On the language of empire, the ethics of art, and remembering that creation itself is resistance.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with a feeling — a kind of quiet reckoning — that what we do as artists, as thinkers, as people of conscience, is not for nothing. The world feels unsteady, heavy with contradictions. We’re watching in real time as language itself gets used to disguise violence. The so-called ceasefire in Gaza has revealed how deeply warped those words can be. Palestinians are told to cease while Israel continues to fire. Even in the pause between bombings, Palestinians are still being killed, tortured, and displaced — yet the headlines read like relief.
When I read that Israel frees 90 Palestinian prisoners while Hamas releases three Israeli hostages, I couldn’t help noticing the asymmetry. The word prisoner assumes guilt. The word hostage assumes innocence. But Palestinians are the occupied, not the occupiers. These linguistic choices are not neutral; they’re designed to manufacture empathy for one group and erase it for another.
Language is a weapon — one that empire has mastered. As Edward Said wrote, colonization doesn’t only seize land; it seizes narrative. It tells the story before anyone else can.
The Grammar of Empire
The Western media’s language of “civilization” and “defense” is the same vocabulary that has long justified invasion, slavery, and resource extraction. For those of us shaped by Black, Muslim, and diasporic histories, the pattern is instantly recognizable.
Colonialism is often remembered as something distant — an event completed. But it’s ongoing. It’s what’s happening when an American reporter calls Palestinians terrorists while calling Israeli soldiers defenders. It’s what happens when children in Gaza die nameless, while every Israeli hostage gets a full biographical profile.
The scholar Achille Mbembe calls this the “necropolitical” order — where entire peoples are made killable in the name of civilization. The violence may look different from one place to another — Congo in the 1960s, Ferguson in 2014, Gaza in 2025 — but the logic is the same.
“The colonizer’s grammar of empathy criminalizes the oppressed and sanctifies power.”
We see it clearly now — and that clarity is painful, but it’s also necessary. Because seeing through the illusion is the first act of resistance.
The Artist’s Struggle
I recently began watching the film Soundtrack for a Coup d’État, which traces how the CIA used Black American musicians as soft power during the U.S.-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba. It’s haunting to think that artists — people whose work carried freedom and spirit — were unknowingly used as instruments of distraction while a revolutionary leader was killed.
It made me reflect on what it means to strive for truth in a world where even art can be co-opted. Artists like Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong navigated that moral terrain. As Nina said,
“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”
That statement has never felt more urgent. Because reflecting the times also means refusing their distortions. It means creating with spiritual and ethical precision, not just aesthetic skill.
Sacred Geometry and Resistance
In preparing for a recent studio visit, I found myself revisiting works from over a decade ago — paintings and installations grounded in sacred geometry and Islamic cosmology. Looking at them now, I realize those forms were my first language of resistance.
Geometry, for me, is a way to contemplate divine order in a chaotic world. Every line is both discipline and prayer. Every repetition is remembrance. When I paint or build around these patterns, I’m not making decoration; I’m invoking alignment.
In Islamic thought, form is never empty — it’s a vessel for meaning. This world, too, is a world of forms and signs. They point beyond themselves. When we engage them consciously, art becomes dhikr — a remembrance of what is real and eternal.
That’s what keeps me rooted. Amid the noise of propaganda and the violence of empire, sacred geometry reminds me that truth, like symmetry, can’t be erased. It’s written into the fabric of existence.
Striving as Worship
We can’t leave the world to those who desecrate the sacred. To do so would be to surrender life itself. The Zionist project, like all colonial projects, depends on convincing us that nothing is holy — that everything is property, resource, or spoil. But as long as there are people creating beauty, telling truth, and remembering God, that illusion cannot stand.
As a Muslim, I believe striving to create a better world, and at it’s very least — to envision it — is worship. It’s the inner and outer work of aligning one’s actions with truth. When I create, speak, or write, I’m not chasing visibility or applause; I’m engaging in that striving.
“And do good; indeed, Allah loves the doers of good.”
— Qur’an 2:195
Not for Nothing
So yes, this is a difficult time to be an artist — but it’s also the most meaningful. Because when truth is under siege, the act of seeing clearly is revolutionary.
Our work, our care, our faith, our insistence on meaning — none of it is for nothing.
Alhamdulillah for that clarity.