Salaam Friends, Over the last 10 years I've been chipping away little by little on two separate books on this idea of Decolonizing the Heart. The first book, Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World - Book 1 - Philosophical Foundations on Ways of Being and Knowing is about 70% complete. I'm turning to my community in asking for your help to create space for me to finish the book. Of course, it's also taken so long because I had so much chipping away to do on my own heart to even publish these books about self-purification and the myriad of challenges we face in the context of colonial modernity. At the end of my graduate studies when I was studying Islam at Zaytuna College and with the set of scholars engaged in the coloniality/modernity school of thought at UC-Berkeley I published my first peer-reviewed article where I used this title, Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World.

El Mundo Invertido (the inverted world) is an apt descriptor of our world when you live your life as a traditional Muslim and you see so much of this world focused only on material pleasure at the expense of all morals. This reality has been laid bare for us over the last 6 months as we have seen genocide unfold in Gaza on a scale that reminds us of 2003 when the United States destroyed Iraq. Over these months of tears, and what feels like absolute helplessness as I've watched my own children struggle to understand why this is happening, I have thought a lot about youth education and how we share ideas of decolonization and the multilayered process that is possible to make this a reality. It was also during this time that one of my teachers and friends, Shaykh Ubaydullah Evans told me that I needed to teach a class on decolonization as there are few Muslims who are connected to the tradition and who are also connected to this tradition of more radical ideas of the America's in how we change the world. 

As I write in the book, 

"Ours is un mundo invertido (an upside down world) where right is seen to be wrong, where falsehoods become truths, and where lies are told about all peoples who do not fit into the globalized regime of Westernization.

The time has come for each of us to begin to ask what is my path towards personal transformation?

How do we build collective visions for a future free from racism, war, and gross inequality?

How do I free myself from this existence before I end up wallowing at the closed door of some shopping mall when this is all gone?

Do I free myself now or stay shackled to this existence and be remembered in death only as what the world around me made me?

These are questions that we must ask before it is too late for each of us individually and for all of us collectively."

The Decolonizing the Heart Class 

Since I left the academy many years ago to focus on institution-building in the Muslim community I haven't had a lot of time to look back. Now I understand as I get older, and as this year I celebrate living half my life as a Muslim, that it's important for me to return to writing to share these ideas with the world. Inshallah over the next few months I will be launching the Decolonizing the Heart reading group here in Seattle, where I now live. My goal with this reading group is to also work through some of these ideas as we explore the worlds of Islamic Spirituality and the radical political tradition of the America's and the global south. We hope to also eventually livestream the sessions but we may not start with that. 

Book Pre-Orders

As a part of this campaign, you can pre-order the first book in the two-part series, Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World - Book 1 - Philosophical Foundations on Ways of Being and Knowing. The goal is to launch this book in Ramadan of 2025, inshallah. The second book is more personal and less academic but is also a bigger book, Decolonize Your Heart - Book 2 - Reflections on a Life's Journey to Transform the Heart & Know Allah. You can check out the table of contents for the first book below. 

Campaign Perks - $100 and You Can Get The Book and One of These Hoodies

Read Excerpts from Decolonizing the Heart

The original article was written as part of a journal in honor of the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, Exploring Pluriversal Paths Toward Transmodernity: From the Mind-Centered Egolatry of Colonial Modernity to Islam’s Epistemic Decolonization through the Heart

The introduction to the 2nd book is here, Heart Over Mind, as well as the chapter Shine Your Light - A Journey to Mecca in Layers.