I made a comment in a Hexbear news megathread about this here. Although it’s mainly just referring to news articles.

The nature of the situation will not mirror that of Ukraine fortunately, however there are other risks involved.

I have now read 2 articles advocating for “security engagements” with the West for both Malaysia and Indonesia.

I suspect this entire facade is ultimately for this exact purpose. ASEAN has it’s faults but what the West wants to currently do is undermine ASEAN centrality (as much as they claim otherwise).

The escalation ultimately led by US-led monopoly capital, wants to break apart the long-standing neutrality and non-alignment that ASEAN was built on, with their current “Indo-Pacific Strategy” basically being the classic divide and conquer. They are using the Phillipines as their age-old pawn as not only an attack on China but also a threat on other major non-aligned states in the SCS, specifically Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

Let us remind ourselves that this escalation is happening right when the ASEAN-China code of conduct negotiations has been finalising (news article in the aforementioned comment). The last thing the imperialists want is a truly free and independent Southeast Asia.

You are right that as Southeast Asians we must reject all forms of US imperialism, and this meaningless agitation does not help nor is the interest of the masses.

Heritage, community… I’m not sure how to explain it other than it appeals to me.

That’s an essential part of Islam. The ummah as it is called.

Which is also why Islam is deeply supported by the masses. Because it is embedded in the community.

Islam is something you can’t practice in private, well up to a certain extent, there are exceptions to this, but that’s why in my primary comment, your first avenue to understanding Islam should be a local masjid and their imam.

I’ll try answering your questions from my point of view, being raised muslim, however atheistic in practice. This is thus a non-expert view and my only formal Islamic classes would have been in school, which was very barebones and westernised, and also weekend saturday schools. I have also lived a majority of my life in Islamic countries but also a minority in the West.

I have limited knowledge regarding Da’wah so any more knowledgeable comrades can correct me where I am wrong.

I’ll start with your first question because I think it is the most important out of all of them.

How can I call myself a Muslim without compromising my beliefs?

I think this is a wrong approach to Islam.

In Islam, belief and faith, is encapsulated in the word iman.

An important aspect of iman is that it goes beyond superficial acceptance. It is not enough to say the shahada and be done with it. You gotta live and breathe it.

And judging from your post you already encapsulate an important part of Iman, which is seeking knowledge. This is why if you read any introduction to Islamic philosophy, their first and foremost topic would be on knowledge production and reproduction. Because the way to showcase your faith is through learning and teaching - through practice.

My point is, whatever you allegedly think Islam is against - firstly, as mentioned by @Aru it’s not about your current perceived faults or unorthodoxy that requires you to compromise. One idea that separates Islam and Christianity is that, in Islam you are born pure but corrupted by material reality. Unless you extricate yourself from reality, everyday you will be making mistakes and faults which requires you to constantly reaffirm your iman. This important emphasis on action, on doing stuff in reality, rather than just in mental masturbation, makes Islam a versatile and realist religion.

Secondly, Islam continues to change and be reformed. As of now, it’s true that a majority of muslims may not approve of those exhibiting same-sex attraction or identifying as different from your assigned gender or outside the binary. But disapproval doesn’t mean excommunication, doesn’t mean dehumanization. There is a clear understanding that separates the private from the public. And there are those that view LGBT identities as perfectly compatible with Islam - that depends on the individual and eventually the community to figure out.

Is there a sect or denomination I can seek guidance from? Am I just wasting my - and your - time?

Your primary guidance will be the Quran. Your secondary guidance will ideally be any imam from a local Masjid.

As for the sects and denominations - they don’t really matter. And what I mean by that is that the basics are the same across denominations. You shouldn’t really concern yourself with it right now unless you are specifically interested because it becomes a really specialised affair. There’s a reason why there are scholars that specialise specifically in matters of fiqh, or jurisprudence.

Also Sufism is not a separate “sect” of Islam, it forms an essential part of the Islamic experience and Islamic history for ALL muslims. Certain muslims, especially those that follow orthodox Sunni jurists, often sideline Sufi thought which were then re-propagated by Orientalist scholars. It is important to recognise this lest we fall back in the colonialist trap.

It feels like appropriation for me to want to convert to a faith, but then pick and choose which parts of it I want to believe and follow. I dabble in tarot and the occult. I’m poly. I believe all consensual love is valid and sacred.

It may shock you to find out that muslims also practice black magic and the like. There have of course been a process “standardization” of such practices, and they are less common now as they are being dissuaded by mainstream Islamic councils.

