Notes from Imam Omar Suleiman’s Podcast on Self-Accountability

Self-accountability requires active, intentional, specific and honest introspection. Weighing your gratitude and awareness of the Greatness of Allah against the ingratitudes of corrupting the faculties God gave us through sins. “Every sin is a misuse of one Allah’s blessings.”

In Islam, community, sahaba, or companionship is so important because it keeps us accountable to our selves when we neglect to hold ourselves accountable. Company helps to “stoke the proper conscience” when you’re not thinking or acting right. Suleiman mentions the importance of being surrounded with “people of knowledge and remembrance” to check us along the lines of shared or right values. 

How to hold yourself accountable:

1. Notice your gratitudes in the mornings every morning. Thank God for all that God has given you already; a bed to wake up in, a healthy heartbeat, a Sun to warm the world. Don’t envy the grave!! When you fail to be grateful with your aliveness, look to the dead with fondness but not the ingratitude of envy. When you envy anyone for what they have, whether they’re living or dead, you’re not recognizing the Source of all Blessings. God is the Source of theirs and your blessings, envy neglects either what God has given you or that God too has given them the blessing you attribute to their holder. 

2. Seek forgiveness at night for the “accumulated sins” of the day. Review your day, all your conversations, all your sins, “the major, the minor, the public and the private.” Imam Soleiman emphasizes the need to get specific with yourself when you investigate how you showed up in the world today, how your actions or words affected others, how you veered from your personal or Islamic values. 

P.S: The Imam also warned NOT to misuse your intellect with self-deceit and the deception of others. I took this to mean, don’t claim for the finger what belongs to the Moon, and for the Moon what only belongs to the Sun.

Relational Selfhood, Means and Ends

There are no ends, only means, because ends are a means to the means of an End. For example: Seifo my bro, you as an end to my love, are in fact but a means; a means to the end of loving you. In considering you to be a means to the end of loving you, I’m considering the act of ‘loving you’ in-itself as the volitional end of my love. In turn, the end of ‘loving you’ is only a means to Seifo being loved by me. If we didn’t consider this second premise to be equally valid yet seemingly paradoxical to the first premise, love would be unbearably selfish. The only way to reconcile this paradox is by considering a relational view of selfhood as opposed to an individualistic one. This view implies that Seif and I, as beloveds and lovers, can’t be considered as emergent distinctly from our relationality with one another. Love breaks apart the ontological walls of individual selfhood. In all practical matters, I carry Seif as a part of my indivisible seed of the Self, and I in Seif’s. We’re self-individuated, yes, have our unique personalties, yes, will disagree, of course, but are we seperable from the people whose love sustains us? The communities whose welfare and care we depend on? Even the mutual trust socio-political associations depend on for health? Nope, definitely not. In loving myself I am nurturing the love of Seif that makes up the fabric of my core memories and heart. In loving Seif, I am permitted to exercise my volitional necessity to live with love. Alone, this characterization remains selfish and incomplete, at what point does Seif get loved as end in himself? At every point when we faithfully abide by the mandates of love between two relationally indivisible members of a community of love. With the collapse of all ends of love into means to the means of loving the beloved, Seifo is loved every time I love him or myself, everytime he loves himself or me. In taking care of one another we take care of our selves, in taking care of our selves, we’re taking care of one another. Not only are we ontologically or retroactively indivisible, but we share the same welfare interests, the good of the family if you want. While love flourishes in the diversity of personalities, interests, values and things cared about, the bonds of love usually last longer when the beloved and lover can agree on the principles that should guide their collective welfare interests.

How have I neglected so much of my being? By narrowing down and fixating on one aspect of my Self or another that I deem acceptable when compared to all the other unacceptable parts of who I am. People are complex, and we can’t always be ourselves when we try to perform a function we think characteristic of our selves, it’s often best to step back and allow who we are to flow in its entirety rather than be curated by our inner critic. Don't commodify yourself as a means to your ends, especially when ends are only ever means to the means of the end. You're neither a mule you have to dangle a carrot in front of, nor a bank you have to steal selfhood from.

Failing to respect ourselves will make us destructive to the people we fail to care for. Friendships are modeled on self-love and if our loving isn't loving, we’ll fail to give others the respect and care we’ve neglected in ourselves.

Moral presence suggests that if we’re not in the here and now, immersed in the experience of the naturalistic present, with our people, we will fail to be sensitive to the cues of comfort, discomfort, sadness or whatever in our friends. If we’re so intent on pleasing from the comfort of our dissociated minds, or from the intellectualization of an experience that demands to be felt, we’ll miss the feeling of a friend having a bad day, that’s feeling down on themselves for example. Side note, why are we so hesitant to bridge the gap of awkwardness when something is visibly off.

From the River to the Sea

Zionists fear what is meant by ‘from the river to the sea’ not solely because they want every grain of flesh along this stretch, but also because they shake at what Palestinian freedom would look like. When Palestinians regain their free land, right to self-determination and self-preservation. When Palestine is allowed complete statehood and a living embryonic constitution, ‘allowed’ by its own generational mission of liberation from the Israeli and American boot on their necks. When its all over and Israel has to stand trial for its crimes against Palestinians, what will they do? Netenyahu’s defense for the apartheid in the West Bank, Israeli military rule of law, the ‘security responsibilities’ Israel so graciously and punitively takes on, and the siege of Gaza, is that the day Palestinians will have their own guns in their own hands, their rule of law on their own side, their state neither co-opted nor antagonized and vilified, when that day comes, Israel will be at the mercy of the People of Palestine. Can Palestinians every forgive them? Co-exist with Israel? Work with the Israeli government after all these decades of dehumanizing conquest, after all these massacres. Will reperations ever be enough? After 75 year of terrorizing, uprooting and salting villages of Palestinians of all Abrahamic faiths, letting them live the slow death of a suffocating occupation when not letting them die at the hands of indifferent shrapnel. It’s unsettling that fear of the Palestinian conscience, the same conscience that welcomed the European and North African Jews who formed Israel atop charred bodies, is weaponized to commit genocide. Since when is genocide a preventative measure against the impossibility of another. Even if Palestinians EVER had the resources to seek revenge against a US-backed Israel, why in the world would they use their NEWFOUND freedom for anything other than planting the seeds for future generations of Palestinian prosperity? Revolution, sacrifice, martyrdom, they rise out of necessity, no one takes arms for something as myopic as baseless hatred or some feudal revenge. When necessity for Palestinian liberation is no longer present, those resources will continue to be used for Palestinian freedom, a freedom that looks all too different. When free Palestinians will sow their own lands, drink from their own wells, learn from Palestinan teachers, develop the political, legal and civic institutions that can now BREATHE outside the cannabilistic ‘patronage’ of a military and civil occupation. Even if they seriously chose to waste their valuable freedom, lives and resources to murder masses for every masses of Palestinians martyred in fear of a free Palestinian state, Palestinians would never sink as low as the fearmongering two-horned prisonguards that conquered Palestinian living rooms and responded to flying stones with an AGM-114 Hellfire.