Indigenousity

HUMAN EVOLUTION

91:1. By the Sun
And his (glorious) splendour;
2. By the Moon
As she follows him;
3. By the Day as it
Shows up (the Sun's) glory;
4. By the Night as it
Conceals it;
5. By the Firmament
And its (wonderful) structure;
6. By the Earth
And its (wide) expanse;
7. By the Soul,
And the proportion and order
Given to it;
8. And its enlightenment
As to its wrong
And its right;—
9. Truly he succeeds
That purifies it,
10. And he fails
That corrupts it!

No thoughtful, intelligent person can deny that materialistic consumerism and its underlying philosophy of human dominion and control, is destroying our earth, our air, our water, and our souls.  We are in grave danger of global system failure.  We are in grave danger of failing because we have fallen into imbalance and corruption.

The Tea Party and other brainwashed people, who run away from reality and live in a world of their own making may deny global climate change.  But denial does not make a problem go away.  How can they deny the fact that people in island nations in the Pacific are being forced to uproot whole communities, established perhaps thousands of years ago, and move to Australia, in order to survive. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/kiribati/9127576/Entire-nation-of-Kiribati-to-be-relocated-over-rising-sea-level-threat.html)

Ignorance is bliss - so the saying goes - but in fact, it is not bliss.  It is down right dangerous.

How did our social order get so unbalanced?

حَدَّثَنَا عَبْدُ اللَّهِ بْنُ يُوسُفَ، حَدَّثَنَا عَبْدُ اللَّهِ بْنُ سَالِمٍ الْحِمْصِيُّ، حَدَّثَنَا مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ زِيَادٍ الأَلْهَانِيُّ، عَنْ أَبِي أُمَامَةَ الْبَاهِلِيِّ،، قَالَ ـ وَرَأَى سِكَّةً وَشَيْئًا مِنْ آلَةِ الْحَرْثِ، فَقَالَ سَمِعْتُ النَّبِيَّ صلى الله عليه وسلم يَقُولُ ‏ "‏ لاَ يَدْخُلُ هَذَا بَيْتَ قَوْمٍ إِلاَّ أُدْخِلَهُ الذُّلُّ ‏"‏‏.‏

قَالَ أَبُو عَبْد اللَّهِ وَاسْمُ أَبِي أُمَامَةَ صُدَيُّ بْنُ عَجْلَانَ

Narrated Abu Umama al-Bahili:

I saw some agricultural equipment and said: "I heard the Prophet (ﷺ) saying: "There is no house in which these equipment enters except that Allah will cause humiliation to enter it."

(http://sunnah.com/bukhari/41)

I remember reading this rather odd hadith years ago.  What does it mean?  The Bible relates the story of Cabel and Abel with some variations we do not find in the Qur'an.  In the Bible, Abel is said to have made a sacrifice to Allah of a sheep, while Cabel sacrificed some grain.  Allah accepted Abel's sacrifice. While the Qur'an focuses on the intentions and sincerity of the two in making their sacrifices, the Bible focuses on the comparison between pastoralism vs agriculturalism.  The Jews were originally pastoral, raising sheep and goats. They looked down upon settled agricultural people.

The same prejudice against agricultural peoples can be found among the Aaraab or Bedouin people.  The Quraish used to send their children out to live in the desert with the Badu so they could learn manners, culture, language and the pure Arab ethos.  The Prophet SAW was also raised in this manner.  The Quraish felt that settled life in towns and cities had a corrupting influence.  

Allah seems to have also supported this notion that agriculture is a corrupting influence.  However, for Allah, this is not a matter of prejudice.  He is all knowing and has far greater understanding of such matters than do we.  And in his understanding, He advises us sincerely and sends us guidance.  

We know that humanity is born on fitrah, the innate knowledge of good and bad. Even the earliest peoples understand right from wrong.  In the movie, "The gods Must Be Crazy,"  Xi and his family of !Kung Bushmen live in a society where everyone is equal and they share all that they have.  One day a Coke bottle falls from an airplane.  The people find all kinds of uses for it, but there is only one bottle.  Suddenly, the people begin to want to keep it and they begin to fight over it, until someone hits another with it.  They realize this is a bad thing, and decide to have Xi go and throw it off the Earth.  

After Adam receives guidance from Allah, Allah tells humanity that He will send us guidance from time to time.  

2:38. We said: "Get ye down all from here;
And if, as is sure, there comes to you
Guidance from Me, whosoever
Follows My guidance, on them
Shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.