But it’s definitely not appropriation. What we need now especially with the rising tide of Islamaphobia is those with humility, introspection and courage to understand Islam. In the end, you may decide to not get into it - and that’s fine, but the journey is as valuable as the destination.

I think this blog post, Interrogating The Border Between Rationality And Faith, will be helpful for you.

If you want to know more about my personal experience and thoughts, feel free to DM me or message me on Matrix.

Kind of funny that there are those in West that still cling onto the notion that Chinese production is inferior while over here people say if you want shit done you call China lol

Nationalisation might be one of their few good proposed policies along with land reform.

And that’s all that is needed. A complete reformation of the relations of production will have a profound effect in elevating the productive forces.

Your critique on the manifesto seems lazy because most bourgeois democracies and their parties over-inflate and exaggerate in their manifestoes. Doesn’t say much about their class character.

Many things can happen when a large mass movement built on consensus is in charge.

I am not saying the EFF is one either, but the critique you bring forward doesn’t showcase your points well.

Bringing back military conscription? For what?

It is answered in the quote you mentioned.

offering life skills and discipline.

Teaching the masses life skills is GOOD.

Military conscription (which in the cited quote doesn’t necessarily imply “conscription”) is not only about invading other countries or protecting sovereignty. That’s colonizer talk.

The army can help with a lot of people’s projects, mobilizing resources for the betterment of the country. Furthermore, most places that have conscription also have options to participate in other governmental bodies, like firefighting. It is not strictly just into the army.

Furthermore, all AES countries have mandatory military conscription.

The countries that do not have military conscription are often those tainted with liberal individualism, prioritising the rights of the “individual” rather than the service to the community especially wrt to Global South countries.

many of which have very little to do with Marxism.

May I get specific examples of which policies “are not relevant” to Marxism? And I want something that is unequivocally and undeniably for the empowerment of the comprador classes and Capital.

And in the other way, especially accounting for costs of living.

See my comment above.

Poland, Lithuania and Estonia in the same cathegory as Switzerland or Luxembourg is like the joke about man and dog having averagely three legs.

You are merely arguing against the presentation of the data on the map, not the methodology of the data or the conclusions made from the data.

PERCENTAGE OF THE NATIONAL POPULATION BELOW WORLD AVERAGE INCOME OR CONSUMPTION

In this image found in the article I sourced the map from, it is made perfectly clear that Poland, with a population of 15% earning below the world average, is obviously vastly different than that of Switzerland of around 2%. In other words, proportionally, there are 7.5x more people in Poland that live with wages below the world average.

It is purely arbitrary that the author made the cutting off point for the legend 20%, when it could easily be in 10%, which would seperate Poland and Lithuania (but not Estonia) from Switzerland. The author could also have based it on quartile ranges (which would defeat the nature of this analysis).

It doesn’t consider the subsistence farmers

I am unsure how this helps your argument.

If anything this all further reinforces the nature of unequal exchange and imperialism.

There are rarely any “true” full-time subsistence farmers in the Global South, for example, during periods of drought, or after seasonal harvests, - subsistance farming doesn’t guarantee full-time job security nor does it entail that (for example) the farmer is able to pay for school or healthcare for the farmer or their family.

and people who obtain resources without the market.

That is of statistical insignificance, unless you are going to argue that Capitalism and Imperialism (what you call the “market”) have not infilitrated atleast 5% of the world populace (400 million people). And if so - may I get a source? I must read about the 400 million people or more that escaped Capitalism!

Even if 80million people were not counted, 1% of the world population or the entire population of Germany, it would still not affect the conclusions made from the article and the map.

As described in the article:

To broaden the focus, we can apply the same reasoning, not only to the United States, but to the rich nations as a whole. We follow the World Bank’s classification of high-income countries:

The average national income per capita in high-income countries in 2021 is $55,225 per year (this and the following figures are in 2023 international dollars).
The total world population is 7.888 billion people.
Repaying the entire world’s population with the average income of the average citizen in high-income countries would require about $436 trillion per year.
However, the total national income of the entire world amounts to just $146 trillion annually.
If all the world’s annual income – eliminating the parasitic counterparts of labor: profit, rent, interest rates, etc. – was destined to simple reproduction, and thus distributed equally among the entire world population, it would be enough to cover barely one third of the average income of high-income countries: that is, about $18,510 per capita per year.

As long as the “proletariat” in the Global North earns more than their labour - earn more in return than their labour is entitled for - their material interests are in direct contradiction to the interests of the Global South masses.

