Q&A: Why are people on falsehood united and Muslims scattered?

Question: “Why are the forces of evil usually loud, somewhat united and confident and the forces of good usually scattered, silent and hesitant. Take an example of Kashmir. All these lgbtq, feminist, atheistic proponents usually share a stage and are well organized, at the same time funded and supported by institutions. But religious intellectuals scattered. I know a lot of people online and offline. If they come together, they can shake the foundations of evil. And common masses also follow where they see potential and power. There is something psychological about it. You should initiate something to unite the forces of good, intellectual warfare is already out there but our side isn’t putting up the fight or even willing to show up for a fight I have been offline from a lot of time but There is you, Ghabit Nabi, Umar Sofi, Poet of Photography, Waris al Harmain and more . Its time to share a stage or atleast come together on a podcast. We need to connect.”

Answer:

You are noticing a symptom that has wounded many sincere hearts before you. It looks as if the people of batil march in straight rows while the people of haqq are sitting in scattered tents, arguing about carpets. You see around the rainbow flags, the NGO panels, the “gender justice” seminars, the atheistic and feminist and LGBT currents sharing one mic, one funding source, one language. And on the other side, believing hearts who seem to be saying the same things yet cannot even agree on a shared room, let alone a shared project. Your question is not small; it touches, in my humble opinion, the metaphysics of our age.

First we must correct the picture. The Qur’an already described this spectacle: “You think they are united, but their hearts are scattered” (59:14). The apparent unity of falsehood is not because they love one another; it is because they share one god. Whether they call themselves feminist, Marxist, liberal, atheist, secular humanist, or simply “progressive,” their qiblah is one: the self deified, desire enthroned, dunya as ultimate telos. That one telos is enough to bind them on stages, in universities, in media houses, in NGO conferences. When your god is nafs, you can differ in slogans but agree in direction.

We, on the other hand, were given one qiblah, one Book, one Messenger ﷺ, and one metaphysic. Yet we appear scattered because we are living through an age in which the very conditions of knowing have been colonised. I have written and spoken extensively that the rising influence of Western ways enters us through “minuscule injections”, subtle drips that slowly alter our cognitive structures until even the believer starts thinking with borrowed categories. When those categories shift, religion becomes a private emotion, culture becomes an obstacle, and the public project becomes “development” and “rights”, not ‘ubudiyyah and akhirah. In such a world, even when Muslims stand “against” feminism or atheism, many of them use the same language of individualism, therapy, and self-assertion. The battlefield is already drawn by the enemy; we only show up as reactionaries.

This is why the forces of evil look confident and organised. Their epistemology is one. From kindergarten to PhD, the child is soaked in a worldview in which God is irrelevant at best and obstructive at worst. Education, as I have argued, has turned into an inoculation against transcendence; it teaches us not only what to think but how not to believe. The modern nation state, the media, the corporate world, the entertainment industry, Western embassies, and local NGOs are all different limbs of one civilisation. So of course they share a stage. They are many institutions, one soul.

On our side, the soul has been wounded. Not Islam, but the Muslim mind, the Muslim heart, the Muslim culture. The early Muslim generations built cultures, like Kashmiri culture, that were load-bearing walls for religion, transmitting adab, family roles, and metaphysical meaning through language, food, architecture, poetry, shrines, and family structures. When those walls are chipped away in the name of “modernisation”, and when their destruction is financed and celebrated, the religious intellectual today wakes up in ruins. He has no institutions, no patronage, no shared curriculum, no living hierarchy. All he has is a smartphone and a wounded conscience. Every man with an internet connection can declare himself da‘i, reformer, or “public intellectual”. The result is not unity but noise.

Add to that another disease I have often described as loss of adab: the levelling of all ranks so that the ignorant feel authorised to speak over the learned, the beginner feels entitled to correct the accomplished, the camera-owner feels equal to the ‘alim. This levelling is a direct fruit of modern skepticism and individualism: when doubt becomes your method, all authority looks suspicious and all hierarchy oppressive. In such an atmosphere, genuine scholars and tradition-rooted thinkers hesitate to share platforms with every loud voice that calls itself “Islamic”, not out of arrogance but out of fear that their presence will legitimise confusion in the minds of the youth. So part of the “silence” of the good is not cowardice; it is wara‘ – cautiousness about becoming a prop in someone else’s spectacle.

