The Family Industrial Complex

Why we gave up on living purposeful lives

Introduction

In his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the power wielded by what he termed as America’s “military industrial complex.” Eisenhower’s basic argument was that an unhealthy amount of political power was wielded by executives of powerful corporations that design, manufacture, and test America’s enormous warehouse of arms and armament. This political power, he argued, was used to influence America’s policies, lobbying for more aggressive, hostile policies even when they didn’t make sense, as the wars that resulted from those policies would require greater arms manufacturing, which in turn would lead to greater returns for their corporations.

The term “industrial complex” has come to mean any special interest whose primary goal is to perpetuate itself by any means necessary, often by creating a circle: manufacture arms to fight wars, fight wars to manufacture arms. We live in a world dominated by these kinds of industrial complexes: the tech industrial complex, the entertainment industrial complex, the food and beverage industrial complex, just to name a few. One of the hallmarks of an economy based on neo-liberal, spiritually bankrupt capitalism, it seems, is what we colloquially call “losing the plot;” that is, forgetting the greater point of the company in its function in society and culture, and instead focusing entirely on the growth and perpetuation of the company itself.

What was once considered a metric for the health of industry has quickly become its very purpose.[i]

For much of the world, while this can be most easily demonstrated on the macro level, it is demonstrable at the micro level as well. And, in today’s Muslim world, there is no greater manifestation of the micro-level industrial complex than the social institution of family.[ii]

The Muslim World from the 1930s to the 1980s

Langston Hughes begins his famous poem, “Harlem,” by asking the question, “what happens to a dream deferred?” He ends it with the question, “or does it explode?” In many ways, our current circumstance is a follow-up question: “what happens after an ineffective explosion?”

We sometimes assume that Muslims were passive observers and recipients of colonialism. With even a cursory reading of the histories of the major population and cultural centers of the Muslim world, such as the Malay speaking world, the Indian subcontinent, Egypt and North Africa, West Africa, Turkey, and Iran to name just a few, one finds that Muslims were in full engagement with modernity and in bitter struggle against colonialism. In some places, like Libya and Algeria, that opposition was open and armed rebellion. In other places, like the subcontinent and Egypt, it manifested as full-fledged social movements for empowerment and independence.

The 30s to the 80s were a time of immense excitement, jubilation – and then frustration and depression for the Muslim world. For the first time since the success of colonial enterprises from Morocco to Indonesia, Muslims were in full fledged revolt against the international order.[iii] While Muslim leaders wrote and organized and planned and negotiated, the average Muslim also saw him or herself as part of a much larger struggle for spiritual and temporal sovereignty.

One of the reasons why there is such an emphasis on the technical degrees rather than the humanities in the Muslim world, for example, is because movements for Muslim empowerment believed that the only way to truly establish sovereignty was to be technologically and scientifically independent of the West. That belief was propagated amongst the masses who responded by sending their children to train as doctors, scientists, engineers, and lawyers. Eventually, these became prestigious fields due to their value as emancipatory, and it is from here that they became an important part of the marriage industrial complex.

This was a time of independence movements, of social and civil investment in education, infrastructure, and public services, or education missions and translation efforts. This was a time when Muslims believed they had thrown off the shackles of Western colonialism and were masters of their own communal destinies.

Then, reality began to sink in.

Western colonial regimes were replaced by neo-colonial dictators in North Africa; Arab governments signed peace with Israel and exchanged sovereignty for wealth of the ruling class; Faisal was assassinated in Saudi and replaced a few years later with the “playboy of Beirut;” General Zia was assassinated and replaced with Humpty and Dumpty taking turns to sit on the wall of corruption and nepotism.[iv]

Struggle turned to jubilation; jubilation turned to frustration; frustration turned to despair; despair turned to depression. To make matters worse, while the Muslim world’s recolonization was being cemented, the Western world won its greatest victory yet: the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Unipolar Moment and the Liberal Order

While neo-colonial puppet regimes tightened control over the Muslim world, the Soviet Union collapsed, ushering in what the American exceptionalists called “the end of history.” Defeat of anyone who opposed the Western liberal order was complete. In 1991, there was absolutely no one who could even dream of standing against American economic and military might. The devastating consequences of earning the ire of Uncle Sam were in full display during the First Gulf War.