When we study these incidences of revelation, we notice something.  All prophets were sent to settled peoples, and many came at a time when the society was in transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled lifestyle.  

Through most of human history, we lived in family groups like the Bushmen. Allah provided us our sustenance through provisions of wild game, plants, fruits, grains, nuts, and honey. We ranged widely.  Genome studies show diverse origins.  Humans are not the result of a great chain of evolution from one creature to the next. Instead, we are discovering a new paradigm, a much older paradigm. 

One of the most important lessons from science is that all things behave as either a particle or a wave.  When we seek to study light, we discover that we can either know its position in space or its movement over time. We cannot know both.  So, light is said to behave either as a particle - an extent located within the time/space continuum observed at a precise moment of singular duration; or it behaves as a wave - a velocity or movement observed over a finite duration. When we look at the development of life, we observe fossils.  

Fossils are discrete facts.  In order to explain these facts, we posit theories. One such theory put forward to explain fossils is Evolution.  

So claim Evolution is a fact.  This is false - it is a lie.  In Science and its rational support system, Induction, facts are listed as the particular premises of an inductive syllogism or qiyas - a simple version might be:

1. A fossil we call Homo Erectus exists and it dates to 70,000 years ago

2. A fossil we call Homo Neanderthalus exists and it dates to 50,000 years ago

3. A fossil we call Cro-Magnon Man exists and it dates to 43,000 years ago

4. Therefore, modern humans evolved from earlier hominids.

But, the conclusion is not really proven.  All we have shown is the relative probability of a particular conclusion, given the set of facts.  We could try another conclusion.  For example, Therefore, Allah created modern humans from Cro-Magnon Man.  We could also try other theories.  

Our purpose here is not to debate evolution versus intelligent design.  The point here is to show that induction does not produce certainty.  It produces only probability.  However, we will briefly note that the Theory of Evolution today is quite different from that of Darwinian Evolution.  Darwinian Evolution states that life evolved from one point to the next along a hierarchy of ever more advanced species.  So, life evolved from one celled organisms to more complex creatures like worms, to fish, to lizards, to mammals, to humans.  Darwinian Evolution has problems as a theory though - the "missing links" in this chain are often missing.  So modern Evolutionary Theory posits random jumps, perhaps caused by mutations and gamma rays, that just so happen to produce fortunate results. So, fig trees just so happened to develop inward blooming flowers, that were pollinated by tiny wasps that just so happened to have also developed at the same time. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficus#Mutualism_with_the_pollinating_fig_wasps)

Personally, the probability of this theory is about equal to that of intelligent design. 

However, the point here is that when we look at the "particle" of human development the individual fossils, we are only seeing the points in time - a snap shot in time.  But, when we look at the complete genome, we see the movement, the wave, over time.  From this perspective, all life is a continuum from single celled organisms to the most complex. 

The conception of life as distinct species and the theory of speciation is not a complete picture. Humans developed and flowed across the landscape.  We met, traded, went off to other places, came back to our birthplaces.  We were nomads, co-operating, co-mingling, co-habitating. 

The "particle" view of humanity has produced several erroneous conclusions. One is that humans are naturally violent.  We assumed that each "particle" in the fossil record killed off the one before it.  Just a few years ago, scientists argued that modern humans killed off Neanderthals in Europe.  The debate became so heated that two of the leading scientists in the field refused to speak to one another.  A documentary was produced perhaps 10 to 15 years ago on this, but I was unable to find it at this time because the whole view on Neanderthals and human development has radically changed since the Human Genome Project results have become available.  A recent documentary, First Peoples," explores the new concept that human development is more of a wave, and that we co-operated with rather than killed off other human groups.

The Genome Project has also changed our understanding of the fossil record.  If you actually study how science looks at fossils and speciation, you will find that very slight variations in a tooth, a small bone, a skull, a leg bone, can lead a scientist to posit that he or she has discovered a new species.  Think carefully. Scientists depend on grant money.  Grant money is not easy to get.  You are not likely to get grants for the "same old bones."  But, a new species... And then, if its new, you get to name it.  With your name...  Scientists may like to portray themselves as unselfish monks, but they are not.  

So, fossils in a hierarchy or life in a continuum?  

We have a preference for hierarchies, as we shall see... and hierarchies mean something is better than other things.  That fits with Survival of the Fittest, that other part of Darwinian Evolution.  

Social scientists also liked the idea of Survival of the Fittest.  In the 1920s, fascists and racists used the idea of Social Darwinianism to justify racism, and capitalism.  It lurks behind the scenes of the 1% Society of today.  And this kind of thinking also justifies violence.  Survival of Fittest justifies killing the lesser peoples.  Hitler killed Jews, Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, and people with mental handicaps.  We can only wonder what our current proveyor of this philosophy, Donald Trump, will use it to justify.

So, Science, wedded to the Western obsession with hierarchy, assumed our ancestors were violent. All this projection of violence onto our ancestors is just that, projection of our behavior onto them.  

Not that we were never violent.  We may have been, but the old idea that Homo Sapiens killed off Neanderthals and other ancestral humans can no longer be supported by factual evidence in our DNA.  We are Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens.  

THE AGRICULTURAL DEVOLUTION

So what happened?  Well, Gobekli Tepe holds some clues.  In the 10 millenium BCE, Neolithic peoples built great megalithic structures whose purpose was clearly religious. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/?no-ist) Monuments like Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon were not built as housing blocks, but for religious celebrations, and for particular forms of religious celebrations - celebrations of the natural cycles of the sun, moon and stars.  

Many have speculated that we settled in cities first, and then developed "organized" religion.  It would appear this time line is false.  We developed "organized" religion before we settled in cities.  And what placed like Gobekli Tepe reveal is that we did, in fact, begin to "organize" religion.  

Humans began as hunter/gatherers, living in small bands and moving from place to place, as needed, in order to find food.  We moved into every environment possible, following migratory animals, following the seasonal availability of plants.  Later, as we became more numerous in the land, we began to move to gather with one another.  The recent research in Africa reveals that ancestral humans moved in trading webs and met up, traded and mated with one another.  What we used to perceive as distinct species were not so.  All of the archaic humans are living in our modern DNA.  Europeans carry Neanderthal genes; Asians carry Davidsonian and Erectus genes.  Our ancestors did not kill one another.  They traded and mated with one another.  

As we moved on the land and met at certain locations, those locations became special to us.  We began to meet there not only to trade, but to worship.  Chaco Canyon in the US, is one such place.  Makkah was another such place.  Both are places of little water and resources, but deep in spiritual meaning for the people who make pilgrimage to them.  Why did we choose such remote places to share our spirituality?  Allah ta'ala Alim.  Allah only knows, for Allah chooses them.   

Initially we did not live in these places.  We remained nomadic and only gathered there at certain times of the year.  Then, we began to move in.  We see this process in the Seerah when Qusayy decided it was easier to care for Makkah if he moved the whole clan there.  But, society began to change when he did that.  It began to degenerate.

The Quraish and their history in Makkah reveals much about what happens when humans settle in cities.  Whereas nomadic societies are egalitarian and communal, urban societies stratify along income and power lines.  Na'ibs become amirs, amirs become sultans, and the masses stratify into merchants and servants.  People can become property, become slaves.  As different groups move in, they bring their own ancestral "gods" and communal practices.  Powerful groups begin to dominate.  One way to dominate is to order the people into hierarchies, with the power groups on top.  As groups jockey for position in the chain, so their "gods" end up in pantheons.  Greek mythology, Roman mythology, Hindu pantheons, Egyptian polytheism all give us a view into who was who in those societies.  

As this hierarchy and organization arises out of the need to organize agricultural labor in urban/agricultural societies.  The Giza plateau around the Pyramids reveals the organization of the work gangs who built those structures.  Catholic padres recorded the organization of the Inca in work gangs to build monumental architecture.  We take our ability to organize farm labor and then apply it to support the perception of power for the king.  And the king then becomes a god himself.

What did Firawn say?  


79 : 24. Saying, "I am your Lord,
Most High".

Some think that the Firawn who said this was Ramses.  Allah Ta'ala Alim, but certainly, Ramses built a huge temple to himself, and had hundred of statutes of himself carved out, depicting himself as a god.  His mummified remains lie in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, a reminder that despite all the hype, he died. And all the power, money, and hierarchy fantasies could not keep him from dying.

THE LESSON OF CHACO

Around a 1000 years ago, the people of the Colorado Plateau also began to enter the Neolithic period.  They were a nomadic people who had begun to farm corn.  They moved in trade webs across the land, and began to meet in a place called Chaco Canyon, in modern New Mexico.  As they moved across the land, they notice movements in the universe around them.  Animals migrated, plants came and went at different times, and the lights in the night sky also moved. They noticed patterns in the movements and positions of the Sun and Moon too. They also noticed that on certain days, the lights from these heavenly bodies would fall in certain places, on certain rocks, in certain patterns, and so on. The whole universe seemed to have patterns of movement - of migration.  