There is also something deeply spiritual in why the armies of falsehood are loud and the people of truth are often hesitant. Falsehood has no fear of God. It only fears losing power and comfort. That gives it a certain shameless boldness. The believer, if he truly knows his Lord, trembles when given a microphone. He knows he will be asked about every word, every influence, every youth whose trajectory he altered. So he pauses. He revises. He insists on nuance where the enemy only needs slogans. That makes him slower, and in a media age that worships speed, slowness is easily misread as weakness.

Now, bring this lens down upon our vicinity and the names you mention. In this valley, our people are being dragged through a single-generation collapse: family disintegrating, gender roles inverted, pop mysticism replacing Sufism, Netflix replacing folktale, NGO feminism replacing the ethics of Sheikh-ul-Alam. Into this chaos enter different voices: some Salafi, some reactionary, some half-therapeutic, some nationalistic. They say some true things: they criticise atheism, they speak against liberal excess, they call youth back from porn and drugs. For these fragments of truth, we are grateful. But they do not share a common metaphysical ground. One is shaped by YouTube anger and Pakistani reaction politics. Another by Saudi minimalism that uproots local Kashmiri turas – the whole living legacy we Muslims have inherited here, our fiqh, Sufi khānqahs, madrasas, du‘as, adab, family structure, poetry, proverbs, ways of remembering Allah, ways of burying our dead, ways of doing nikāh, all of this as it was shaped by Islam over centuries in this land. Another by Instagram poetics that have more to do with trauma discourse than with fiqh or tasawwuf. To call all of this “the forces of good” simply because they occasionally attack the same enemies is to make “enemy of my enemy” the new criterion for wala’ and bara’.

Unity in Islam is not putting all who shout “Islam” on one stage. Unity is tawhid made social. It requires shared aqeedah, shared epistemology, and respect for legitimate hierarchy. It requires that Islam not be reduced to a mood, an identity marker, or a political brand, but restored as the worldview from which everything else flows. When that foundation is missing, any call to “come together” is premature. It is like trying to tie different animals together on one cart; the rope becomes a torture device, not a means of travel.

You are right that “common masses follow where they see potential and power”. This is why I refuse to chase mere virality. If I share a stage with people who trivialise Kashmiri culture, who de-sacralise our shrines, who laugh at our elders as “grave worshipers”, or who smuggle in Sahil Adeem-style psychology and NGO-friendly liberalism under the name of Islam, I may gain numbers but I will lose the very foundation I am trying to defend. I would become one more talking head in a circus whose rules were written elsewhere. That would be a betrayal, not unity.

Yet you are also right to sense that something must be initiated, that intellectual warfare is underway and our side often refuses to even show up. Let us address this directly. First, we must not overestimate the unity of the other side. They share funding, language, institutional backing, and algorithms. What they do not share is truth, meaning, or inner tranquillity. Their alliances are tactical, not ontological. Today the atheist sits next to the “spiritual but not religious” Sufi-lite, next to the NGO feminist, next to the LGBT activist, next to the neoliberal economist. Each of them, if left alone, would deconstruct the other. But as long as there is Islam, family, and fitrah to be dismantled, they temporarily suspend their internal contradictions. This is not strength; it is desperation.

Second, do must not misunderstand what kind of unity we need. We do not need a grand podcast with all “Islamic content creators” in one room smiling for the camera. That may soothe our inferiority complex for one evening but it will not change the cognitive structures of our people. What we need is exactly what I have been advocating: the resuscitation of fitrah and the revival of religious sciences so that a true centre of gravity returns to Kashmiri Islam. That means rebuilding culture in sync with revelation, protecting our extended family, our adab, our shrines properly understood, our dress, our food, our language, not as folklore but as vehicles of meaning. And it means producing a generation trained in Qur’an, Hadith, fiqh, usul, tasawwuf, kalam, logic, rhetoric, and the social sciences, who can see through NGO jargon and atheist sophistry with ease.

