Traversing Tradition

[NEW] In the short “Defying Big Brother: The Right to Be Unseen,” Amirah Chati argues that privacy is a spiritual and political necessity in an age of surveillance capitalism, AI militarization, and data extraction. She calls for reclaiming the unseen spaces that protect human dignity and sincerity before Allah. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/06/10/defying-big-brother-the-right-to-be-unseen/

[NEW] Nadeem Dawud's reflection on how global markets penetrate even the most sacred Muslim spaces, turning worship-adjacent life into consumption. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/06/02/what-the-haram-could-not-keep-out/

Ibn Khaldūn lavished the most simplistic yet enduring tribute on the 11th-century Almoravid general, Yūsuf Ibn Tāshfīn, in just one line: He conquered more than any caliph, yet called himself only a servant. He commanded the first indigenous Berber empire in Muslim history in the 1000s, stretching 3000km from the Senegal River in the south of West Africa to the gates of Toledo across the Straits of Gibraltar in Spain. He wore a simple woollen cloak; ate only barely bread and camel milk; and refused to build a palace. He was the founder of Marrakesh (evolving from the original Berber name ‘Mar un Kush’, meaning the ‘Land of God’, which the French colonisers distorted to designate the entire territory as “Morocco”) and saved the Muslims in Andalusia from the first sweeping wave of the “Reconquista” in 1086, defeating Alfonso VI at the mighty Battle of Zallaqa, all while Yūsuf was an octogenarian (in his 80s). He was the original anti-Crusader, parrying the blows of the Papacy before Salāh Al-Dīn was even born.

Corporations working on the frontier of AI have to spend hundreds of millions to create neural networks with enough nodes and weights to imitate human reasoning. The sheer spend on compute along with challenges in memory and inference should make us all grateful for the simple fact that God granted us such gifts without any expectation of Herculean expenditures. The only demand he’s placed on us is recognizing his singular majesty and lordship as creator and rendering dues of worship that demand less of us than the taxation of governments and the monopolistic price gauging of corporations. The hand of evolution—if our reasoning capacity can be attributed to such a process—required nothing but the command of a benevolent Creator whose grand plan unfolds by His constant activity and maintenance; a series of perfectly-aligned coincidences is the belief of an idiot, especially when one believes in a deterministic model of the universe extending to human thought and behavior. A true God has nothing to fear of His creation, while a false god is plagued by existential angst. If Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) of the type “prophesied” in AI 2027 or “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is on the horizon, it only proves the hubris of a creature playing with laws it barely understands despite nearly a century of horror literature warning of this sci-fi doom. Only the lowest intelligence in the animal kingdom would actively accelerate its extinction in the hope of massive short-term rewards. أَمْ تَحْسَبُ أَنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَ أَوْ يَعْقِلُونَ ۚ إِنْ هُمْ إِلَّا كَٱلْأَنْعَـٰمِ ۖ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ سَبِيلًا Or do you think that most of them listen or comprehend? They are but like cattle—nay, they are even more astray from the ˹Right˺ path. Qur’an 25:44 يَوْمَ هُم بَـٰرِزُونَ ۖ لَا يَخْفَىٰ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ مِنْهُمْ شَىْءٌۭ ۚ لِّمَنِ ٱلْمُلْكُ ٱلْيَوْمَ ۖ لِلَّهِ ٱلْوَٰحِدِ ٱلْقَهَّارِ the Day all will appear ˹before Allah˺. Nothing about them will be hidden from Him. ˹He will ask,˺ “Who does all authority belong to this Day? To Allah—the One, the Supreme! Qur’an 40:16 Let them worship themselves and their creations that frighten them.

[NEW] Adnan Mahmud revisits critiques of Muhammad Iqbal’s readings of the Islamic intellectual tradition, arguing that Iqbal’s philological missteps must be understood alongside the colonial crisis of Muslim selfhood he was trying to address. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/05/25/predicament-iqbal-or-iqbals/

[NEW] Abid Haseeb writes a reflection on consumer culture seeping into community life, turning friendships, invitations, and spiritual gatherings into value propositions to be optimized. The piece calls for Muslims to leave the “marketplace of community” and reclaim village life through commitment, service, forgiveness, and sincere presence. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/05/20/villager-or-consumer-the-marketplace-of-community/

“A mercy to all the worlds, whose path remains preeminent for all time. To renounce spiritual ignorance and return to the One — this is the religion called Islam.Muhammad is the most noble sage (Prophet)." This text is from the Hundred-Character Eulogy (Baizizan / 百字讃), traditionally attributed to the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty. Written in ancient-style Chinese characters. Calligraphy by  Dr. Qayyim Naoki Yamamoto

DHŪ AL-ḤIJJAH FAQS Answers to your most common questions about uḍḥiyah (qurbānī), the ʿĪd prayer, fasting on the Day of ʿArafah, and the rulings specific to these blessed days: https://darulqasim.org/dhu-al-hijjah-faq/

[NEW] Thoufeeq Aslam interrogates the supposed binaries of private/public religion, Sunni/Shi’a rivalry, and quietist/legalist Sufism, through Sheikh Zainuddin Makhdum II’s ‘Tuhfatul Mujāhidīn’ in the context of Malabar Muslims fighting the Portuguese colonization of South India. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/05/18/beyond-binaries-rethinking-religiosity-through-tuhfatul-mujahideen/

One of the strange things about being a Muslim in America is that we often think of our faith as something that came from somewhere else, and although we practice, its true essence of somewhere else. Today we are reminded about the martyrdom of three brothers in San Diego, and we remember that this silsilah of sacrifice is uninterrupted. And they did not spite them except because of their faith in Allāh, the Mighty, the Emphatically Praised...

