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Steadfast elders are hard to find and I am grateful Dr. Omar fulfills that role. I found the old white man online providing the meat of historicity for Imran Hosein’s extensive works on eschatology (INSIGHT Conferences: KL, Malaysia, 2011–2014). Not long after, I was making my way through the Sheikh’s books when Saudi authorities confiscated Dr. Omar’s in the mail. So I went to KL to obtain signed copies from him personally. That was nearly five years ago. Since then, and despite an age difference of nearly 50 years, we’ve transitioned from mentor and student to friends and budding colleagues.
In terms of traditional hierarchies, he addresses mankind’s recent failure to mature due to the collapse of high cultures. He claims the arrested moral development followed a rather determined destruction of customary social order, a phenomenon that initially struck the church before the Enlightenment when it mortally wounded the Ancien Régimes. This processing of mankind favors rootless oligarchs wedded—not to land, people or principle—but solely to mammon and power. He further suggests reconstruction efforts have recently incurred an irredeemable liability after post-modern academics and leadership failed to consult science and divine agency before granting “building permits to sandcastle city planners of unsustainable catamite farms”.
Globe trotting scholars often discuss the Islamization of Knowledge (IOK). I’ve read them and numerous philosophers, Muslim and not, who endlessly talk of coupling science with wisdom and revealed knowledge. But despite reams of sophist rhetoricians who reinvent ancient wheels, I’ve seldom seen it done except by Dr. Omar and a few others who generally avoid IOK venues. For this purpose, he targets neglected disciplines and historicity to synthesize secular sciences with Revealed Knowledge using intuitive induction and time-honored wisdom drawn from the experience of giants. He describes marital and sexual metaphysics, and by extension, their relevance to decent human relationships as well as morals, human development and civilization. Of greater interest is his narrative on a hidden trans-generational war against the fundamental tenets that sustain legitimate societal institutions, which he contends it is conducted by centuries-old associations. Dr. Zaid even documents how sabotage allows nobodies attached to nothing but pernicious avarice to guide the world into the contemporary stupidity of fragile narcissism; an estate that harbors destruction, misery, loneliness, wantonness and pan
Heidegger, like Martin Luther, held to social theories centered on ‘marriage’ (vs. celibacy), ‘homecoming’ and ‘dwelling’. These themes embrace the existential fulfillment of human purpose (vocation and social responsibility). Holderlin claimed all three sentiments could not exist without the repose that humbly accepts naturally ordered hegemony; i.e., of life ‘as it is’ in the absence of vain abstractions. Taken together, their positions are not only wholly German but also anathema to the Counter-Reformation’s effort to salvage Rome’s ‘Peter Pence’ monopoly; an institution the doctor appraises from the uncommon perspective of a cult that defends fabrications rather than genuine spirituality. Yet our modern world appears blind-to or careless-of these facts of life and history. Indeed, many in the postmodern world are purposely displaced while others no longer ‘dwell’ but move from person-to-person, job-to-job and place-to-place, never resting in tranquil equanimity. But only when we ‘dwell’ do we build, and only when we build do we live in harmony.
The author regrets decades of his own prodigal wandering and methodically pleas for the sense of ‘belonging’ to family, place and people where one feels safe and at home, clothed with purpose and meaning. But more significantly, he critically demonstrates that what Muslims term sakinah (repose in peace and security) only manifests in those who build and sustain homes and communities founded on the matrix of heterosexual marriage. Zaid also presents a rigorous case to the contrary for the LGBT community. His painstaking brief judiciously shows this imposing minority primarily derives from developmental anomalies of the brain during the first trimester of pregnancy. Unfortunately, and despite legal inventions, they remain categorically exiled from the pleasures and security of normative heterosexual repose, and this more by natural default than by common social bias.
Zaid allegorizes the body-mind, heart-to-heart relationship between male and female. He describes it as a finely tuned dance that is physiologically and anatomically constituted prior to birth then psychologically reinforced and choreographed postpartum; matters that traditional societies knew or deeply felt and provided for with rites of passage that contemporary societies mindlessly discard in favor of affectations to the contrary. A Provencal song from the high Renaissance captures this reality as a longing for intimacy, consolation and harmony:
Although long time I had cried out
Un’valingly for pity and for love
Wherewith to comfort this grievous life of ours
My time’s not yet outrun,
Thus, since my speech yet finds not your hearts,
I stand a-weeping with my wounded soul,
Saying together: ‘Thus was it cast in heaven’. [1]
In agreement, Zaid contends that the “divine imperative” of natural law provides for only two genders, male and female with variable expressions, normative and not. Moreover, he says nature does not comfortably accommodate “alternatives”. Along with several others, he also claims that normative gender duality innately stands as the basal kernel of human identity, which means that primary human sexualization is not only obligated but also pre-determined as a regulated developmental process that is inherently constrained without any human input whatsoever. In addition, he claims the Decalogue is intrinsically inscribed in each pristine heterosexual bond as a matter of constituted sensus communis (Kant).
Zaid then demonstrates that the majority of atypical sexual orientations results from toxic insults that alter normative fetal development, and provides ample references that are simply being ignored. The implication is, therefore, that developmentally, human sexual orientation is a matter in which we have no choice other than to submit and then responsibly protect mother and child from vectors that cause abnormal outcomes. He recommends that such victims should be compassionately accommodated but without disadvantage to the universal hegemony of a ninety-five percent heterosexual majority.
Apparently, according to the author, sexually muddled brains do not allow the human soul to access the penetrating intimacy and spirituality that engender the emotional stability of moral maturity. He claims this is due to unsolvable conflicts stemming from non-validated/non-validating identities that inescapably lean towards self- and communal harm. To the contrary, heterosexual marriage completes the gender-balanced wholeness that assigns, signifies and channels individual identity and integrity, as well as spiritual and emotional development plus bio-quanta towards what is beneficial for the social matrix upon which we all stand. Zaid consequently posits that the LGBT polity is bound to faulty physical and metaphysical constitutions that host insecurity marked by prurience and volatile childishness. Such emotional instability painfully betrays a wanton soul hunger for the intimacy of naturally gendered complementarity; and for relationships that dwell within the heterosexual nest. This is just as true for heterosexuals who suffer arrested moral development. Thus, LGBT claims of normality and equal status with regards to marriage and sexuality are irrational imaginations that erode society’s bedrock and debase respective higher cultural pursuits, which is far more than the fine art of pretense.
Most sages advise us to live in the moment and flow with the rhythmic tides of moral imperatives and their simple complexities. Some of us, however, unwisely choose to endlessly de- and re-construct power associations in efforts to build impossible utopias in which they can usurp naturally constituted hegemony. Foucault was just such an enigmatic fool. Zaid calls him a typical anarchic Marxist who displayed the restless misadventure mania that accompanies gay sadomasochism. The good doctor claims intellectual sociopaths like this “genius of the queer” commonly hold dangerous disdain for those who enter the repose of higher spheres of human cognizance because they cannot access the Divine Performative, a reality he carefully describes in this little book on the Primacy of Heterosexual Marriage.
Sufyan Jan
January 2018, Jeddah, Hijaz
[1] Ezra Pound (1924). The Spirit of Romance (chapter 6: Lingua Toscana). London: JM Dent & Sons (p. 107).