Third, yes, there must be a voice, or a set of voices, that draws these threads together in the public square. A voice that is rooted, not reactionary; metaphysical, not merely political; Kashmiri in culture, Muhammadan in soul. I do believe that the project of revival is rhetorical as well as intellectual, and that a voice must rise which is unapologetically traditional yet conversant with the modern. I do not claim to be that voice in any absolute sense, but for now it seems to me that you and others have asked me to occupy that role in some measure. Your question has given kept me restless and I must say it clearly that I am open to working with people who do not fully share my framework, on the condition that cooperation is upon ma‘ruf, what Kashmiris collective consider acceptable, and that the terms are clear.

What does that mean in practice? It means I can sit in a room, even appear in a shared space, with someone who not only prays and affirms Qur’an and Sunnah, but whose basic project does not attack our heritage, does not smuggle in secular psychology as a replacement for the Prophetic vision of the soul, does not treat Kashmiri Islam as a disease to be cured, and does not make da‘wah out of anger and spectacle. With such a person, even if we disagree on some questions of Sufism, strategy, or secondary politics, we can coordinate on defending clear red lines: the sanctity of marriage, the protection of children from sexual confusion, the right to name haram what God has named haram. I will not demand that he becomes a copy of me before I speak to him, but I also refuse to decorate the stage for projects that deepen the very cognitive drawers I spend years critiquing. On any shared platform, I will say what I believe, respectfully but without disguise, and I will not soothe the listener with the lie that deep disagreements are cosmetic. The listeners deserve clarity, not choreography.

So to the specific picture you paint, “you, Ghabit Nabi, Umar Sofi, Poet of Photography, Waris al Haramain, and more” on one podcast, my answer must be more severe than polite. These currents, though they oppose some of the same enemies, often move within the same modernist frame: a Salafism that uproots Kashmiri heritage, a psychologism that replaces tazkiyah with therapy-talk, a reactionary culture-bashing that leaves the Muslim naked before the West. To stand beside them as a “team” is, in my view, to lend my little capital to a larger confusion. That is not unity upon truth; it is branding. I do not want to help normalise an ecosystem in which the very foundations I defend are constantly undermined with Islamic slogans. This does not mean I slam every door: I am open to private conversation, to principled cooperation with those whose core telos is restoration and the defence of our inheritance, even if we are not identical. But I will not join spectacles that turn the deen into content and make the valley’s youth choose between different flavours of the same disease. My principle remains: unite only where the foundations themselves are shared, speak openly where they are not, and refuse to turn Truth into a costume worn for the algorithm.

You talked about something “psychological”. Here is the deepest psychology I can offer: hearts were created to incline toward might and meaning together. If you show people only power without meaning, they eventually revolt. If you show them meaning without any visible strength, they become cynical. Our task is to restore jalal and jamal of Islam together. That will not happen by borrowing the NGO’s microphones, nor by hiding in our rooms sulking over YouTube. It will happen when homes become small fortresses of Islam again, when local circles study Imam Ghazali and Sheikh-ul-Alam instead of random Twitter threads, when masajid reclaim the role of teaching adab, and when some of us, however few, speak in public with yaqeen instead of apology.

You, my dear brother, are already part of this work by asking this question. Do not wait for ideal elders to unite perfectly before you move. Begin by guarding your own fitrah from those minuscule injections, media, content, friendships, that are bending your sense of what is normal. Help build or join small, serious circles of learning. Support, with whatever little you have, those voices that are rooted and not for sale. When such centres of gravity grow, something beautiful happens: the scattered sincere ones begin to orbit around a shared sun without any bureaucrat “uniting” them.

The forces of evil are loud because their god is noise. The people of truth often look scattered because they refuse to worship noise. Our task is not to imitate the enemy’s unity of slogans, but to restore our unity of telos: worship of God, preservation of fitrah, rebuilding of culture, revival of religious sciences. On that path, I am willing to walk even with those who do not fully resemble me, as long as we are walking toward Medina and not away from it.