[NEW] The Bitcoiners Confronting Islam’s Money Problem: Is there an Exit From Riba? Hudhaifah Zahid, founder of Grynvault and Econommi, joins Hibatuallah Bensaid for a correspondence interview on Islamic economic ethics, debt-based money, and the promise and limits of Bitcoin as censorship-resistant infrastructure. Against a backdrop of fragmented fatwas and persisting debates, Zahid argues that the deeper question is not over Bitcoin's novelty, but whether modern fiat regimes have become so structurally saturated with riba that Muslims have lost the ability to imagine monetary sovereignty altogether. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/05/04/the-bitcoiners-confronting-islams-money-problem-is-there-an-exit-from-riba/

Khadija bint al-ʿAqil al-Dimaniya al-Shinqitiya She was a scholar from Shanqit, modern day Mauritania who lived in the twelfth century AH. She attained an advanced rank in rational sciences, such as theology and logic. She directed one of the major mahadir (traditional desert schools), which emerged leading scholars. Among them her brother, the eminent scholar Ahmad ibn al-ʿAqil (d. 1244 AH), the renowned grammarian often called “the Sibawayh of Shinqit” al-Mukhtar ibn Buna (d. 1220 AH), the scholar Hurma ibn ʿAbd al-Jalil, and the sultan of the Imamate of Futa Toro, Imam ʿAbd al-Qadir. She was the leading figure of a distinct school of logic, whose methodological approach was followed by a number of later scholars in Mauritania. She was widely known for both authorship and teaching. Among her most important work is a commentary of al-Sullam al-Munawraq that is currently published.

As Dr. Asim Yusuf aptly puts it when describing what I would label 'intelligent non-specialists': "the terms 'lay Muslim' and 'scholar' are not absolute divisions." (Shedding Light on the Dawn)

NEW As surrogacy becomes more common, Heraa Hashmi challenges the autonomy-based arguments used to justify it by building on Islamic bioethical critiques. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/04/02/whose-body-islam-surrogacy-and-the-limits-of-market-autonomy/

The more I read modern Islamic thought leaders, the more I feel that much of their work revolves around abstract thought exercises with very little substantive grounding. Over time, this kind of reading seems to cultivate a habit of pontification, where constant reflection, theorizing, and re-framing become the objective, without a serious concern for what is actually true, effective, or actionable in the real world. In a post-colonial context, Muslims have developed an intense preoccupation with explaining themselves: redefining ḥikmah, rethinking the role of fatwā, and endlessly analyzing identity and tradition. But while we are occupied with these discussions, we often avoid confronting the concrete realities of power and development that shape the modern world. If we step outside this discourse and look empirically, the path to strength is not mysterious. As highlighted by real economists and people who truly analyze the numbers, look at historical trends, and parse the data, nations that became powerful did so through clear, material strategies: industrialization, protection of domestic industries, and the cultivation of military strength. Books on these topics need to be required reading for the Ummah. By contrast, much of modern Muslim intellectual output operates at a level far removed from these concerns. Some may offer sophisticated reflections on knowledge, ethics, and civilization, but this type of discourse has not translated into tangible civilizational progress. No Muslim country today has emerged as a leading industrial, technological, or military power in the post-colonial world. The issue is not that these discussions are inherently useless, but that they are disproportionately emphasized. A community that spends most of its intellectual energy on abstract interpretation, while neglecting the practical sciences of power by analyzing economics, statecraft, and military capability, risks becoming intellectually active but strategically ineffective. At some point, the question has to be asked: if a body of thought does not produce strength, stability, or measurable advancement, what exactly is it producing?

[NEW] This essay contends that Australia’s proposed ban on Hizb ut Tahrir is a juridical lowering of the threshold for Muslim political expression. The authors argue that the deeper stake is not Hizb ut Tahrir, rather it’s the shrinking possibility of autonomous Muslim political imagination in Western public life. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/02/16/australia-is-banning-hizb-ut-tahrir-and-all-of-us-should-be-concerned/

Here is the Muslim in charge of keeping the keys of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The man inherited this task from his father. His family is responsible for keeping the church keys for many centuries before the Balfour Declaration was issued. This family was given the task by Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi himself after he liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The native Christian population of the Holy Land preferred Islamic rule to that of the Vatican. And Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in relative harmony in Palestine until the Zionists came in from Europe.

[NEW] In an age of algorithmic cherry-picked proofs, Abid Haseeb argues that spiritual mentorship is even more crucial as the clarifying hand that prevents self-authorized interpretation from devolving into harm, and as a living conduit of Prophetic adab that reshapes communal bonds. https://traversingtradition.com/2026/02/23/tributaries-of-the-ocean-on-the-necessity-of-spiritual-mentorship-for-muslims/

On a more serious note, 18th January marks the unification of Germany in 1871 (with Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck making the declaration at Versailles) and also marks the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919. Compulsory reposting of James Corbett’s documentary on the reality of World War I. The Rhodes Milner roundtables. Feat. Richard Grove, Gerry Docherty, Jim MacGregor, Carroll Quigley, Antony Sutton . You can’t understand modern politics without it. https://odysee.com/wwi:bdfce695093e4f448a11d883632df3afacd57d18?src=embed