Nor does it take into account cost of living.

It is using 2023 international dollars - so it does take into account cost of living, unless you are arguing that the World Bank’s “basket of goods” is flawed.

If you think about it, people who live “on less than a dollar per day” literally wouldn’t be able to live if they faced the same cost of living as people in western societies.

There is a difference between “living” and “surviving”.

The question we must ask ourselves is why is that? What makes their lives different from ours? What is considered essential, abundant or normal here that isn’t in the Global South?

To quote Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism by Communist Working Group and Arghiri Emmanuel.

The commodities which represent the reproduction costs of ther working class do more or less cost the same all over the world. generally speaking, the costs of maintaining a living as a Danish worker are the same in Denmark, Tanzania, Brazil or Hong Kong. The price for one kilo of wheat, one kilo of meat, one watch, or a transistor radio varies by 10, 20, 50 percent from country to country. However, the wages are 5, 10, 20 or 50, times higher in the imperialist countries.

Truthfully, that does not need to be quoted by I did anyways because the main point is that “living costs” is defined as the level needed for basic social reproduction. It does not entail short working hours, safe working conditions, the price of buying a meal at a restaurant, strong environmental regulations, the price of consumer goods or rent, etc.

The calculations in the main article explicitly mentions that it eliminated “the parasitic counterparts of labor: profit, rent, interest rates, etc.” by utilzing only data on production.

but the gap is exaggerated by the liberal worldview.

What is considered liberalism here?

It’s important to remember that a lot of this data is biased.

Yes but not necessarily for your own argument that the data is “exaggerated”.

The official data is given to the World Bank by member states, in which for Third World states, due to centuries of imperialist sabatoge, is unable to provide fully accurate statistics and often overrepresent organized workers. This means the disparity may even be larger in real life.

I recommend reading this article on the Labour Aristocracy and the book I quoted prior.

There has also been other extensive works on Imperialism in the late 20th and early 21st century that I think may help you understand the arguments being conveyed here.

PKK and Imperialism https://en.rnp-f.org/2015/03/24/pkk-and-imperialism/

💯

However I’d like to add your analysis a bit. Excerpt from my other comment again:

the material harm NGOs cause to people are two-fold.

On a societal level, they aim to circumvent and build alternative structures to the current government and thus without the “democratic accountability” that these governments have to face (even if they are bourgeois dictatorships, they still have to manage the contradictions within society to remain in power). This can be seen in many colour revolutions that have occurred the past 50 years.

They also introduce and import foreign concepts, what I call “academic lib phraseology”, without the democratic consultation and “diffusion” to the masses. The masses here aren’t dumb when they realise that these NGO liberals speak the same as any other NGO liberal in other countries or those in the West. This is not a coincidence.

On a local level, despite their claim to the contrary, they actually maintain and sustain the oppression of LGBT people. Since they do not address the material basis of the oppression and are funded by foreign elements, their only justification and purpose for existing IS the existence of the oppression of LGBT people in the targeted Global South country.

Why would an LGBT rights NGO founder want to achieve LGBT liberation? The founder would lose their only source of income and their entire career!

This is similar to when the labour aristocrats in a trade union stops representing the interests of the rank-and-file.

This also means that the NGOs feature the worst of the liberal activists, who are often groomed by the West in the first place through their scholarship programmes. They are filled with opportunists and careerists, because to them, civil society is their way of climbing the corporate ladder and for their “professional development”.

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Read this response first if you want full context.

Before I start, I want to preface this by saying that even though it may not be obvious to foreign observers, believe me when I say that the rhetorics and contentions you all have has already been extensively discussed and debated by anti-imperialists in the Global South. It may not be in English, it may not be available in neat and easily read blogs, essays and articles, but it has been discussed and taken into account.

Have a little faith in the Global South, okay?

Starting with the first article, it’s a reddit post. I am not bothered enough to even begin to engage with that. It’s reddit.

Second article - okay so some random guy swooped in and said some wrong things about sexuality and got barred as a result.

To chalk this incident up to the actions of one rogue counsellor ignores systemic issues of inadequate sexuality education, the group [Pink Dot SG] added.

Okay so no one here denies discrimination exists and sex education is lacking. What I am against is the use of this unforunate circumstance for psyops and NGO infiltration. We don’t need an NGO to say that we lack good sex education policy.

Third article - that is all completely true.

Fourth article - random culture war bullshit that was imported into Singapore by the West in which the article itself notes that the chances of any law proposal coming into fruition amounting to zero.

