The recent rise in corporate bankruptcies in America may well be a sign of much worse to come. Capitalism without bankruptcy, it is said, is like Christianity without hell.” It was with these words that the ECONOMIST opened its report about the banking crisis.

We are living at an extremely dangerous moment in the history of mankind during these months.

Our situation reminds us of Rainer Maria Rilke’s lament prior to the world wars: “The earth” he stated in his horror “had fallen into the hands of people.”

Let us not fool ourselves: the collapse of the bank system will be accompanied by the automatic disintegration of humanism. Instead of “humanism” we could soon be confronted with “wolves” in our cities.

Whatever happens, we must be prepared in the days to come for the imminent and momentous return of the Political. But what kind of political reality will it be and how can we prepare ourselves for it?

What is certain is that the return of the Political will not be ushered in by states or statesmen. The history of nations has ended up with the states themselves having mutated into banks. States conduct themselves today like banks – heads of government like bankers. America – the leading democracy – has long since developed a one-party system which is subordinate to economic interests.

Thus the theme of this lecture is nothing but a mapping out of the basic outline of the return of the Political. We Muslims are aware that neither the end of history has been arrived at nor that the political destiny and the political responsibility of mankind can be simply done away with.

It will also be necessary in the light of the above to consider the differences between:

internet and revelation

and

the land and sea

But let us proceed step by step in our thinking.

In order that the Political may return, one must be clear as to which reality we are actually living in. It is not enough that we watch television in order to experience this reality. We must – as our Shaykh, Shaykh Dr. AbdalQadir as-Sufi has advised us - travel and look about us in the world.

Finding out about the world is an important precondition. Whoever ignores for example the millions of suffering or hungry people of this time, or no longer cares for them, will as a result not want the return of the Political.

The horrifying situation which has arisen in the years of our de-politicization is symbolized by the mass production of “naked life”.

Today we find these people – who, as the Italian philosopher Agamben defined, possess no more than their bodies - in ever greater numbers in the well-known camps of Guantanamo and Abu Ghuraib for example, or in the world-wide refugee camps, and also increasingly in European old people’s homes, centres for asylum-seekers, airports or police stations.

The bearers of this ‘naked life’ have given up the fight for their political sovereignty.

It would be dangerous to ignore the phenomenon of ‘naked life’ – if only for the fact that it is coming nearer and nearer by the day.

Recently I had to wait at a red light here in Cape Town when I caught sight of an old man dressed in rags with an empty supermarket trolley near my car. This man with his empty facial expression and his empty trolley was a symbol for the poverty and destitution in a world without the Political.

Alongside the experience of travelling which shapes and influences us, we must also have clear sources of information and evaluation. At this point I would like to briefly consider the fundamental difference between “internet and revelation”. The basic question in this respect is whether a person creates a reality for himself or whether reality creates people for itself.

As we all know Internet reveals a massive supply of technological information today. At the click of the mouse every individual can assemble the exact reality which seems to him the most agreeable and enjoyable. Everything is right but nothing is true. In the internet one can document any particular political view with a corresponding flood of data. In effect the net does not create anything but a structural and extremely individualized system of belief.

Of course the internet also has a political function for the masses who use it daily. The best censorship – at least this is what the French, political writer Jean Chrisophe Rufin told me in Cologne – is the creation of vast amounts of data which effectively bury any idea of truth and conviction.

It is quite clear: the return of the Political and the substance of political decision-making can never arise from a base of subjectivity and arbitrariness.

In response to the question as to where his political hopes lay with respect to a future worth living Rufin told the astonished audience that mankind needed “a book!” - in order to be in any position to reassemble in a political manner. This book must constitute a counterweight to the flood of published books, data and information.

We Muslims possess just such a book.

The Qur’an reveals a SINGLE reality for over a billion people, contains a warning and a precise and tangible order.

In the Qur’an is also to be found the breathtaking key for the modern problem of the Political and for the return of human sovereignty in general. It is precisely this key which Heidegger was unable to have and which turned him inevitably into a “political esotericist” after the second world war.

What then is this key? Allah explains that the technology of finance is a challenge issued against Him, and that for this reason He has declared war on usury!

At the same time mankind, the instrument of the Divine, is charged with the task of establishing zakat. It is this responsibility required of mankind which ensures its political sovereignty, will and power.

The return of the Political cannot be brought about by the individual Muslim, however good he may be. For this, of course, larger, political entities and political leadership are required. The vehicle for the establishment of the Political is not however the state, which as we have learnt has become in fact a bank, but rather membership of a jamaa’at.

Let us not forget: in general the existential meanings of the Political are not to be understood in terms of states, associations, clubs, parties or in a retreat to one’s tiny flat or apartment.

One of the greatest secular thinkers of the bourgeois state, Hegel, explained that the pillars of the bourgeois state were “life within associations and small families”. In such states the Political, as we know today, is disappearing. Muslims who are shaped by life in associations and small family units cannot bring about the return of the Political.

Shaykh AbdalQadir as-Sufi has described in his political classic “The Time of the Bedouin” the driving force of “Assabiya” – this ‘being together’ of the Muslims as defined by Ibn Khaldun.

This kind of politique has a decisive advantage: it can exist within but also beyond any state entity and its frontiers.

Alongside our listening to and obedience to the instructions and warnings in the Qur’an two further dimensions must be considered necessary for any return to the Political. These I would like to briefly mention here.

