One thing that used to bother me a lot, even when I was deep in the throes of my love sickness, was that NK, UK, and US used to refer to all non-Muslims as "the kufar", and the West as "Darul Harb" or the lands of the kufar, things like that. At every dars, NK would pray and he would three times pray for the victory of the Muslims over the kufar. When they would speak about non-Muslim women, it was always this idea that they were empty headed, empty souled, that they were sex machines, who have no dignity or anything like that. Funny I never heard them speak about non-Muslim men the same way.
I know this is something that a lot of Muslims don't care about. But it bothered me because NK and UK used to be non-Muslims and a lot of the murids did too. That means we all have non-Muslim parents. I mean, I used to wonder, if these are people of haqq, and it's supposed to be about your excellent character (a phrase we heard all the time, especially from UK), then how is this excellent? It was offputting to me.
It was the venom with which they spoke of the West and of non-Muslims. US used to talk about how we would rise up in victory against them. She would make fun of the kufar, and would question the iman of Muslims who lived in the West, even though her own family does live there.
If you have read "Reliance of the Traveller", then you know that there is a chapter on jihad in there and that the book doesn't pull any punches on its treatment of non-Muslims. Now, it is true that this is an old book from "a different time," but it is intended to be a manual for us, today, to live Islam and understand the fiqh of the Shafiis, but also of Islam as a whole. And the book is very clear about fighting and killing non-Muslims, treating them differently when they are ahlul dhimma, and things like that. It's all very much contrary to the image of Islamic brotherhood and tolerance that Muslims talk about on television.
This hatred of the West was an issue because there were a lot of the sisters who didn't want to be in Jordan and wanted to go home. There were a few women who came expecting to stay in Jordan for a few months or even a year, and then once they got there it was like "Oh we're going to live here." They missed their families and life in Jordan isn't easy, even if you are from America and have more money than a Jordanian. So sometimes they would come seeking the counsel of these people, about how sad and miserable they were in Jordan and wanted to go home and it would be "Why do you want to leave the Muslims for the kufar?" I think this is one of multiple ways the women were induced to stay in Jordan rather than coming to an agreement with their husbands that they should leave.
There was a woman who was very ill, and had bad allergies that the Jordanian climate made worse, and even her husband wouldn't leave b/c UK and NK told him not to, and UK and US would say, "Why she wants to be with the kufar I don't know, they have doctors here in Jordan, Muslim doctors, that she can visit. And she should be patient with her sickness. Jordan is a land of baraka because the prophets were here, and she wants to leave that?" Things like that. It didn't matter that the doctors in Jordan are kind of shady or that they couldn't do anything - it was the land of Jordan itself that was making her ill. So when she did finally leave, a lot of the sisters took it as a sign of her (the sick woman) weak iman. "She just didn't try hard enough," is something that I heard many times.
A final part to this. I was with a group of murids, and this was in America. We were doing something for another murid, helping him out in his business, and we had to go out and buy supplies, meet vendors, things like that. Another one of the murids who lived in Jordan and would travel back and forth was with us and everytime we would go somewhere, he would remark on the kufar. He would even do things like take a deep breath and say "Sidi (to the men, not to me), can't you smell the kufr in the air? I can't tolerate it, I need to be back in the land of baraka."
He would also say how they had to be brought to Islam or risk the sword, things like that. I said to him, but didn't people come to Islam through the spread of the sufis and the traders and he goes "A very small portion. The truth is that most of the people who came to Islam did so because of military conquest. Islam was spread by the sword and we shouldn't be ashamed of it." He would even say these types of things when we were shopping for supplies and again later when he was shopping for treats and goodies to take back to Jordan because Jordan didn't have the little extras that he enjoyed in life. Only the West did.
But it did embarass me, and others, because we came to Islam through knowledge and peaceful means, and here he was saying that if people like us didn't come to it, then just kill us. Maybe he is being truthful. I'm not a historian so I really don't know, but it doesn't matter. It's just that this guy, who is a very close murid of the shaykh, exemplifies the mindset of NK and US on the matter of non-Muslims. Hatred of them, hatred of all the things they have, even while taking advantage of their technology and using their passports. None of them, not even NK and US, have given up the passports of their native Western countries, and because the laws of Jordan for hajj are very strict, NK makes hajj using his US passport, since the rules for Americans are more relaxed.
I thought it was plain hypocrisy. Decry the West even though they would seek out Westerners to join the tariq. Hate non-Muslims even though some of the murids came from convert backgrounds, especially some of their favorite ones, and the shaykh himself (or, maybe he has psychological issues about not being born a Muslim). To me, it was like on one level they will talk about love and peace and being an excellent person, but in reality, when you got up close, there was hypocrisy and hatred and a more militant attitude that you would expect from other groups of Muslims but not sufis.
Anyway, it might be something that doesn't bother a lot of people but it bothered me because it seemed two faced, and to me, it kind of hinted at a darker, uglier attitude and belief about Islam and the world that lay under the surface. I knew from a long time ago that people who were "higher up" in the tariqa received teachings and counsel that were supposed to be "secret" or that the rest of us weren't "ready" to know. When I got to see their hatred of others up close, I wondered what some of those teachings were, and honestly - it scared me a little. Again, it might just be me, and I definitely never heard aything that was really far out. But it was one of those things, that over time, peeled away the illusion and showed me the reality.
