Decolonizing the Heart Book & Podcast

Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World - Book 1 - Philosophical Foundations on Ways of Being and Knowing - By Mustafa Dustin Craun

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In a world where so many questions about Islam and Muslims have been at the center of Western society over the last 30 years, this two part series of books flips all of these questions on their head and examines global Western dominance from the perspective of the worldview of Islam. Mustafa Dustin Craun, born and raised in the suburbs of Colorado embraced Islam in 2002 and has spent the last twenty years working and living between Muslim spiritual movements, and grassroots political movements in the US and around the world. This first book in the series Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World - Book 1 - Philosophical Foundations on Ways of Being and Knowing, creates a unique connection between Islamic spirituality and the radical decolonial traditions of the America's and more broadly the global south.

There are books on nearly every type of Decolonization, Decolonizing the mind, Decolonizing trauma work, decolonial Christianity, decolonial Judaism, decolonial Buddhism, but there has never been a book looking at a decolonial process as it relates to what Muslims see as the center of existence, the human heart. For the mind centered epistemology of the West, white western man has been placed on a god like pedestal as an imagined pinnacle of civilization. For the integrative epistemology of Islam, the heart of a believer is said to rule over all other faculties, the body and the mind, with the heart also being the seat of the soul and the spirit. For decolonization to be possible in these times we have to come to terms with both Truth and Power, as in a world where power is so all encompassing as part of nearly every aspect of our lives we have to chip away these layers of falsehood to get to the truth and transform our hearts.

In our world today we are dealing with the layers of colonialism, the coloniality of power in the remnants of these colonial systems, the reality of neocolonial rulers around the Muslim world, and this late stage of technocratic capitalism where algorithms drive our every desire. As we understand Islamic spirituality here we then have to understand not just what has happened externally but also internally as Islamic education has been transformed and our very saving grace, our spiritual practice at the center of Islam, Sufism, has been marginalized to such an extent that Muslims around the world do not have easy access to these traditions of self transformation rooted in the heart.

Chapter 1 - introduction - Towards the Revolution of Hearts in an Age of the Soul Wound

Existence

Beat

Breath 

Life 

Perception

We can start big, or we can start small, but in an era where we focus most often on our exterior self, it is best to start small and as close to home as possible within ourselves. 

Close your eyes, feel your body, feel its energy, focus on your breath and strengthen your focus.  Try to let go of all the fleeting thoughts that are constantly coming in and out of our minds, the time has come to shift the center of our perception.  Keep breathing, if you have a mantra or a dhikr that helps you clear your mind then repeat it with your tongue silently.  The one that I most often use is لا إله إلا الل - La illaha il Allah (there is no Reality, but Allah).  With this clarity let us start small by focusing on the center of our human spiritual existence, that of our…

Heart

The center of everything for us as humans. In my spiritual tradition as a Muslim the heart is the center of human existence, the center of our consciousness, and the center of our perception, and it is also the seat of our soul.  In a culture that focuses so much on thought and information and lives mostly within our minds, we have forgotten and neglected our spiritual heart.  Do not think here of the physical heart, or the heart as greeting cards would remind us of, but instead feel your spiritual heart.  

Stop, close your eyes and feel your spiritual heart.

From this space try to feel through your heart, try to think through your heart, try to imagine existence, and try to perceive that force and giver of all life and existence that created us.

Hu, Hu, Hu - feel the divine essence pulsing through you. You don’t feel it yet? We ask Allah to open your heart to His divine secrets and ultimate realities, Ameen. 

But perhaps that is getting a bit ahead of ourselves.  Each of our hearts have have the ability to know Allah, but each of our hearts are different, based on where we were born, the traditions that we were born into, and the state of our hearts at this moment will effect what each of us is capable of feeling.  Our hearts are like the biggest vessel we can imagine, almost anything and everything fits into it, and what ever we put into it turns into a big mixture that formulates the state they exist in. We must be careful with what we put into our hearts. 

This is perhaps easiest understood through examining the stages of life that we go through.  Each of us it is said in the Islamic tradition is born into a state of fitra or primordial existence, meaning that we are born inclining to goodness, and towards our Creator الخالق.  This is obvious when you see the light and powerful energy that comes from newborns, and young children.  Young children in this state can perceive things that grown humans cannot, as often times you will see children looking above you, or at something that seems to the side of you.  Some have written that these children just fresh from the womb, can actually sense and see auras, angels and other things from the unseen realm of our existence.  While we are each born into this state, who we are is ultimately constructed by our surroundings.  

