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Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

On the End of Capitalism and the Revival of Islam¹

by Dr. Riyad Asvat

The inspiration for this article came from my research for a book on the political writings of Shaykh Abdalqadir (1930-2021), may Allah be pleased with him. The article is long because it is very difficult to condense and summarize Shaykh Abdalqadir’s teaching on any issue. There are two reasons for this difficulty. Firstly he was the most important Islamic scholar of the last hundred years as well as the most important Western intellectual of this period and he was a prolific writer whose literary output spanned well over sixty years. Secondly he was able to unify the outward (physical), the inward (psychological) and hidden (spiritual) dimensions of reality whilst our education has trained us to do the opposite, that is, to divide, compartmentalize and analyze. Shaykh Abdalqadir’s greatest contributions to humanity have been: (1) his analysis of contemporary society; (2) his description of the original Islamic phenomenon; and (3) the steps he outlined for Islamic revival.  He did not put a time frame for the Islamic revival. It might well take a hundred years. After all, the capitalists abolished the caliphate in 1924 through a process of modernization that began in 1789. Almost a hundred years later Islam still does not exist as a socio-economic and political reality. 

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi’s Teachings on Psychology¹

Dr. Riyad Asvat²

Introduction

In a discourse on the 18th of August 2007 Shaykh Abdalqadir, may Allah be pleased with him, said: “I have written in my writings about a certain change which took place in the world in the middle of the nineteenth century, and I am not the only person to make that observation. Christians have made it, humanists have made it, historians have made it, sociologists have made it – that is that somewhere, in the century before last, there was a kind of split, a crack in consciousness, and it is like, after that, a kind of defeat of the human creatures occurred, and it was done in the high effervescence of something that was called Humanism. But at the very point they were declaring Humanism, people became subhuman. What is subhuman? It is that we have gone out of kilter, we have gone out of the pattern which, in the language of our ‘Ulama [scholars], is called Deen al-Fitra [Natural Religion]. The Fitra [the inborn natural predisposition of the human being to worship Allah] of the human-being has been totally dislocated because of the action of usury, the action of the fundamental motor of this social system actually cracks and breaks the Fitra. So the people are no longer able to have the Deen [Religion] which is Deen al-Fitra. Also, the Deen al-Fitra is Deen al-Haqq [True Religion], so you cannot have the Haqq [Truth], you cannot have Tasawwuf [Sufism] if you do not have this pattern of behaviour which means that in the transaction you are honest and act according to what has been commanded in the Book of Allah [the Qur’an] and by the Rasul [Messenger], sallallahu ‘alyhi wa sallam [may Allah bless him and grant his peace], and the First Community of Madinah. It is VERY important that we grasp this because what has to happen and will happen over the coming years of this new century, is there has to awaken a generation of men who want to taste that matter which is the subject of what we have been studying – that is Divine Love and Passion and Ecstasy of Allah, the Creator of the Universe. Without this, nothing can be achieved.”³