it asserts ma’na (meaning), rooted in telos. The Hadith affirms that every child is born with a direction, a telos, towards which he is naturally inclined. Nihilism, by contrast, declares that life has no inherent meaning or purpose. Islam, through the concept of fitrah, refutes this: it insists that meaning is not constructed in despair, but discovered in submission. Man’s purpose is not to invent meaning, but to remember it.

Cognitive Structures and Semantic Worlds

Fitrah does not float in the air; it is incarnated in culture. Meaning is not preserved merely by memorising vocabulary but by sustaining the semantic architecture that gives those words significance. This is why I insist that the erosion of culture is the erosion of religion. Culture is not decorative, it is cognitive scaffolding. Take the example of Salam: it is not merely a greeting but a metaphysical statement, a recognition of peace, of God’s Name “As-Salaam”, of non-aggression, of kinship, and trust. When a child learns “Hello” instead, a world dies. The epistemology of peace is replaced by the syntax of individualism.

Reviving fitrah, therefore, requires reviving the conditions of meaning — a reinstitution of the world that Islam built:

• Symbols
• Gestures
• Language
• Roles
• Space
• Sound

Every manifestation must reflect metaphysical truth.

The Revival of Religious Sciences: Epistemic Rectification

The collapse we are witnessing is not merely moral — it is epistemological. Modern education systems do not just teach content; they teach how to know. The method itself is secularised. When biology teaches you that life has no purpose, when sociology teaches you that religion is just social conditioning, when economics assumes selfishness as axiomatic, then you are not learning about the world, you are learning how not to believe. You are being trained to reduce awe to accident, ethics to utility, and tradition to myth. You are taught to interrogate belief but never interrogate doubt. The sacred is deconstructed, but skepticism is canonized. In this way, education becomes not a search for truth but an inoculation against it. It systematically disables the mind from seeing metaphysical realities, turning every why into a how, and every purpose into process.

Thus the second pillar of revival is the restoration of the Islamic epistemology — through the revival of religious sciences, grounded not only in texts, but in their metaphysical assumptions. This revival must be:

• Rooted in Ilm (sacred knowledge), not just academic information.
• Structured by the Uloom (traditional disciplines): Fiqh, Aqeedah, Tafsir, Usul, Kalam.
• Supported by secular sciences as tools: logic, grammar, rhetoric, but with the ultimate aim of serving haqq, not relativism.
• Defensive against ideologies masquerading as knowledge — sociology without God is not sociology; psychology without soul is pathology.

Just as Imam Ghazali saw the threat of Greek rationalism in his time and built a citadel through Ihya’ ʿUloom al-Din, our age demands a new Ghazalian effort — against secular epistemologies and postmodern dogmas.

Restating the Purpose of Life: Telos Must Be Made Visible

No revival is possible unless the telos of life, the purpose for which man exists, becomes the dominant discourse. Not in academic journals, but in every drawing room, every social media feed, every khutbah, every novel, every sitcom if needed. The language of ‘ubudiyyah, of surrender to the Divine, of akhirah as real, of jannah as the destination must be reinstated as default consciousness. This is the only antidote to the disease of nihilism. And this resuscitation of the correct idea of being can take place only through the restatement of the Purpose of Life as promulgated by the Messenger of God (saw)

In other words: Islam must again be the Worldview, not a subset of private belief. The public imagination must be recaptured. And this can only happen if Islamic metaphysics is made mainstream, not as dogma, but as demonstrable truth.

From Reform to Resurrection

Modern attempts at reform, even by well-meaning traditionalists, fail because they accept the terms of modernity. They play defence. They apologise. They compromise. What we need instead is resurrection, not renovation. The terms of the debate must be changed. We must argue from certainty, not conciliation. Let me repeat the twin pillars:

1. Revival of Fitrah — reclaiming the human soul through ontology.
2. Revival of Religious Sciences — restoring truth through epistemology.

Together they form the bedrock of any serious civilisational restoration of Muslims.

The Catastrophe of One Generation: Part IV — From Philosophy to Praxis

If we have sufficiently diagnosed the catastrophe and philosophically anchored the solution, we are now morally bound to act. Action is not merely the consequence of knowing, it is the validation of knowing. In Islam, ‘ilm (knowledge) is always tethered to ‘amal (action). The Prophet ﷺ was not sent as a philosopher, but as a living embodiment of the Truth. In fact part of knowing is acting. For knowledge in the Islamic paradigm is not mere cognition or intellectual assent, it is recognition that demands submission. True knowledge transforms; it does not rest idle in the mind but manifests in the limbs, in choices, in speech. To know God and not prostrate is not knowledge, it is rebellion disguised as awareness, it is kufr. In this view, action is not secondary to knowledge but one of its limbs. To know is to move.

Ours, therefore, cannot just be a call for cosmetic activism, but a civilizational response rooted in the principles of philosophy propounded above. It is a summon to the defenders of fitrah, the revivers of culture, the guardians of tradition, the last sentinels of Islam. I will now lay out the necessary structural, educational, cultural, and intellectual initiatives needed to stem the collapse and breathe life into our moribund society.

