# Why Some Scholars Critique Resistance | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine **Author:** Tom Facchine **Series:** Imam Tom Live **Published:** 2025-10-22 **YouTube:** https://youtu.be/ShUs6mwKfWE **URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/why-some-scholars-critique-resistance-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine **Topics:** History, Politics & Practical Theology ## Description Scholars who defend order over justice don’t emerge by accident. They are products of Western philosophy that have conditioned generations to prize compliance over courage. Imam Tom breaks down how colonial and modern powers molded Muslim scholarship to value control over truth and highlights how... ## Transcript **[0:00]** The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said that the scholars are the inheritors of the prophets. That's why it's so upsetting when we see scholars betray Palestine by collaborating or normalizing with Zionists. **[0:19]** This is nothing new. This has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Certain people, whether they're scholars or not, collaborating with the enemy, collaborating with the oppressors. But why does it happen? Is it as simple as saying that these are scholars for dollars, they're bought and paid for, they're chasing fame and clout and access? **[0:36]** It would be nice if it were that simple. In reality, it's a little bit more complicated than that. By the end of this episode, you'll understand how religious ideologies can interact with national security interests to cultivate Muslim scholars who are more critical of Palestinian resistance than they are of Israeli crimes. **[0:54]** Let's start in a counterintuitive place, the curious case of Martin Lings. If you're familiar with the name Martin Lings, he's the author of a very, very well-known English language biography of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) called Muhammad, His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. A lot of people don't know Martin Lings' other works, one of which is called Ancient Beliefs **[1:15]** and Modern Superstitions. It's a very short book. I recommend that you read it. It's got a lot of interesting points. But you'll notice a big change in tone from the biography to his other works that you'll find, for example, Lings grounding many of his critiques about modernity, about things **[1:33]** that are happening these days in not Islamic theology, but in Christian and Hindu theology. He regularly downplays the differences between these religions and between all religions. He actually calls them matters of perspective or different manners of expression. **[1:49]** And this denial of difference is actually all over Lings' other works. You can see throughout many things he says all religions are in agreement about what is really fundamental. He also says in its more general aspects, orthodoxy across religions, he means, is always **[2:05]** fundamentally the same. What gives? This is maybe alarming for some people who aren't familiar with Lings' body of work. Well, if you weren't familiar, Lings is what's called a perennialist. Perennialism is an ideology that believes that all religions are valid and that they **[2:23]** all have essentially the same truth, that Islam is not exclusively true, that Hinduism is also true and Christianity is also true, et cetera, et cetera. But this aspect of perennialism about minimizing the differences between all religions and saying that they're all essentially the same, that's actually not what we're here to talk **[2:40]** about today. We're actually here to talk about a different aspect of perennialism that affects people's politics and even their politics on Palestine. The part about perennialism that we're zooming in on today is it's anti-modernist. **[2:55]** It's very against modernity, even more than I am. I mean, if you follow my work on other platforms, like I'm not the biggest fan of modernity. We did a lot of messed up stuff, but perennialism is extremely anti-modern, categorically so. You'll find the different perennialist writers such as Lings, such as René Guénon, Frithjof **[3:12]** Schuon talking about the Kali Yuga. They use Hindu language that this is the end of times, this is the last epoch and everything is entropic and everything is about to explode, that it's chaos. Now because they're against this, they go to the opposite extreme and they say that, **[3:29]** well, what we value and what pre-modern religion and what the perennial religion, perennialism, the truth, the perennial truth champions is order. It's hierarchy. It's even, you could say, perhaps a little bit of elitism. **[3:44]** And that's why if you go into the books, you go deep into Lings and Guénon and Schuon and other perennialists, you'll see them defending things like monarchy. You'll see them nostalgic about monarchy. You'll see them defend things like the Hindu caste system. And for especially a modern reader, this is very, very shocking. **[4:02]** And even a normie Muslim reader, it's also kind of jarring that they defend hierarchies so much so that they're not even willing to entertain some of the critiques against the abuses of hierarchy that are very ubiquitous in the modern era. **[4:21]** Now let's be clear. This group of thinkers, Guénon, Schuon, Lings, they're a group, but