Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I couldn't have put it better.
I don't know if it was the excess of other, more important things I was asked to think about in childhood, but I've always found patriotism/tribalism a little self-aggrandizing.
Patriotism was never an issue we discussed at home, except to say how it keeps dividing people instead of uniting them. It isn't the simplified meaning the dictionary gives you. It has roots in people's souls that have reached in so deeply that they overlook Islamic teachings.
If you take my extended family, for example, three of my cousins have parents who are from different states. I have a cousin, she married a guy who is three years younger than her. I have aunties who work and their husbands stay at home. One of my dad's cousins from his mother's side (let's call her X) and my dad's uncle from his father's side (let's call him Y) wanted to marry. X married Y, and suddenly she's my aunt and she's my grandmother at the same time. But I call her "didi". Plus, Y is my dad's uncle, but he's the younger one. X and Y have a daughter, she's younger than my cousin's daughter. So the aunt is younger than the niece.
It's crazy, Ma Shaa Allah, but if we allowed the rules of culture and patriotism to play out, this (Islamically) perfect normal family wouldn't have been allowed. Then again, my point is I'm not proud because I'm a part of this family, but because they've been able to disregard the cultural whims forced upon them. It's not always about the vigorous support for the country, it's also how much that controls you. Don't get me wrong, we should be protective of the land we live in, but to the point of pride?
The Qur'an discusses four types of jahiliyyah. One of them is himyat-al-jahiliyyah. NAK describes it as "making affiliations rooted in an ignorant sense of superiority, tribalism or nationalism."
This kind of ignorance is when loyalty and obsession is bound to things that aren't rational. It talks, not only about how people support sports teams and fight about it --that's a mild case--, but also when you decide your lineage and culture is superior to others. My language is superior, yours has hardly half the richness, and don't you dare say anything bad about it in front of me.
Even within Islam, if you're not careful, it could easily make you look arrogant when you say my teachingsand opinions are better, my school of thought is the best and I will look down upon every other. It happens when people feel threatened that they may be wrong, or that they may lose their integrity. All of this, without leaving doors open for improvement or correction, without leaving room for an open mind.
It's a kind of insult, in my opinion. For those of you who know Urdu, we call this feeling of superiority as "khudgarzi", because the English equivalent doesn't offer the required emotion. (Disclaimer: That's my reason for telling you the urdu-almost-equivalent word, not because I'm somehow supposed to be proud of it.)
I mean, excuse me, but when did you become an owner of anything in this world? What are you claiming that for? We are as temporary in this world as the second that just passed while you were reading this sentence.
These people will literally invite you for it, saying"ey benim cahiliye!"(I used a similar-sounding, similar-meaning Arabic word for it in the title. 😏) *facepalm*
An apparent great big concern for the world today is finding spouses. One of my friends who got married recently had this tradition in her family to marry cousins (translation: keep the property in the house). You know why? Because you've bound yourself to a chair with all these ropes of pride and patriotism, of ignorance and superiority. You're not overlooking it like how Islam teaches us to.
We have a word in medicine for the consequences of continuously marrying inside the community.
Inbreeding depression.
After a few generations, it's fatal. The genetic mixing doesn't stay ideal. Suddenly, everyone's questioning about the still-births and blaming it on the female (of course). This friend of mine finds it hard to tell her family all of this, please do make du'a for her, In Shaa Allah.
