Series of Lucid Observation (SOLO)
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Every lunchtime at the cafeteria, I can’t help noticing how much food gets left on people’s plates and bowls. My mind jumps straight to the irony of how much waste are here, while elsewhere people are starving, or don’t know if they’ll eat tomorrow.
It made me realize that this world doesn’t have a resource problem, it has a distribution problem. And that, I suspect, traces back to capitalism. It keeps people anxious, always bracing for scarcity, so they hoard more than they need for the “just in case”. They stash money in banks, pour it into companies, and in doing so, only feed the rich and stretch the gap between those who have and those who don’t a little wider.
That’s the keyword I suppose, anxious. In arabic, it’s called وسوسة (waswasa), the whispers of Satan that slip into our hearts.
It’s said by Imam Al-Ghazali in his book “Censure of Wealth and Miserliness”
whoever has enough to meet his needs in the present, need not be overly distraught over the future. Rather he must trust in the promise of God:
“And there is no creature on earth but that upon Allāh is its provision” (Q.S. 11:6).
“Satan threatens you with poverty and orders you to immorality” (Q.S. 2:268)
saying, “Unless you strive mightily to amass stores [of wealth], you may fall ill and be afflicted with incapacity, so you will be forced to beg and suffer the resulting humiliation.” And so [a person] spends his life anxiously seeking [more and more] out of fear of suffering. Meanwhile, [Satan] laughs at him for the suffering he endures in the present while, at the same time, he grows heedless of God —all due to some hypothetical future hardship that may never come to pass.
I accidentally came across some bank account information once. The balance was quite astronomical. Upon seeing it, I had a distinct reaction. Envy was not the first feeling I experienced, nor was it amazement. The first feeling I felt was… pity. I just don’t know for whom. Perhaps for the people who could have needed that money, or for my future self. I imagined myself in the future holding onto that much money and I already felt a deep disgust toward the person I might become. Or more frighteningly, toward the person I already am. How far had I deluded myself?
I kept being anxious about the future. I was so afraid of suffering that I failed to notice the people who are actually suffering, physically, right now, around me. I bought into the term “Islamic finance,” a phrase that is increasingly entangled with the very worldly desires it was meant to guard against, often concealed behind technicalities. Halal investment this, halal loan that.
We become so concerned with whether our financial dealings are permissible that we forget to question why we are so eager to accumulate wealth in the first place.
Our Prophet ﷺ and his companions did not treat wealth as something to be accumulated and left sitting idle. They spent it continuously on the dīn and on those in need, and that is the best investment a muslim can make.
We often judge others for accumulating excessive wealth, for spending beyond their means on things that provide little value, for corruption, and for even greater atrocities such as genocide. These actions may appear different in scale, but they share a common denominator:
Greed.
The uncomfortable truth is that the same evil we recognize in others also exist within ourselves, even if expressed on a much smaller scale. After all, each of us is a microcosm of the world we inhabit. The desire to have more, to possess more, or to prioritize ourselves above others is a human tendency that exists within all of us.
“for whoever does not recognize evil will surely fall victim to it”
If we truly want to stop being frustrated by the direction in which the world is moving, we must first look inward. It’s always easier to identify the faults of others than to confront our own. But we cannot control other people. We can only govern ourselves.
Let us try to move beyond moral luck (the idea that each of us is capable of evil, and that it is often our circumstances, rather than any inherent moral superiority, that keep us from committing it) by defeating our nafs and disciplining our ego. Because from the islamic perspective, wealth is as much a trial for those who possess it as poverty is for those who endure it.
** This part contains another tangent which is kinda off but i included it anyway.
We’ve surely all been in a position where we talk for hours with people about an intellectually stimulating topic, only to end up with the conclusion, “That’s life. There’s not much we can do about it.”
I think such discussions are a waste of time if we never get past that conclusion. I’ve always wondered how to be more practical about the things I believe in, particularly my belief that we can free ourselves from capitalism.
So I started asking myself why capitalism thrives so much and why it’s so difficult for us to detach ourselves from it.
For something to thrive, it needs a constant supply of fuel to keep its engine running. Capitalism’s fuel is our seemingly endless surrender to desire. It teaches us to want more, then builds an entire system around satisfying those wants, only to leave us wanting more again.