Fifth article - this is where it gets more serious and has some interesting stuff I want to highlight.

Firstly let’s talk about the website. “Express your heckin’ LGBTQ+ identity.” Ok some random company that profits off LGBT suffering by selling LGBT themed pins and apparrel and then funnels it into some other LGBT NGOs (more on this below). Yeah, seems about right.

I can talk a lot about the individualization, commodification and liberalization of “LGBTQ+” “identity” and it’s harmful impact on Global South gender and sexual diversity but I’ll not mention it here so it doesn’t lead to an essay.

On the article itself :

First few paragraphs, nothing of use, just the event that the first article covered and a high school level statistics course I guess.

It then discredits some pop science transphobic authors which I agree with.

The article mention two authors which is supposed to indict Singapore’s LGBTphobia because they were invited into a webinar?? Ok so some people thought these frauds had something valuable to say, doesn’t really signify much about the quality of life of LGBT people in Singapore.

And then it tries to scaremonger about “misinformation”. Hmm where have I heard this term before? Oh right, western liberal circles.

The article is very liberal because it reeks of the short-term sightedness present in all liberals, whether Amerikan or their comprador counterparts. We have been suffering with “misinformation” for 500 years under colonization and imperialism.

I do not care about the article’s scaremongering and pathetic elaboration on “muh SCIENCE!!!”. The East doesn’t really treat Science as some sort of sanctimonious and immutable ideology to bully others for wrongthink. That’s why traditional medicines still exist.

The normalisation of misinformation — including fake news and fake science — can have destabilising effects on society. We’ve seen this happen in the US with the Trump administration — fake information about the pandemic led to a weak response and loss of public trust in healthcare institutions, and made the US the country with the highest COVID-19 death rates among advanced nations.

And the article’s whole tangent on vaccines misunderstands the entirety of the US situation aswell. Perhaps the history of colonized people and US culture where large vaccination drives, quarantines and mask-wearing cultures isn’t the norm may lead to many Yankees resisting when the government forces people to do it. It is not just evil Trump ignoring ScienceTM.

In the section about Quentin Van Meter, this paragarph stood out to me:

Local transgender support organisation TransgenderSG has compiled a useful and robust list of corrections to the fake science shared by Quentin Van Meter during his webinar. We recommend reading it to understand the full scope of corrections.

Ok that’s an interesting NGO I never heard of before. Let’s look at their website.

So a random website made by some volunteers. Seems innocent enough.

Then I look at their collaborations.

On the first home page:

17 March 2021: Read the press release on the Universal Periodic Review report that we co-submitted with Sayoni and the Asia Pacific Transgender Network.

Ah the infamous Asian Pacific Transgender Network.

Some of their sponsors include the Robert Carr Fund and the Global Equality Fund.

Robert Carr Fund gets its money from:

I searched the Global Equality Fund and found it on www.state.gov of all places. Oh very nice.

It’s nice that Google also funds APTN to really drive home that the US is a dictatorship of Capital.

The rest of these orgs:

TheProjectX - an NGO that wants to legalize sex work lol. No further comment.

The T Project:

The founder and director “participated in the U.S Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership programme in 2018” and also “ILGA-Asia”, oh you mean the sister branch of ILGA-Europe. (ILGA-Asia suspciously does not list any source of their funding…)

and ILGA World

Their Co-Secretary General: “Mexican Microfinance Institutions” (LOL), “MacArthur Foundation”, “EXXON MOBIL” <-- now that’s funnier.

Their other Co-Sec General: “Global Interfaith Network on Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (former Co-Chair)” the org in which has funding from:

Oogachaga has this to say about their own website:

Yes, the NGO is sponsored by the High Commission of Canada and is transparent about it.

The jokes write themselves. It’s like a russian nesting doll of NGO and Western fuckery.

The book ‘The Aware Saga: Civil Society and Public Morality in Singapore’ also has information on how the christian right managed to ban official sex ed from ever being able to acknowledge or properly educate on gender and sexual minorities.

Sex education is an important issue that gets hijacked by “civil society” that politicizes and polarises the people. I have not read the book and it’s use of “civil society” in the title discourages me from ever touching it.

They constantly call LGBTQ foreign interference yet allow anti-LGBTQ talking heads into the country.

I’m sorry that Singapore isn’t an Orientalist Authoritarian Despotic State that will restrict anyone from entering if they are speaking anything that someone else would disagree with. (And this isn’t even the case - it’s just a random online webinar.)