Like many Neolithic peoples before them, they began to build stone structures. These structures replaced the temporariness of wood and hide.  The stone gave an illusion of permanence, absoluteness, certainty, finality - hierarchy.  And just like Qusayy, some one must have thought that such places need permanent care-takers.  A new hierarchy of priests and kings arose.  

Archeologists have noticed evidence of two types of settlements on the Colorado Plateau, southern facing pueblos, and pueblos with towers and T shapes. Archeologists have also noticed evidence of violence, brutal and unnatural - cannibalism.  Something terrible happened.  But, in the end, the sky centered hierarchy vanished, and the earth centered egalitarian pueblo culture continued. 

The people of the Colorado Plateau made a choice, a choice that no one else has yet made, that we know of... they gave up hierarchy and returned to an older, egalitarian paradigm. 

INDIGENOUSITY

A few years ago a skeleton was found in Kennewick Washington.  After dating the remain, scientists determined that he was perhaps the oldest skeleton found in North America.  Immediately, the native peoples of the area demanded that "the Ancient One" be repatriated to the tribe and reburied.  Scientists rebuked them.  There is no way this skeleton could be their ancestor...  

This is not a clash of facts, it is a clash of paradigms. No people today are "first people."  No one today is a "first person"!!!  We ALL have ancestors.  Being Indigenous is a point of view, a philosophy, not a biological fact.  The Umatilla People understand this philosophy.  Biological ancestry is not important.  Both the Ancient One and the Umatilla share something.  They can feel the webs of connection to him over time and space.  

The scientists, and their "superior" "educated" world view of hierarchies fought against the tribe for custody of the body of a human being.  Who really has the better interest of humanity at heart?  

In the end, a scientist from Scandinavia, in a respectful way, offered to help. He ran the DNA of the Ancient One and compared it to the present tribes.  In fact, the present tribes are carrying his DNA.  Science can be used for good and it can be used for evil.  It is a tool, but too many are treating it like a religion that cannot be questioned.

THE LEGACY OF HIERARCHY

This philosophy of hierarchy has brought upon us an unjust world.  We have noted before the original sin of Shaytan - Kibriyya/Arrogance.  "I am better than him (Adam), You created me from smokeless fire, and You created him from dirt."  Here is the first hierarchy.  The Greeks imagined all kinds of hierarchies - the Great Chain of Being.  This led to the idea that the physical world is lowly and evil, so man must have "fallen" into it.  That led to the doctrine of Original Sin.  

Now, this doctrine is leading us to utter destruction.  The 1% seemed to feel justified in having all the wealth.  We all feel entitled.  No one is grateful anymore.  We live in our own fantasy worlds, where we are the kings or queens, and when the real world crashes in on us, we go ballistic.  We have become the One of Plato's hierarchy of being, and nothing else matters.  

Like the people of Chaco, we are consuming one another.  We uses words like "competition" "survival of the fittest" "top this" "top that."  We have a culture of "est."  "Best" "Greatest" "Smartest" "This is the biggest of its kind to come out in the last five minutes..."  Everything must be a superlative.  

However, superlatives are not sustainable.

ISLAM IS INDIGENOUS

In order to survive, we must return to our origins, our roots as human beings, to our indigenous state.  To be indigenous is to remember, as Allah reminds us, that we are a part of Creation.  We are part of the web of life and we have a particular role in it.  We were created to worship Allah.  We were created to be the successors of the Malaa'ikah on this Earth, as its stewards and caretakers. We were created to be in communion with Allah and community with each other.  We were not created to be competition with Allah or with each other.

Islam means to surrender, to cease hostilities with Allah.  It is the essence of Indigenous philosophy.  To be at peace, the peace of the body, the mind and the soul.  To be in the correct relationship with Allah and His Creation.  To be in society with each other, respecting each others rights and performing our obligations and duties.  

It is unfortunate that many Muslims have also fallen prey to hierarchical thinking.  The Khalifaats did it.  Sultans did it.  Modern nations and their dictators have done it.  We have also fallen prey to arrogance and racism.  This is not Islam.

Like the people of Chaco, we should abandon the hierarchies and seek the webs that link us across time and space.  Only then can we link with our Islamic ancestors, the Sahabi and Ahl Al Bayt we all talk so much about.  Only then, can we overcome the years of "divide and conquer" politics we have all suffered through.  Only then can we appreciate the full potential of humanity, that potential that Allah SWT saw when He told the angels that He knew something about us that they did not.