Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla y Centro Cultural Islámico de Sevilla®
Spengler says in his work The Decline of the West: “History teaches us that the doubt of faith leads to knowledge, and the doubt of knowledge – after a time of critical analysis – again to faith.”
This search is based on what he knows through his experiences, observations and research.
Based on the conclusions he obtains from this purpose, he constructs his existential discourse; through which he tries to understand the time and space in which he has lived and find his place in it. The variety of methods that man has used throughout history ranges from the magical explanation of phenomena to scientific experimentation, with all kinds of intermediate possibilities that have undoubtedly enriched human experience and knowledge.
Despite this, the current moment in which we find ourselves has homogenized knowledge and information.
Knowledge through the educational system and information through the media.
The result is, therefore, a homogeneous discourse.
This homogeneous discourse can be assimilated to the stagnant waters of a swamp.
In these waters, the chemical components will be the same regardless of where you take the samples, perhaps with slight unimportant variations that do not change the main composition.
This is evident in conversations and gatherings at very different cultural levels and geographical locations; from those that we can see televised with supposed experts in New York to those that occur while having breakfast in the bar on the corner.
So much so that there are times when one gets sovereignly bored, since the arguments presented are repetitive.
And this is something that happens in the same way between the community of Muslims in general and those who are not.
Setting these waters in motion requires enormous effort.
It is not simply a matter of opening the gates and letting in new water, since it soon acquires similar characteristics to the original, but of turning the reservoir into a river.
The characteristic of the river is that the water flows, it renews itself.
And such must be our thinking.
We have to make it flow, change, transform.
Goethe said that man must read something new every day, look at a painting or listen to music.
And he said this not only because of the natural positive impact that subtle beauty can have on the human spirit, but also because of the need to enrich the waters of our thought.
We seek this enrichment in reflective reading, in the development of curiosity for various topics that leads us to non-conformism, in exposing ourselves to situations and experiences that connect us with innate interiority and in beneficial company.
One of the purposes of constructing this discourse is to discover our individuality and, based on this, to understand our freedom.
One of the greatest tasks facing the individual today, and in which most fail, is to discover their individuality in a tremendously individualistic context.
When the components for this task have been standardized, individuality becomes superficiality and freedom becomes an easily manipulated idea without reality.
Beyond the existential situation we have to face, we must be aware of this, and each one, to the extent of their possibilities, put it into practice. Shaykh Abdalqadir As Sufi says in his book Letter to an African Muslim that the Muslim is, by definition, intellectual.
Let us recover this intellectuality, then.
Hafiz Luqman Nieto luqmannieto.com