It is argued that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is entirely imported (which I agree) but seemingly when I say that pro-LGBTQ+ rhetoric also comes from the West it is somehow belittled.

I expect that for the comprador liberals who doesn’t even know about their own colonial history but I am a bit dejected that this same rhetoric is also conveyed in an “anti-imperialist” site.

Perhaps it is a means to divide the people and cause instability like I said in my previous comments? So yes, I will call it western cultural imperialism when Christian sodomy laws were enacted that restricted Global South cultures to the Eurocentric gender binary but I will also call it western cultural imperialism when these liberal NGOs faff about “queer theory”, “intersectionality” and “lgbtqia+ rights”,.

This is because it all inevitably came from European Enlightenment epistemology (which itself stems from Western Philosophy), reeking with self-centered individiualism that can not facilitate and forment lasting gender and sexual liberation.

We survived 500 years of onslaught and invasion. We will develop our own path to liberation.

I recognise that life is, perhaps, awful, but that won’t make me give colonizers an inch when they WILL take the whole mile.

I wrote these two long effortposts with the acknowledgement that it may just be disregarded as a slight of hand and all my time invested here may just be wasted. But I’ll say this: this perspective I am saying right now isn’t fringe. It may not be directly structured into the sentences I formulated in these two posts, but it is more common than you think. I’m going to take a long break after this. This has exhausted me.

So there’s this popular Ex-Muslim youtuber that I used to watch a while back.

They became a raging Zionist.

Average “Ex-Muslim” Westerner be like.

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They make some noise about it sometimes but when you country is fully intertwined with Global Capital liberal media tends to look the other way.

the size of Italy

Speaking of which…

It is up to the specific society, nation, civilisation and state to determine how it will handle “religious” affairs.

Religion is in quotes because how religion is understood in the East is different and often misconstrued to how it is understood in the West.

And as such, questions like if “dialectical materialism and a belief in God mutually exclusive” is unanswerable once you get into the specifics because it is broad ranging and implies too many things at once.

Let the masses of every culture on Earth determine their own path to modernisation. It is not up to us that is the least affected and the most encumbered with dubious assertions to dictate how other people handle their internal and communal affairs.

I realise my mistake in engaging with questions that pretend to be universal while yet ultimately being situated in an Anglophone, western-dominated space. As such it is best to not put my nose where it doesn’t belong.

This will be my final answer on this topic and I will stop commenting on such matters directly on this site.

There is a classic quote I usually refer to when someone asks this question regarding Geographical Determinism.

It is from Stalin’s 1938 Dialectical and Historical Materialism itself:

There can be no doubt that the concept “conditions of material life of society” includes, first of all, nature which surrounds society, geographical environment, which is one of the indispensable and constant conditions of material life of society and which, of course, influences the development of society. What role does geographical environment play in the development of society? Is geographical environment the chief force determining the physiognomy of society, the character of the social system of man, the transition from one system to another, or isn’t it?

Historical materialism answers this question in the negative.

Geographical environment is unquestionably one of the constant and indispensable conditions of development of society and, of course, influences the development of society, accelerates or removed its development. But its influence is not the determining influence, inasmuch as the changes and development of society proceed at an incomparably faster rate than the changes and development of geographical environment. in the space of 3000 years three different social systems have been successively superseded in Europe: the primitive communal system, the slave system and the feudal system. In the eastern part of Europe, in the U.S.S.R., even four social systems have been superseded. Yet during this period geographical conditions in Europe have either not changed at all, or have changed so slightly that geography takes no note of them. And that is quite natural. Changes in geographical environment of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand years are enough for even very important changes in the system of human society.

It follows from this that geographical environment cannot be the chief cause, the determining cause of social development; for that which remains almost unchanged in the course of tens of thousands of years cannot be the chief cause of development of that which undergoes fundamental changes in the course of a few hundred years

In the academic discipline of Geography, this sort of inevitable determinism, has been rejected since about the 1950s for both it’s colonial assertions, but also it’s patently inaccurate claims. No serious social scientist of any background would take the claims of geographical determinism at face value.

If you would like to entertain a more serious and dialectical understanding of Geography and it’s relation to class society, I would recommend a A Theory of Imperialism (2017) by Patnaik and Patnaik. There has also been numerous other works dealing with Uneven (and Combined) Development within an urban, urban-rural, and of course, international contexts aswell.

Hell, if anything, Marxism’s pre-occupation with the peasant question and primitive accumulation IS already a valuable theoretical and practical contribution to understanding the role of Geography in society. And unlike the vulgar geographical determinism of the Eurocentrists in which colonialism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, Marxism has always been a few steps ahead of conventional western science in that regard.

