Gaze Into The Fire
The Analects of Dawoud Kringle
In my life, I have had my share of experience with the unclean and uncivilized. But I learned something. I am not the state of my body’s health or hygiene. I am not my collection of badly remembered data accumulated through clumsy senses and erratic emotions. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to think, pray, or meditate. But I think, pray, and meditate only because I am not these things. I am not even myself and do not belong to myself. I am a soul driving a collection of bones in a bag of flesh, reciting the Words of Allah as I can understand them.
Those who have read my writings know I despise nationalism in all its forms and shun it and its practitioners as I would a syphilis-infected pig. But I have a nation, and I care what happens to it. My people have me worried. I fear that we will wake up one morning and realize that our civilization has been pulled out from under us, inch by inch, dollar by dollar. We were fools who slept through the most important century of our history. We must now spend the 21st century paying for it.
People want freedom. I want freedom. And if you cultivate the concept of freedom in a person, he will inevitably strive to free himself and others. But if you only educate them, without instilling the concept and responsibility of freedom, they will embody the most deplorable cringing servility imaginable in the most elegant and refined manner the are capable of.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men, and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
Gaze into the fire, at the stars, and into your innermost being. When the voices begin to speak the true names of all things which Allah taught Adam, don't ask if it's permitted or wouldn't please a false god you made of your teachers, culture, or ideology. You will ruin yourself if you do that.