That’s precisely why escaping capitalism is so difficult. We struggle to imagine a life outside it because we struggle to imagine a life in which we no longer feel compelled to pursue our desires.
People often talk about achieving financial freedom as the ultimate way to defeat capitalism. Accumulate enough wealth, and you can finally free yourself from its constraints. But even then, we can still lose the bigger battle. Capitalism has already won when it successfully leads us astray, making us believe that freedom lies in having enough money to satisfy every desire. We may escape its financial constraints without ever escaping its hold over us.
I believe Islam offers a different understanding of freedom, beginning with how we approach the human ego. The modern world teaches us to validate and nurture it, while Islam teaches us to discipline it.
We must distinguish between desire and ego. Desire gives us the appetite, but ego convinces us that we are entitled to satisfy it, even at someone else’s expense. Capitalism exploits this relationship by teaching us to take pride in what we earn and believe that what we possess reflects what we deserve. We’re encouraged to consume, reward ourselves, and prioritize our own interests until wealth becomes a measure of our worth.
But if everything ultimately comes from Allah, how much of what we possess can we truly claim as our own?
I often hear Muslims argue that we need to become rich because many acts of worship, such as Hajj, Umrah, qurban, and sadaqah, require money. I understand the intention, but this risks turning wealth accumulation into a religious ideal. Money is a means through which we perform certain acts of worship, not the essence of worship itself.
We should encourage Muslims to earn halal livelihoods and avoid riba without implying that financial success is a measure of religious virtue. Hard work does not guarantee wealth. Some people work tirelessly and remain poor, while others do very little and earn considerably more.
I believe our rizq has already been written. This doesn’t mean we should abandon our responsibilities or stop seeking justice. It means recognizing that our sustenance is not entirely under our control.
Consider someone with a severe intellectual disability who cannot work or achieve financial independence. They continue to receive sustenance through their family and caregivers, who become the means through which Allah provides for them. Their inability to earn does not make them any less deserving of sustenance.
So why do we find it harder to extend the same principle to someone who is capable of working but chooses not to?
This is where capitalism’s influence on our ego becomes most apparent. It teaches us to see wealth as proof of merit and superiority. We begin to believe that the hardworking deserve abundance while the lazy deserve deprivation. When someone receives what we believe they haven’t earned, our sense of justice is offended. We struggle to accept that Allah’s provision extends beyond our own judgments of who deserves what because doing so requires us to let go of the entitlement capitalism has nurtured in us.
After all, who gave us the ability to work in the first place? Our intelligence, opportunities, health, and even our motivation to persevere are not entirely of our own making. From an Islamic perspective, these too are blessings from Allah. That’s why I find it is not fitting to complain about the poor not having manners, or grit or willingness to work and better themselves. Stop blaming others especially those disadvantaged by the corrupt system and those who are less blessed (in our eyes), certainly we don’t know their position in the eye of God. Instead just focus on yourself.
This is where the practicality of defeating capitalism begins. Financial freedom means little if it simply gives us the means to afford the life capitalism has taught us to want. True freedom is being able to live with less without feeling that our lives are any less complete.
Isn’t this part of what fasting teaches us? We experience hunger and thirst without immediately satisfying them, learning that the presence of a desire does not mean we must fulfill it. If we can exercise restraint over our most basic appetites, we can also learn to resist the endless desires that capitalism exploits.
Stop asking yourself, “Don’t I deserve a little reward?” Truthfully, to be completely honest with you, and I’ll try to say this in the most polite way possible, most of the time, you deserve none of that sh*#. Give more, consume less, and learn to live without treating yourself as someone who must always be rewarded.
If we cannot begin with ourselves, what are we doing when we condemn the atrocities of a world driven by unchecked desire? We cannot expect the world to change while refusing to challenge the impulses that keep it running. The fight against capitalism must begin with us, or our outrage is nothing more than another thing we consume.
By no means I think that defeating capitalism means consuming less and less and be poverty stricken, I just think this is the path we need to take until we can reach a level where we see money the same way as we see soap, in other words, be indifferent of it. You buy soap because you need to wash yourself, not to accumulate a hundred bars just to admire how many you own. And if someone needs soap more urgently than you do, why wouldn’t you give them one?
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