they had an influence on Muslims. Like if this group of people are fringe, they have had an influence on people who are much **[4:41]** less fringe. In fact, they have had an influence on some, and I stress some, flavors or groups of neotraditional Sufis in the modern era. But let's first talk about the political implications of this movement of perennialism. **[4:59]** One of its tenets, metaphysical purity, right? That we're talking, we're all about metaphysics. The last era that we're in, the end of times, it's all about dunya. It's all about materialism. And so we are about the metaphysical. And so there's become a trend in distrusting political struggles and distrusting activism, **[5:19]** anything worldly, or activism and political struggles being glossed as worldly and materialist. Now there is a valid point here that within post-modernity, if you're familiar with any of the postmodern thinkers and writers, like Foucault, for example, he has pointed out **[5:36]** that once society is robbed of its religion and its sacred tradition, everything becomes politics. And that is true. We have seen that. And there is a way in which certainly leftist movements, but other political movements, they have a type of politics of despair. **[5:52]** And what that means is that it's coming from a place of grievance, that they're only focused on denouncing what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, and not necessarily sufficiently attending to building a positive, constructive future. That's fair. **[6:08]** However, there is something in the perennialist critique that's re-entrenching this bifurcation of secular versus Islam, Islam versus politics. Islam is political. You can't get around it. So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try to read every Muslim political movement **[6:27]** or Islamic political movement as materialist or as worldly or as insufficiently metaphysically pure if that makes sense. So what we see from many people who have been influenced by the perennialists is that there's an elevation of personal piety and moral reform over structural critique and resistance and **[6:46]** calls to action. If you've ever been told, well, you want to go protest for Palestine, but you haven't prayed Fajr in the masjid, you're never going to liberate Al-Aqsa unless you pray Fajr in the masjid. It might be true. It might be true. But the implication from these folks who I would claim are influenced by perennialism **[7:08]** is that that is your only means. Your means to liberate Al-Aqsa is only you're praying Fajr in the masjid and then you raise your hands to the sky and then Allah's help comes down. It doesn't attend to the means. It doesn't attend to strategy. And the Prophet (ﷺ) was very strategic. **[7:25]** The things that he did throughout the Sira, the maneuvers that he made, the steps that he took against the Quraysh were extremely strategic. It sidelines all of that. And it says, no, no, no, don't get too concerned in the dunya. The most important thing is that you're pure and that your metaphysics are pure and that you're oriented towards the afterlife. **[7:41]** Of course, we should all be oriented to the afterlife, but we must also attend to the asbab, the reasons and the causative effects that Allah (ﷻ) has created. So the second point is order. So perennialists were big on order. And let's say that Muslims who are affected by perennialist thinkers, they romanticize **[8:02]** the harmony in the pre-modern times. This is actually a really, really useful tool to be able to get a litmus test, to be able to tell where people stand on modernity. What do you think about how life used to be, right, before industrialization? There's people who think that life was just horrible, that, you know, it was nasty, brutish **[8:20]** and short and everyone was dying from diseases by the time that you were 30. This isn't really true, or at least it's not true the world over, maybe Europe, but not the world over. If you analyze the average life expectancy of the companions of the Prophet (ﷺ), the Prophet (ﷺ) said the average life expectancy of my ummah is around his **[8:38]** life expectancy, 60, 63 years old. You have companions like Abu Hurayrah (رضي الله عنه) and Anas ibn Malik who lived to be very, very old. This was not, they weren't just dropping like flies in their 30s or 40s. So, this idea that before modern medicine everyone was just dying all over the place **[8:56]** due to like a flesh wound or whatever, that's not true, right? And this usually indicates a modernist position that things are better now than they've ever been. But the perennialists make the opposite mistake. They go to the other extreme and they say that, well, everything is bad now and everything used to be great, right? **[9:11]** So, before industrialization, before the modern era, everything was in harmony, everything was in order, even the monarchy, even authoritarianism, even the caste system, everybody knew their place that this was good for order, there was, you know, purpose. It's insufficiently critical, I would say, of those points of exploitation or structural **[9:32]** problems that existed. Now, because of this, perennialists and people who are affected by perennialists often align themselves with conservative or authoritarian state agendas and they will justify them under the guise of promoting order and tradition, okay? **[9:49]** They encourage obedience to authority and they see rebellion as a spiritual disorder, right? This is fitnah. How many times have you heard that? Any sort of resistance to oppression and tyranny? No, no, no. This is fitnah. And we're not saying that this doesn't have any precedence within our tradition at all, **[10:07]** but we're saying that the perennialists and certainly the Muslims that have been influenced by them, that's all they see. They don't see any viable Islamic resistance or anything like that. They see it all as dunya, as disorder, as grievance culture, etc. **[10:25]** So the last point, preferring beautiful architecture, rhetoric, sights, sounds, smells, and associating that with tradition over messy real world struggles, right? There's a Turkish saying, right? I like to use, you're a landlord, you're a nobleman, I'm a nobleman, but who's going **[10:44]** to milk this cow, right? There's real things that have to be done in the world. Palestine is being occupied. Muslims are being slaughtered in Myanmar, in East Turkestan, in different places across the world. We have to act. That's part of your solidarity as a Muslim. **[11:00]** Even if you're just somebody who lives in the West and all you can do is vote or whatever or even just share things on social media, you have to act. That's part of your solidarity. We don't necessarily shy away from these things by just saying, oh yes, this is just normal. **[11:15]** There's a normalcy to it. This is part of history, but Allah also expects us to act and to respond. So it shouldn't be any surprise then if we move from the general political to Palestine in particular. How does perennialism and those who have been influenced by perennialism, how does that **[11:32]** affect their politics on Palestine? We'll notice a few things. One, we notice that Israel is often framed in an abstract Abrahamic way. Interfaith narratives become sort of the default. Its crimes are depoliticized. We could even say they're universalized. **[11:47]** Yes, yes, this is part of what happens and this is Allah's punishment and all we have to do again is turn inwards and spiritual purity. And again, it's true. That's not false, but it's not the whole truth that there are things that need to be done and actions that Allah (ﷻ) expects us to take. **[12:03]** On the other hand, violence and the crimes of Israel are universalized and made to seem like just this blind historical force. The Palestinian resistance is critiqued as anger driven, as hatred filled. It's secular. It lacks adab. This is not how you do things. **[12:19]** This is again, aesthetic critiques. This is ugly. This is not whatever. Right. Palestinian resistance to their own oppression is recast as disruptive rather than prophetic. Okay. What would the Prophet (ﷺ) do in this case? Would he resist or would he not? That's an important question we have to answer. **[12:34]** Now it's important. I want to reiterate that we're not saying that it's as simple as people are being paid. Okay. That's actually really, really superficial. It's much, much more complicated than that. We want to show how these ideas and these movements, they actually shape people's politics **[12:51]** and how they even understand Islam. If you're going to say, well, how does Islam guide us in this particular situation? People's ideologies, they shape their sense of what Islam has to offer on this particular issue. These particular individuals that are influenced in this particular way can be used. **[13:08]** Right. So if the worldview prioritizes metaphysical stability over historical material injustice, then you're actually very, very useful to some of these governments. Again, it doesn't mean that these scholars are being paid or that it's that in your face. **[13:24]** They could be working for free and often they do. Right. But it's to show you how their discourse aligns with state interests. And so the state wants to co-opt and use them. Right. We also see that it aligns with regimes that normalize with Israel and suppress dissent, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and that use interfaith rhetoric to neutralize Muslim **[13:45]** solidarity with Palestine. They replace it with this idea of Abrahamic harmony. We don't want to disrupt the harmony between the Abrahamic faiths. When as we know, people use interfaith as a Trojan horse in order to stop us from holding people accountable and saying, hey, you can't do this. **[14:01]** This is wrong. And so sometimes even people can internalize state priorities and present them as spiritually justified. And this is one of the biggest concerns with here people using the language of extremism or using the language of fundamentalism or using the language of the global war on terror **[14:17]** discourse, which assumes at its very base that the problem is Muslims and the problem is violent Islam, as opposed to the problem being imperialism and occupation and colonialism and foreign policy, the West's foreign policy towards the Middle East. **[14:33]** You have to choose between those two things. There's no third option. Either that the root cause is that Muslims are violent or that Islam teaches violence. Or the root cause is Western imperialism. **[14:49]** Pick one. The folks who are influenced by perennialism, it's