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Counter Currents – Generational Trauma & Toxic Families
I A sincere question stands before us: How do we live after inheriting wounds we did not choose, parents at war with themselves, with each other and with us, homes that taught fear before trust, patterns that seem to pass like blood from one generation to the next? We are told to “heal,” to “set boundaries,” to “break cycles,” and many try; yet the attempt often collapses into exhaustion. People ask, almost whispering, what if we fail again? What if what they did to us is already deciding what we will do to our children? How are we do come out of this circle of “trauma”? While we face these…
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Our Culture – Part 6 – The Road to Medina
Blueprints inspire, but blueprints alone do not pour concrete, assemble councils, or season the first vat of shūrba. Having envisioned the khanqāh’s spine, its architecture, governance, curriculum, economy, and digital nervous system, we must now pivot from the aerial view to ground-level logistics. How does a handful of families, graduates, or concerned professionals move from rented prayer-room to self-sustaining waqf compound? What sequence of legal filings, funding milestones, pilot programmes, and talent recruitment keeps vision ahead of bureaucracy yet prevents zeal from outrunning capacity? The following roadmap charts that incremental journey, mapping each stage to the very drawers we seek to replant, service before spectacle, transparency before scale, and shared…
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Our Culture – Part 5 – A Reform that Works
Our diagnosis has cut from surface symptom to civilisational marrow, tracing how borrowed curricula, market logics, and algorithmic moods have rewired the very drawers that once made Qurʾān, fiqh, and lived mercy click into place. The catalogue of fashionable reforms, liberal, literalist, technocratic, commodified, statist, showed that none rebuilds the habitat where revelation breathes as self-evident guidance. We therefore turn, at last, from critique to construction. Part V sketches a contemporary khanqāh: not a museum of bygone piety but a purposeful ecosystem calibrated for the twenty-first-century city, where worship, craft, learning, and service intertwine to re-seed the cognitive, moral, and economic soil of Muslim life. First we outline its architectural…
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Our Culture – Part 4 – Towards a Reform Movement
Part I exposed the loom: culture installs the hidden drawers that govern what a mind can notice, affirm, or reject. Part II traced how colonial curricula, global market logics, and minuscule media drips quietly relabelled those drawers, making traditional practices appear archaic and importing a new Overton window framed by autonomy, utility, and spectacle. Part III showed the deeper consequence: once the drawers shift, the very act of reading revelation is recoded. Legal proof-texts are historicised, spiritual vocabulary is psychologised, and entire movements, literalist or liberal, emerge as reflexes of an alien grammar rather than recoveries of Prophetic intent. The result is a civilisation suspended between nostalgia it can no…
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Our Culture – Part 3 – End of Religion
The argument thus far has tracked how imported curricula, global market logics, and minuscule cultural drips re-engineer the very drawers through which a Muslim perceives reality. Yet cognition does not stop at street etiquette or economic choice; it also governs how we read the Qurʾān, weigh ḥadīth, and adjudicate fiqh. If culture is the loom that pre-sets what counts as evidence, coherence, or beauty, then any shift in that loom necessarily recasts the enterprise of Islamic hermeneutics itself. Part III therefore turns the lens inward: we will examine how the same cognitive realignments that trivialise traditional practices also reshape the methodologies by which revelation is approached, interpreted, and sometimes unwittingly…
Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment