The Making of Meaning, Part 1: Popular Kufr, Western Thought, and Islam

How popular media subtly advances an agenda of kufr that targets the core precepts of Islam

This is a preliminary sketch of ideas.  My thinking on the subject will evolve over time – but this piece serves as a useful repository of thought that will assist in further development and tightening of the concepts. Subscribe to keep up with how the thought develops.

Introduction

The boys who work the front desk of the masjid and I went to see the Barbie movie. It started as a joke – they wanted to watch a movie, and the summer blockbusters were either The Barbie Movie or Oppenheimer. The latter seemed the much more obvious choice for a group of young men; and, so, as is customary for young men, we decided to watch The Barbie Movie for the memes.

We didn’t just go, though – we went in style. We matched outfits, each of us wearing all black and donning a pink shawl from Amazon just for the occasion. We posted it on our socials, because meme-ing isn’t meme-ing if it isn’t public. Take yourself too seriously, and you risk ridicule. Acknowledge your ridiculousness, however, and people only ever laugh with you.

We bought tickets for the latest showing (one of the boys had the closing shift, so we had to wait for him) in our matching outfits and a mix of embarrassment and mischievousness plastered across our faces. The boys thought they were going to watch a movie made by girls for girls hyping up girls. Having watched a couple of trailers beforehand, however, I knew exactly what I was walking into: a deeply philosophical movie exploring what it means to live a meaningful existence.

The Barbie Movie did not disappoint. In many ways, it was a masterful example of the intersection between art and philosophy. It was at times hilarious, at times corny, at times thoughtful, and, above all else, deeply moving. There was a scene in which Barbie sat in the human world and absorbed the entire spectrum of emotions that are felt in an organic existence: the joy that comes from watching children play; the wistfulness that accompanies the pit-pat of water dripping from a leaking tap – like the hours, days, and months that slowly drip out of our temporal being; and the melancholic, almost nostalgic smile that tugs against the edge of your lips when watching the elderly go about their day.

Scene after scene was profoundly meaningful, powerfully evocative, and intensely moving – a masterclass of imparting complex philosophical concepts through the medium of deeply felt emotions.

It was also complete kufr – a brand of kufr that is so pervasive to an almost hegemonic degree that every person who is raised in the West absorbs it like they absorb the sun on a hot summer day.

God is Dead, So Man Is God

“But what will become of men then?” I asked him, “without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?” 

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A great anxiety has gripped the Western world since the realization of what Nietzsche called the “death of God” – that is, the steady fall of Western intellectuals into degrees of unbelief. The response to this phenomenon has taken many forms. Dostoevsky and Tennyson seemed to agree with Voltaire, who said “if God did not exist, we would have to invent him,” and tried to rescue the concept of a divine creator from skepticism. Darwin and Freude believed scientistic explanations could fill the void of the why by explaining the how. Nietzsche was perhaps the most prescient of all 19^th century thinkers, and his immense pessimism from the death of belief in the Creator drove him to an intense nihilism. The great thinkers of the 19th century seemed to agree on a single concept: without God, without an agreed upon how and why for existence, being itself was without meaning.

Perhaps it was the two world wars; or perhaps it was the steady development of technology that brought greater and greater human control over the natural realm; or perhaps it was the disintegration of previous hierarchies that had determined so much of human life; or perhaps it was the growing role of the state in control over all facets of human affairs – no matter what it was, something shifted in the 20^th century. Nietzschean pessimism seemed to cement itself in the Western intellectual imagination: there was no God. Now what?

The Existentialist Turn

The thought that began during the early 20^th century amongst writers and philosophers sought to answer that question that rescued life from meaninglessness: if there was no God that created man for a pre-determined purpose, then all that can create man is man himself. Yes, man may be the ultimate effect in a series of material causes that begins with the big bang; but, it seems that impersonal, scientistic determination is deeply unsatisfying. How we came to be is far less important than why we came to be – and where we are going. To put it more bluntly, the most pressing question for the human condition as imagined by 20^th century thinkers seemed to be, “if all I am is a result of complex material causes, then why should I continue to exist until my existence ceases to be?”

All this pain, all this misery, all this confusion, all this anxiety, all this frustration, all this agony, all this consternation, all this ambiguity, all this suffering – if there is no God, why should I persist in the face of uncertainty, resist in the face of anguish, insist on continuing to exist despite the all the twists that come with the tumult of living life?

If we embrace nihilism, we have no answers. And, yet, the Western intellectual was unwilling to re-embrace God. And so, instead, the thinkers of the 20^th century fashioned a new idol in their own image and worshiped him as their new god: man.

Man must live life to find meaning authentic to himself. Even though there is no inherent objective meaning in life, man can and must fashion meaning for himself by himself in such a way that existence has purpose for him made by him. In this way, every person will have their own purpose. It will be built on what gives them the desire to live the next day. It is a kind of people’s revolution of meaning, an overthrowing of the tyranny of an objective truth to give way to a multitude of personal meanings and truths – each as authentic as the other. Instead of one man, one vote, we receive one man, one truth. This strand of thought it best expressed by French philosopher and literature, Jean-Paul Sartre – and yet the basic tenets of existentialism cannot be attributed or credited to any single figure.