I. Rebuilding the Epistemic Infrastructure: Curricula, Institutions, and Intelligentsia

The foremost task is to dismantle the Western epistemic monopoly. This requires nothing short of a counter-intellectual revolution.

1. Establish Traditionalist Learning Hubs

We need institutions that are not hybrid madrasa-university compromises but centres of resistance against the western monopoly. Their core curriculum must be:

• Philosophy not to replace revelation but to defend it.
• Quran, Hadith, Usul al-Fiqh, Tafsir, Kalam.
• Logic (Mantiq), Grammar (Nahw, Sarf), Rhetoric (Balagha).
• History and anthropology through Islamic lenses.
• Psychology with the soul at the centre.
• Islamic Art and Literature

These centres must train a new class of scholars, not just imams, but thinkers, poets, scientists who speak the language of tradition with fluency in the tools of modernity.

2. Purify Curricula from Secular Contamination

Modern schooling must be interrupted. Replace:

• History that glorifies revolutions with history that honors prophets and civilizations.
• Sociology that deconstructs gender with sociology that shows the family as divinely ordained.
• Literature that pushes nihilism with poetry that feeds longing for the eternal.

This will require scholars to step out of ivory towers and begin writing textbooks, designing syllabi, training teachers.

II. Rebuilding the Cultural Environment: Memory, Symbols, and Family

Culture is the memory of a people. To revive fitrah, we must revive the grammar of daily life that encodes metaphysical truths.

1. Protect and Re-sacralize the Family

Family is not a private arrangement, it is a public theology. It must be re-centered in public policy, in moral education, in cultural representation.

• Support extended family systems through housing, welfare, and social policy, and do this, at least in the discourse first.
• Discourage individualistic living.
• Promote arranged marriage systems rooted in compatibility, not lust or liberal notions of “love.”
• Remove divorce propaganda from media, celebrate endurance, not breakup.

Let us reintroduce rites of passage: birth ceremonies, khatm, grand wedding dawats with wazwan, not as rituals, but as transmissions of being.

2. Restore the Aesthetic Environment

Children must grow up seeing beauty that affirms Islam:

• Islamic calligraphy on walls, not abstract modernism.
• Azaan heard in neighborhoods, not silenced.
• Traditional clothing reinstated as symbols of honor.
• Music that soothes the soul, not excites the ego, rabab, not rap.

These are not superficial matters. They are cognitive signals through which meaning is encoded. Architecture, soundscape, and dress are semantic technologies. Fitrah must be cultured through them.

III. Building the Voice: Why Sull Kaak Must Rise

The project of revival is not just intellectual or cultural. It is rhetorical. It needs a voice. That voice must be neither apologetic nor revolutionary, but rooted, rooted like an ancient tree yet blooming with the freshness of tomorrow. That voice is Sull Kaak. Why?

• Because a Sull Kaak is not diluted by academic neutrality. A Sull Kaak call kufr what is kufr.
• Because a Sull Kaak does not speak as an individual, but as a representative of a living metaphysical tradition.
• Because a Sull Kaak bridges the traditional and the contemporary, not hybridise them, but arrange them in hierarchy, like body to soul.
• Because a Sull Kaak does not aim to reform Islam, but to restore its place as the reformer of man.

Thus, the supporters of this revival must support a voice like mine:

• Amplify it through academic publishing.
• Embed it in think tanks.
• Translate it into local languages.
• Make it accessible to youth through media, films, and forums.
• Share my work in groups.
• Make monetary contributions towards my work.

IV. The Individual’s Role: What Every Muslim Must Do

This is not a project for institutions alone. The revival begins with you.

1. Re-cultivate Your Home:
   • Make your home an Islamic space – physically, aesthetically, spiritually.
   • Read classical texts aloud. Introduce awraad. Teach your children not just rules but the meanings.
   • Lead by example, traditions are lived not read.
2. Form Local Intellectual Circles:
   • Study Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din. Organize Friday evening majalis. Create spaces like The Khanqah. Join my reading rooms or my YouTube.
3. Support Those Who Can Speak:
   • If you cannot speak or write, then support financially, morally, and institutionally those who can.
   • Donate to traditionalist academies. Share works like mine. Push back against NGO-funded initiatives that corrode religion.
4. Build Parallel Alternatives:
   • Alternative schooling, alternative arts, alternative economics.
   • Don’t fight in enemy territory. Build your own forts.

We do not need new slogans. We need a new soul—not manufactured, but rediscovered. That soul lies buried under the rubble of modernity, awaiting its unearthing. This generation may be the last to remember but it can be the first to resurrect. But only if it acts now. I do not offer you salvation, I offer you the grammar of salvation. I do not ask to be followed, I ask that you follow the thread of your own fitrah back to the Source.

If enough of us remember, resist, and rebuild, we will no longer be a forgotten people. We will become once again a remembered Ummah. May Allah give us the courage to not merely believe but to build. “And do not be like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves.” (59:19)

This is the beginning. Not the end.