Our parents, our family, the area we live, the society we grow up in, its traditions or lack thereof, and all the layers of socio-historical realities each of us are born into and which can bury us in an avalanche on top of what was once a tranquil, beautiful God centered child.  All these layers, this is why this is all so complicated, how do we get back to anything that resembles wholeness in a society that in many ways is proud of the fractured nature of our beings and the historical moment we live in.  Veil upon veil, upon veil, all cover our hearts because of these things, but as we see this world of veils crumble around us we know that now is a time for truth.  Down with falsehood, down with lies, the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we tell each other, and down with our lives that are built upon the oppression of other people and the destruction of our world.  

But how?  How do we remove these veils?  How do we open ourselves up to the spiritual existences of this reality?  How do we live our lives with Truth as our organizing principle and shared global communal goal.  These are things I have been thinking about my entire adult life, and while I have often failed, I have always kept striving.  When I fall I get up, I ask Allah for forgiveness as a process of istigfar, I dust myself off and keep going while keeping my humbled heart to the ground while recognizing that which guides me. This is really about emptying our hearts of those things that hurt us, and replacing those things with realities that fill our hearts with spiritual light. 

To even speak of the heart is something that I know I am in no way the most qualified to do. There are spiritual masters amongst us, most of whom are unknown who could pour forth the true secrets of the heart that few people will ever know. I have sought out these people and whatever good is contained in these pages likely begins with their spiritual insights. The words here are reflections on how I even came to recognize my own heart and these teachings in my own life. Because the reality is there was a time when my heart was in great pain, it had no feeling, and and it had fallen into a space of great anxiety.

I remember a specific moment when this really all struck home for me. I had just visited the U.S./ Mexico border for the first time in my life in Ciudad Juarez, a city bordered by El Paso, Texas where both of these cities downtowns are literally on the border. We had driven up to the top of a mountain range that surrounds this valley and there you could see exactly the inequality of an upside down world. The planned, spotless American streets with skyscrapers, the tallest of which lit up at night as a five story American flag shinning as if it was taunting the people on the other side of the militarized border fence in Mexico. In the borderlands we see all the inequalities of our world laid out bare in front of us. 

On this trip we were staying in the developing edge of the city where the poorest parts of the migrant community new to Ciudad Juarez were living. There we met many children playing soccer on a dirt field next to the border wall in their neighborhood. One of the children’s name was Jesus a young boy maybe seven years old whose body was so deformed on his leg and arm that he had to flip to walk. This child was filled with the light of Allah as he ran and played with his friends the best he could. Here we were, US raised young people thinking we somehow had something to give to these people, when the reality was he gave us everything in that moment. But the reality is that this child’s body was like this because he had Polio, a water-borne disease that was supposedly eradicated from North America decades ago. These children, these families, with no access to water, and right there in front of us just across the border fence stood the University of Texas El Paso campus, with all the running water, swimming pools, and access to everything an American campus has to offer right there. For this child to see but never to touch, and yet he was the most beautiful heart, content, humble, filled with love and light. 

I have never forgotten Jesus more than twenty years later after meeting him, but in that moment I was inspired by him, but broken by the systematic realities created by hard-hearted politicians more interested in money than they are in human life. In that moment I also questioned like we all do, why this suffering exists around us at a theological level. The anxiety grew on that trip so much that I actually ended up in a public hospital later in the week in El Paso after I thought I was having a heart attack, in reality my first and only sever anxiety attack in my life. This is what I always have called TMD, Too Much Dunya, when the material world is so heavy around us and we don’t have access to any spiritual practices then the world is too much for us to handle and we look for ways to escape, which for most people is mostly drugs and alcohol. 

For many of us that have attempted to change our lives feeling this strong revulsion in our hearts, and the pain and emptiness of a life without a relationship with our Creator, this reality we live within is one where our hearts are literally inverted what is called in Arabic Qalb al Haqiq or the inversion of reality. Our hearts are upside down and through submission, through prayer, through fasting, through right action, good character and high virtues we have attempted to do the hard work of repairing our damaged hearts. Because we speak of revolution, and yet we have no true conception of what the destructions of our civilizations have meant to each of our lives in losing our true spiritual power rooted in our hearts. 