feared that they side with the former rather than the latter, that they're more concerned about the extremism and the fundamentalism in Muslim circles, which we're not denying that it exists, but it ignores the root cause. **[15:08]** Like the root cause is that these things are legitimate historical and political grievances that are being had, even if they result in unsavory and unacceptable responses to those things. Again, we'd like to reiterate that this isn't new. There's a long history of governments manipulating Islam, governments manipulating religious ideas. **[15:27]** All you have to go to is the history of colonialism in the Muslim world to see that. And we've got other episodes we've done on that, that the manufacturing of the acceptable Islam, whether it was the docile Sufis, whether it's the Madkhalis, there's other groups. This is not limited to one. **[15:43]** It's not a sectarian issue, right? This isn't like a Sufi Salafi thing, or it's not an Ash'ari, Athari thing. No, the governments have traditionally used whoever is useful to them. So in different times and places, they will try to cultivate particularly docile Sufi groups and then in other places, they'll try to cultivate particularly docile Salafi groups. **[16:03]** The most important thing here, again, is that we have to pay attention to these things and we have to realize when these things are happening, that the Islamic tradition is one that requires solidarity from you. This is a fundamental aspect of every Muslim's creed, that you have to have solidarity and **[16:20]** that solidarity is expressed through certain actions that Allah requires you to take to put an end to evil and to put an end to injustice. And that does not contradict, it does not contradict complete acceptance and submission to Allah (ﷻ)'s will and His plan. **[16:37]** It doesn't contradict being a pious Muslim and being in the masjid and taking care of your worship and making sure that you're spiritually pure. In fact, Allah (ﷻ) requires both from us. Now, the most concerning thing and the thing that we want to avoid is that if we're not aware of this, of these influences like perennialism or other influences, that we will end up seeing **[16:57]** scholars preaching more against victimhood than they preach against genocide and that they will echo the tyrants rather than the prophets. ## Other Episodes in "Imam Tom Live" - [The Promise and Paradox of the Islamic Republic | Deep Dive: Iran Ep. 2 | Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/irans-political-system-explained-deep-dive-iran-ep-2-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Sunnis vs. Shias | Deep Dive: Iran Ep. 1 | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/sunnis-vs-shias-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Who's Your Real Enemy? | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/who-is-your-real-enemy-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [How ‘Taqiyya’ Became an Islamophobic Talking Point | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/how-taqiyya-became-an-islamophobic-talking-point-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Does Islam Actually Oppose Science? | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/does-islam-actually-oppose-science-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [What Sharia Law Actually Means | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/what-sharia-law-actually-means-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Why Not Every Seat is One Worth Taking | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/why-not-every-seat-is-one-worth-taking-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Debunking the Myth of the ‘Oppressed Muslim Woman’ | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/debunking-the-myth-of-the-oppressed-muslim-woman-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [What ‘Allahu Akbar’ Really Means (And Why It Scares Them) | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/what-allahu-akbar-really-means-and-why-it-scares-them-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [How Does the Qur’an View the Bible? | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/how-does-the-quran-view-the-bible-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [What the Qur’an Says About Christianity | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/what-the-quran-says-about-christianity-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [The Truth About AI’s Intelligence | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/the-truth-about-ai-intelligence-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Amazon's Kill System & the Network Behind Sami's Detention | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/amazons-kill-system-and-the-network-behind-samis-detention-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [What Real Masculinity Looks Like | Snapshots with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/what-real-masculinity-looks-like-snapshots-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [What Islam Reveals About Socialism and Capitalism | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/what-islam-reveals-about-socialism-and-capitalism-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine.md) - [Kings Chased Thrones. 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