The Pervasiveness of Existentialism

The school of existentialism as it’s called becomes pervasive in the Western European world and the United States following World War II in such a way that it has become part and parcel of every aspect of society. Life becomes the search for meaning, for purpose; and anything that gives an individual person meaning without infringing on the meaning of another person must be protected at all costs. The bill of rights now suddenly includes an unspoken addition: the right to free meaning.

This is not, of course, entirely divorced from the Western philosophical tradition. As far back as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics can be read as a search for meaning. The greatest development – almost a full rupture – is that existentialists deny telos while still affirming meaning. That is, they deny that there is such a thing as an objective meaning (where others before them, like the hedonists, might affirm that pleasure is the only meaning) while still affirming that meaning does exist.

This is how they avoid the complete nihilistic undertones to the intelligentsia’s rampant atheism. Each man becomes his own god, creating his own meaning for his own existence. But, when one looks at the ways in which humans create their meanings in this post-God world, we return to the Nicomachean Ethics framework of happiness – that happiness is in and of itself meaning (there’s another post that is necessary to break down the meaning of happiness and its place within an Islamic framework).

This happiness, however, can also be observed as sought after in several distinct ways: happiness through people and family; happiness through prestige and status; and happiness through hedonistic pleasure. Deprived of an objective happiness, however, man is thrown into an anxiety of choice. In a world where everything is made accessible, where, without God, all things are possible, man sits in front of the complexity and infinite choice of the world like a person sits in front of the Netflix homepage: overwhelmed by choice, none of them guaranteed to produce authentic meaning, and, without the excitement and passion that comes from a degree of certainty, it all seems boring and pointless.

“I’ll just grab another bag of potato chips,” he thinks.

Islam and the Meaning of Existence

This one sajdah that you find so heavy

Emancipates you from a thousand sajdahs

Allamah Muhammad Iqbal

For us as Muslims, there is an objective meaning to existence: the love and worship of Allah. This is hard-coded into an Islamic paradigm by being clearly outlined in the Quran:

• I did not create jinn and humans except to worship Me (51:56)

• Still there are some who take others as Allah’s equal—they love them as they should love Allah—but the ˹true˺ believers love Allah even more. (2:156)

For us, God does not give us meaning in that we love Him and therefore His love gives us purpose – and yet that purpose remains individual, fragmented, no less purposeful than a person whose dog gives him purpose. Rather, it is the creative act of God, the kun from which we are yakūn that brings us into being for a purpose – a purpose that is equally applicable for every person that has ever been, is, or will ever be in existence: the love and worship of Allah. There are some who choose to recognize it, others who choose to live in rejection of it, and yet others still who have not been shown the truth of their yearning for God.

This has reverberating consequences for how we live and brings us into severe tension with the dominant, almost hegemonic thought about meaning in the Western world: while others live for themselves, turning themselves into their own gods, we live for the pleasure and love of Allah. How, then, is it even possible to translate justifications for our acts of worship, devotion, and dedication to One Who is greater than us, beyond us, transcends us, in a language that is accessible to those who believe in and worship nothing other than the self. The answer lies in the Quran, as it always does, and is worth another post fleshing it out.

The Barbie Movie and Popular Kufr

We now return to the Barbie Movie, whose core message is that life is lived to be authentic to one’s desires, wishes, yearnings, longings, and passions. Life has no inherent meaning, it says; rather, it is on (wo)man to fashion their own meaning from their own existence. There is, then, no true way of being man or woman – rather, personhood is experienced in finding authenticity in fashioning one’s own purpose for existence.

This core message, and not the fluff about masculinity and femininity, is the most threatening element of the movie. It doesn’t threaten possibilities of how Islam might dictate gender; rather, it threatens the very theological assumptions that uphold the basic tenets of Islam. And yet, for many around the world, popular media is how they absorb philosophical and theological concepts. They don’t read complex philosophical or theological texts that require training just to penetrate. They consume media, where complex concepts are made accessible through parable and story – where plot and character are minister and preacher.

I’ve already written on the need for Muslim art – because art is the missionary of ideas – as a means of imagining Islam as a lived reality rather than a subject learned in a school. This art is not necessarily overtly morale; art that grows out of internalized concepts is a subtle missionary. It needn’t be overt and on-the-nose. Convert the heart, and the mind will follow.

And yet, existentialism is not entirely outside an Islamic framework. It is as antithetical to the sunnah to believe that there is only one mode of being within the core conceptual framework, that being an authentic Muslim requires a tasbih, a prayer mat, a Quran, and nothing else. Rather, there is a way to rescue authenticity from kufr and place it in the service of ibadah – but that is for another post.