I have no illusions about the horror of the Soviet regime, nor am I a supporter of Saddam (God forbid); but I am realistic about the message the world received from the American-led world order in 1991: oppose us, and we’ll wipe you out; follow us, and we promise you prosperity. It was at that moment that the Muslim world was twice defeated.

Something shifted between the 70s and the 90s in the Muslim world. An attitude of defiance and national, even ummahtic upliftment, a civilizational project of empowerment and revival, was replaced with depression, lethargy, and familial selfishness. The fundamental question of the age changed from “what am I doing to uplift our people” to “what am I doing to secure whatever comfort I can for me and my family.”

The events of 9/11 and the global War of Terror further cemented this outlook. The Empire could not be opposed. It could not be challenged. It couldn’t even be reasoned with. It could only be appeased. And the Empire’s terms of appeasement for Muslims were simple: do not be politically, or culturally, or socially relevant. Live you lives in comfortable obscurity, in willful mediocrity, and we will leave you alone.

The process began in the 70s, but the attitude truly cemented in the 90s and early 2000s. Muslims, despairing in the failures of their independence projects, horrified by the cruelty inflicted by the global Western war machine, terrified of the prospect of being next, simply gave up.[v]

The Family Industrial Complex

So what happens when the exploded dream produces nothing except a continuation of suffering and plundering? When a person is trapped in traumatic environments, he begins to disassociate his mind from the rest of his body. While the body receives continuous, torturous abuse, the mind goes into itself, at times completely decoupling from bodily experience. The body might be ravaged, but the mind has created a fantasy in which it makes itself safe. I know this all too well, as that kind of intense disassociation was the result of my own traumatic childhood.

The Muslim mind has made itself safe from the horrors of a ravaged body by retreating into the fantasy of family. That fantasy then becomes spiritualized, just as suffering during the colonial period became increasingly spiritualized, until the fantasy of family becomes the spiritual purpose of reality.

My spouse is half my dean. My children are my ṣadaqa jāriyah. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters.

We study hard to get good grades. We get good grades to go to good colleges. We go to good colleges to get good jobs. We get good jobs to get good spouses. We get good spouses to have good children. Our good children study hard to get good grades. And the cycle continues.

No aspirations beyond comfort; no dreams beyond vacations and some enrichment courses in Quran and fiqh and tafsir. No hope except a peaceful death and entering Jannah with our pinky toes.

One of the greatest consequences of the industrial complex is the sacrifices people make to get married and stay married. We choose our careers for the sake of a good match. We abandon dreams to get married. We shape our lives for marriage instead of making marriage one of the things that enables how we want our lives to be shaped. How many great artists became consultants because they feared no one would marry a writer? And how many great entrepreneurs became software engineers because they feared Aisha’s baba wouldn’t take him seriously if he pitched his business idea as his long-term career?

The marriage industrial complex breeds predictability and mediocrity in a world that is shaped by risk-taking brilliance. Marriage and family became the purpose of life when, in fact, it was meant to be the means to something greater, something better – something prophetic.

The Purpose of Love, Marriage, and Family in the Quran

“˹They are˺ those who pray, ‘Our Lord! Bless us with ˹pious˺ spouses and offspring who will be the joy of our hearts, and make us models for the righteous.’” (25:74)

We often put emphasis on the first part of this ayah and not the second; whereas, in fact, it should be the opposite. Imam al-Rāzi mentions in his tafsir that the ayah was revealed about al-ʿasharah al-mubashsharah, the ten companions of the Rasul (SAW) who were guaranteed Jannah. Taking that into consideration, one reading of this ayah is that the first part is establishing the means while the second establishes the end. That is to say, that the comfort and joy received from family is the means to towards the objective of family, which is to establish ourselves as the foremost of the believers.