In this sense there is no true decolonization, in so much as there is so much that we can never get back. Even within our traditions, much of what has survived which is easily accessible are the material aspects, the forms of our beliefs, without the deeper spiritual realities that don’t easily fit within colonial modernity. From lives lived with divine assistance, to lives of the isolated mind alone with its ideas. We become today intellectuals instead of friends of Allah (awliya). To break through to the other side of existence is to chisel away at the covers surrounding our hearts and with each strike of the blade the spiritual light grows stronger. Maintaining this spiritual light involves moving to new ways of being and ways of knowing as the central goal of the spiritual path as the goal is living our lives within the state of divine presence with the direct knowledge of Allah, a long term ma’rifa, spiritual tasting and knowing the divine realities that can last in each of our hearts. As we begin, we bring our spiritual chisels along for the journey in the form of a tasbih (prayer beads) and come with me as we commit to radical transformation of ourselves and our world.

We must each move through this process ourselves, to move our families and communities for the diaspora of hearts to connect and create truly revolutionary change, and an ummah wide reality. This is the only way forward as we face genocide after genocide that have gone on for more than 500 years now with an inevitable planetary destruction at our doorstep through rising fascism and white supremacy that refuses to give up its grip of power, nuclear disaster, or rapidly worsening climate change. These are the extremes of this age of the self (nafs), what the Mayan have called, the era of death, as scientific extremism with no limitations has led us to this existential moment for humankind. Yet we cling on to this hub of dunya (love of the material world), because the realities of dismantling these systems would be to difficult for most of us who lack any connection to the divine presence. This work begins in each of our hearts, and it is hard, deep, life long work in dealing with the intergenerational trauma living within our families and communities. 

The trauma of colonialism, enslavement, and generations of exploitative capitalism that lives off the sweat and blood of our labor lives on in each of us as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), various forms of addiction, as minds unable to rest in a peaceful state (ADHD), and ultimately as the plethora of diseases destroying our lives and families like cancer and heart disease. Within Native American indigenous psychology this reality has been deemed by the community as something much deeper than the incoherent conception of the soul in Western psychology as, “spiritual injury, soul sickness, soul wounding, and ancestral hurt,” what Eduardo Duran calls, the soul wound. For Muslim communities the reality of this soul wound is described throughout our sacred texts as it relates to goodness and evil in our world, living a blessed life versus living a cursed life. This decolonization then is both an individual process and a communal process, as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ described when he said, "“The parable of the believers in their affection, mercy, and compassion for each other is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.” What we have faced over the last five hundred years as a community then as a process of intergenerational trauma is what we could call, an ummah wide trauma.

The Martinican poet and politician Aime Cesaire wrote of colonialism as a poison that is distilled straight into the veins of the colonizing race. What of our world 60 years after the revolutionary era of the 1960s when Cesaire was writing where popular pundits speak about “retiring” words like colonialism. Where politicians like Barack Obama as the first Black president of US Empire, talk of Black suffering and enslavement as the United States, “original sin,” but never speak of the settler colonialism and series of genocides throughout the Americas that laid the foundation for the global spread of European civilization and US imperialism. Many White people today do not know or do not care to recognize their own ancestry and check “American” on census forms as if their families were immaculately born into these lands who just arrived here with no story, and no past. Yet these same people dine in the restaurants of White nostalgia to almost every era of White existence in this country whether its the Cracker Barrel, 1950s dinners, or Applebees, so how are we surprised when they so easily buy into this cult of white supremacist nostalgia that is, “Make America Great Again.” This reality of living without past and without tradition is one of the goals of the monoculture of globalization that wants to act as if these systems of power do not exist as it uses diverse names like “Islamic Finance,” but in reality these are often attempts at putting lipstick on the pig of unfettered financialization of our world and westernized global capitalism run amok. Aspirational whiteness can build the wealthiest cities in the United States today that are majority people of color and yet they follow the masters playbook laid out for them in their gated communities.  

It’s interesting that a 2022 NY Times bestseller is today saying many of these same things, but without saying them as explicitly. In Gabor Mate, the famous physician and psychiatrist, newest book he writes of this poisoned culture of Cesaire, what he calls a “toxic culture,” in his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, that this toxicity includes, “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.” This is a trauma informed understanding of wellness, that sees the world unraveling in front of us as we continue to ignore the root causes of our illness in making the world as a White supremacist myth, and how this reality of colonial modernity is making us all sick in an unprecedented way. 

Colonization / Enslavement  - Genocide / Epistemicide - Trauma   / The Soul Wound - Intergenerational Trauma - PTSD - ADHD - Illness.

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