[Long post ahead]

Frankly, I was a bit confused at first at the responses to Hakim’s supposed misdeed. I saw practically nothing wrong with his post.

This is speaking as someone who considers themself “ex-muslim” and rarely practices any of the daily rituals of being muslim.

I have read through both the Hexbear thread and this one here on Lemmygrad. Firstly, I would like to say I agree with Aru’s comment on the other parallel thread running right now.

I’d like to address some of the contentions people have about the post. Hakim starts his post with this statement:

How do the Palestinian people persist? As muslims…

Not because they ARE muslims, as in, Islam was the only way in which they were able to carry out anti-colonial struggle, but rather they carry out the anti-colonial struggle through BEING muslim. Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.

It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education. It is the masjid that organizes the local community. It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.

To say that if Palestine was fully christian or any other “religion”, they would still reject colonization, misses the point. It doesn’t matter about some hypotheticals that you concoct in your head. That’s as useful as saying that if China was 100% Christian they would still be communist - what is the point in engaging in idealist hypotheticals? To simply compare it to Christianity, is idealism. Because you are not comparing the reality in which these cultural traditions, epistemologies, and beliefs operate. You are comparing one idea to another, utterly deaf to the material context behind it. The material reality of the ummah, the material reality of Palestine, means that Islam is the force in which anti-imperialist and anti-colonialism is carried out.

So yes, perhaps for many muslims, the Quran, the life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) becomes the starting point of their political conciousness, and to somehow call it immature, backward, or a type of “false consciousness”, is to fall into the orientalist idealist tropes of the days of direct colonization.

Throughout the entire Islamic world we have seen numerous secular and communist organizations that directly collaborated with the colonizer, that never gained support from the muslim masses and that also had to face a visceral reactionary force funded by the West. To say that secular movements only failed in the Islamic world because they were being pitted against reactionary Western-funded movements ignores the fact that if these secular movements truly had the mandate of the people - truly did listen to the working masses, they would have succeeded in maintaining power in the first place.

To act like this analysis is somehow “idealism”, when it is actually idealism to ignore history and material conditions in favour of a dogmatic secular understanding of class warfare.

Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR? Why doesn’t anyone ever mention about the beacon of liberal modernity and secularism - France - in which if you ask anyone in the ummah what they think about it, they would vehemently reject associating with that Islamophobic “secular” state. Why is it immediately assumed that when someones says they want an Islamic country, it is immediately assumed they want a monoreligious populace with forced conversions on heretics and heathens? Why is it assumed when we say something is Islamic, it means that it cannot involve people of other faiths (or lack thereof)?

In my eyes, the answer is simple. It is because the Western left still carries the mental burden of colonization, of cultural genocide, and they project it onto the global south - onto the ummah.

Are we suppose to ignore the Islamic influence of for example Southeast Asian foreign policy, Arab nationalism, or North African decolonization? How about the Islamic Axis of Resistance pushing back against the Zionist Entity and other US imperial projects in West Asia? Islamic socialism and Islam has been, and continues to be, materially closer to anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and communism than Western Marxism could ever even dream about (that is - if they even recognize imperialism). Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.

Is it the “muh slems” that are idealistic, or is it the Western’s left misunderstanding of the “unity of opposites”? If you can only percieve reality in absolutes, in black-and-white, then “religion” is always “immaterial”; that means you will be unable to identify your friends from your enemies and it also means you will never understand Islam and the ummah.

Thanks for the highlight! This was a really interesting video.

I also like to clarify a thing you mention.

Chinese Malay

isn’t really used in Malaysia unless specifically referring to someone who was raised by a Malay speaking parent (often muslim and male) and Chinese speaking parent. Two different racialised groups.

This is because of the racialised definition of “Malay” that came after British colonization. I elaborated more about it here. You were right to call them Chinese Malay if the anti-colonial forces in the country won, which would have radically returned the term “Malay” back to it’s indigenous meaning or if they fit the description I laid out above.

However, nowadays, the government recognized term and how most people identify themselves as is “Chinese Malaysian”. Chinese Peranakans (sometimes just Peranakans only) could also be an alternative term for Chinese people that have inter-married with local peoples earlier in the colonization process, but that usually refer to those that typically have lost their ability to speak Chinese and have families in Peninsular Malaysia that date back atleast a few generations and practice “Peranakan” or “Baba-Nyonya” customs.