None of the ten who were promised paradise engaged in the marriage industrial complex. They were khulafāʾ, merchants, generals, governors, and scholars. They, the foremost of the believers, spent their lives in tireless service to Allah and His Messenger (SAW). What can be said that does justice to the service to Islam performed by Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, ʿUmar al-Farūq, ʿUthman Dhū al-Nūrayn, and Imam ʿAlī al-Ḥaydar al-Karrār?

Another important figure is that of the Rasul (SAW)’s own wife, ʿĀʾishah (RA). She was the peace and comfort to the Rasul (SAW) to the point that all of Madinah knew how much he loved her. And, yet, that was also her days of training, whereby she became amongst the most knowledgeable of the Ṣaḥābah in language, fiqh, and medicine. She trained many of Madinah’s next generation of scholars, including the important ʿAbdullāh ibn. ʿUmar.

For the foremost of the Ṣaḥābah, marriage was not the purpose of existence; it was the means to the greater cause, which was the establishment of lā ilāha illa Allah on earth. The joy and comfort and rest in marriage and family is the means; aspiring to be the foremost of the believers is the end.

Gaza: The Second Awakening

Just as something shifted in the 70s and 80s, something shifted again on October 7^th, 2023. While the depressed and desperate Muslim generations of the 90s bought into the false promises of a liberal order designed to keep them in perpetual servitude, the utter moral bankruptcy of the world order was put on full display with the most broadcasted genocide in world history. It has been a shock to Muslim body in a way that can only be delivered by complete and utter humiliation.

We have watched desperately, powerlessly, hopelessly, as the fruits of our investment in the family industrial complex have come to bear. When we needed to wield the full capacity of worldwide Muslim power, we found it entirely absent from existence.

As I wrote earlier and will write later, power is not built in politics. Power is only brought to bear and negotiated in the political arena. Political influence is entirely dependent on the capacity for power. Just as it would be a mistake the believe that American capacity for power was built from 1941to 1946, it would be a mistake to believe that Muslim power can be built in conflict.

America already had an enormous economy, brilliant scientists, and advanced manufacturing prior to 1941. Then, when American society had to gear itself for total war, that immense capacity quickly transformed to real power wielded on the battlefield. Muslims, on the other hand, have chosen mediocrity and comfort in conformity over building our capacity.[vi] And, so, when we needed the full capacity of Muslim political power worldwide to bear on the issue of genocide, we came up empty.

To be sure, valiant efforts were made. And, yet, 40 years of failure cannot be undone in a year and a half. Now, we watch as the prospect of a full genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine looms on the horizon knowing full well our best efforts have failed entirely.

It is time to awaken the Muslim mind, to rise from sleep and embrace the reality of our failure. Spiritual despair manifested in the fervent pursuit of comfortable mediocrity in the perpetuation of the family industrial complex needs to come to an end. We were not born to have family; our families are a means to the greater end of our birth.

We were born to bear witness that there is no God except Allah; we were born to advocate for the spiritual and temporal flourishing of humanity; we were born as agents of justice and goodness. We were born to be the moral and intellectual voice of conscience for humanity, the loud cry that proclaims the full consequences of the oneness of God.

When family serves that purpose, it is blessed. And when it becomes the purpose, it is as Allah describes it in the Quran: “Your riches and your children are but a trial. As for Allah, with Him is a great reward.” (64:15)

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[i] There’s a point to be made about the observer’s paradox viz. data and measurement – that is, the things we measure quickly morph into the purpose rather than the measurement – something that is well discussed in managerial psychology but seems to be making slow progress into the field of economics

[ii] Please do not read this as a neo-marxist attack on family. It is not that. If you assume that it is that and you attack me in the comments, I will troll you vociferously. You have been warned.

[iii] Yes, Morocco was never technically under the sovereignty of France, but it was more or less a client state

[iv] If you hate General Zia, don’t come at me. I have my long list of critiques of him, as well.

[v] Obviously, this is not an indictment of everyone. It is a reflection of the general attitude.

[vi] There are obvious exceptions, but it is not the Muslim Zeitgeist