On the HAJJ we learn that we do not have only a revealed order but also a location. The deen is not only an abstract system of belief but it always has a location as well. According to the European political thinker Carl Schmitt - who was as unfortunate as he was famous - nihilism is nothing other than the separation of order and location. On the hajj we learn that we are bound in solidarity in a single reality with other Muslims from all over the world. Here we see people who do not have anything else but a thin covering of cloth and Allah. They are – politically speaking - the radical opposite to “naked life” described by Agamben.

The other dimension is a particular spiritual experience which is only possible by means of a correct Sufism.

I remember a press conference in Cologne years ago when Shaykh Dr., AbdalQadir as-Sufi was asked by a young journalist whether “a Sufi Shaykh does not normally sit under a staircase and make dhikr” questioning in this way why Shaykh AbdalQadir was speaking about zakat and economic questions. Shaykh AbdalQadir’s reply to this was: “Yes that is absolutely true, but for this reason one has to take our political situation so seriously!”

We, that is of course only the Sufis of authentic instruction, are today – paradoxically – destined to have a deeper understanding of the Political. In this respect it is purely a question of our certainty as to the essence and natural goal of the Political: POWER.

What is power?

According to secular understanding, power is organized will. The more will a person can organize the more powerful he appears. The strength of the Political is rooted– according to this manner of understanding – in the will of the individual person and may be intensified by the organization of the will of the masses as required.

Ernst Jünger however recognized early on that the modern state de-politicizes and neutralizes  the masses and then reduces them to “workers”.

In order to facilitate the return of the Political we must radically change our relationship to power. We Muslims know that the understanding of power as described in secular terms is false. Power is not a question of organization. OUR experience of absolute power demands that we deactivate our own will and in doing so obliterate ourselves as well. Thus we experience the basis of our politique: all POWER is by Allah.

Contrary to the standard definition of political organization, we Muslims are neither powerful or powerless.

Let us note in passing: this form of deactivation and obliteration – which is at the centre of the spiritual experience of Sufism– has nothing to do with the political madness of parties and their leadership.

When asked after a concert whether he was not in fact a “dictator” whom one had to follow unquestioningly Herbert von Karajan smiled and said: “You should imagine the director and orchestra as an interactive team  rather than a flock of birds”.

Let us sum up: in order to facilitate the return to the Political we need: 1. A revelation  2.  A precise and tangible ordering 3. A location and of course a created world in which the Political can  come about.

In the final section of my lecture I would like to talk briefly about the dramatic contrast between land and sea. This contrast sets the stage on which we may expect the return of the Political. The return of the Political is not a theory which is situated in an empty space. Geopolitics is also always a matter of destiny.

I would like to mention again one final time the last great political thinker of Europe, Carl Schmitt. He continues to be of importance even today. Please do not forget that, statistically speaking, a new book has appeared about Carl Schmitt every month up to the present day since the passing away of this thinker.  Despite this however it is time to add a new chapter.

Schmitt realized that every political authority laid claim to its sovereign right to define the meanings of political terms. With his famous definition, “the nature of the political lies in its differentiation between friend and foe”, Schmitt founded the myth of the Political.

Ironically this controversial definition is being revived by the liberal enemies of Carl Schmitt - witnessed by the fact that European liberalism defines the Muslims as the enemies of the state.

We Muslims are not however interested in a dialectical theory against the enemy but rather in a positive establishment of a Nomos. Neither do we need an enemy in order to find our identity nor do we dream of a world without enemies.

What we need in order to find our identity is a Nomos. Only in this way will we be able to practice Islam in a complete way. It is with the establishment of the Nomos that the Political – about whose return we are reflecting upon here – has its ultimate goal.

For this reason we are more interested in Schmitt’s forgotten definition of the Nomos than the famous definition of the Political. Schmitt in his customary brilliant manner emphasized that the Nomos is not a law but a way of life. The Nomos ist a “taking, dividing and pasturing”. Thus the Nomos – according to Schmitt – is a continental, land-bound matter as it presupposes the taking of land.

The  Nomos creates an existential reality in a specific territorial space which affords a location and order to the spiritual and material and which is delimited by the rising and setting sun.

Only when the Nomos is established will it be possible for the era of the world-wide civil war to come to its end and – in a legal sense – for a true peace to be possible again.

It is logical to assume that the establishment of a new Nomos on the land masses of the Eurasian continent will be opposed by the transatlantic powers whose power is based on an aggressive naval and air supremacy and will be actively fought against by NATO. The more the landmasses of the continent grow together the more likely it is that the power of the transatlantic Empire will come to an end. We will experience this conflict in our own life time.

The connecting of order to location, the overcoming of nihilism, and the establishment of salat and zakat are the political goals of the Muslims. The result of the Muslim way of life is the new Nomos.

Thus the return of the Political has a first political strategy:

1.   Our Muslim media must transmit an understanding of reality which is inspired by the Qur’an and must invite people to Islam.

2.   We must network the European Muslims and organize the meeting of European and Asian Muslims in Istanbul and Moscow.

3.   We must cultivate, encourage and refine the relations of the Muslims of Europe, Russia and Central Asia.

4.   We must establish salat and zakat, order and location along the axes of the Eurasion continent.

5.   We must create a new NOMOS and a society free of interest with our own financial measure: the Dinar and the Dirham. The distribution of the Dinar und Dirham is a public duty.

And finally, if Allah wills, we shall ensure – after the return of the Political - the necessary establishment of a political adab which does not want power for itself but will by nature hand it on. In other words we will enable the appearance of a new order for a new territorial space.