From time to time we mine the treasures of the old majalis sittings with Souliman Sousi from back in the day, here’s a gem, for those who can perceive. Shaytan is always busy. Iblis and he Dajjal manipulates, steers, and guides human cultures through the ages using narratives, stories fables and myths, as well as language itself. Language is key to the science of memetics, for it’s chiefly through language that ideas pass from mind to mind.
As long time readers and listeners would be aware, and new sisters and brothers just joining us are learning , for over 30 years before retiring and disappearing from view, Soluiman Sousi quietly taught a small number of people around the world about the reality of the doctrine of the dajjal hidden in our classical Islamic texts and lore, and indeed within the Quran itself. Interpretations scattered across literally thousands of classical manuscripts and texts but cleverly obscured and arranged in ways to prevent millions of Muslims in history from realizing the truth.
The Dajjal leaves his footprints outside of our narrow Muslim circles, however. Sometimes with a sharp eye you can see his footprints in the most surprising places. William Shakespeare is an interesting example.
Like Milton, Dante, Firdawsi, Pir-e Roshan Bayazed Ansari, Abu Nuwas, and many other interesting literary figures, Shakespeare had an unparalleled influence on his language of expression: English. In fact in many ways he’s one of the fathers of the modern English language. Modern English as it left the Tudor period owes an immense debt to Shakespeare, who single-handedly created more new words in English than anyone else outside of Milton.
In doing this Shakespeare cemented certain changes into the English Language itself, and thereby altering the mind of its speakers for the rest of time. Shakespeare profoundly influenced, changed, modified, indeed warped the English speaking mind in ways to make it more manageable.
Maybe you are skeptical, think about it deeply. Reflect on this. Why are certain slogans and phrases, even words, just tiny words, so effective in pushing the emotional buttons of Americans, British and English, Anglo-Canadians and Australians, New Zealanders? There are slight variants between them all, but they are slight.
You can push people’s emotional buttons with a tiny turn of a phrase, drive people to genocidal war, set them against each other, or unite them in mind-bogilingly huge undertakings. Most of these turns of phrases originated with one man’s pen: ‘The Bard’ himself, as he is often called. Shakespeare is explicitly seen as The Bard, the Master Poet of all English. That should tell you something.
Here’s the key to really understanding what happened: Howard Bloom. In the late 1990s Souliaman Sousi directed us to the late Harold Bloom, one of the most influential Jewish-American literary critics in the late 20th and early 21st century. Our teacher advised us to make a special note of Bloom’s recent work, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. What does this have anything to do with the Dajjal or Islam or Prophecy? Well that’s what we asked.
Being unable to grasp the relevance of it to the Din and prophecy it took us some time to follow our teacher’s advice and examine the book. Years later, once we did, Souliman Sousi explained its relevance, shedding light on things far beyond Bloom’s ken. Bloom argued that Shakespeare’s writings absolutely altered human consciousness, at first for the English but thereafter for the entire world that the English influenced.
Bloom’s thesis is that Shakespeare’s writings actually changed the world itself, and created the modern mind that we are now all influenced by. William Shakespeare subtly re-created humanity, mentally and spiritually, in particular through certain characters, like Hamlet, or Falstaff, or MacBeth. Souliman Sousi affirmed this, and said it went beyond anything Bloom himself ever imagined, and Bloom was the first writer to actually concretely grasp this.
But what Bloom did not grasp, Souliman explained, was how, and why, Shakespeare’s deep use of language itself accomplished this. And moreover that these changes profoundly warped humanity, and the British most profoundly so. They created the modern mind. Bloom saw that as good. However it’s more complex than he was able to imagine.
We were all altered, changed, in ways that we simply can’t go back from. But by becoming conscious of what was done, and broadening your grasp of languages, you can better realize it, and compensate for it.
William Shakespeare was responsible for an extremely large number of neologisms, i.e. newly coined words. More than anyone in his age. Beyond just words he introduced a massive amount of terms, cliches and phrases, buzzwords, turns-of-phrase, that mold the modern English speaking mind. You are made of the slogans repeated around you constantly. Whether they come from Nubuwwa – prophetic teaching, or from comic books.
Shakespeare’s influence was unparalleled not only in his age, but in times up to our age as well. Not even Milton surpassed him, though Milton was also responsible for massively re-working the English language. And so too was the anonymous “authors” of the King James Bible, allegedly written by a committee but betraying the overwhelming influence of a single hand, and who was contemporaneous with Shakespeare.
The King James Bible and William Shakespeare’s plays and poems are the chief cultural products of the Tudor Age that absolutely re-worked the modern English mind. It’s no accident that his age was the very beginning of modernity itself.
Whoever William Shakespeare really was, as with whoever the real authors of the King James Bible were, these works and Shakespeare’s in particular cemented the changes in the then quite fluid English language and effectively cemented a certain mentality in the English, and those whom the English later influenced by their language. English was not one language then, it was a collection of quite disparate dialects, some still quite close to the older Saxon and German of Beowulf’s age.
Many English dialects at the time of Shakespeare itself wouldn’t be intelligible with a modern English speaker. They are literally different languages. But the dialect of Kent and London, as molded by Shakespeare, came to effectively dominate and re-work all of them, into a new language, a new mode of expression: one that became international, and in time a World Language. A new lingua franca.
What’s the “take-home point”? The scheming never ends. The dajjal is not just on an island somewhere, waiting in a grotto or abandoned monastery until the end of days. Rather, he has been and is currently actively walking, living, and working among the people of the world, and in particular the Muslims, in disguise, wearing various ‘hats’ so to speak, and patiently working his fitnah and misguiding people. Ibn Sayyad was only one of many identifies, disguises, or let’s say ‘hats’ that he wore and continues to wear. We believe William Shakespeare also was one.
You will never understand how he does what he does, or why he does what he does, and if you have the misfortune to run into him and he tells you then don’t forget: his business, his occupation, his vocation is misguidance. That’s what he does.