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“…thoughts are the wealth of the nation…” – Sheikh Taqiuddin al-Nabhani
How does one society’s intellectual elites apply themselves to developing knowledge that distributes prosperity, while another applies the same knowledge to systematically commit at an industrial scale the highest legal crimes and immoral actions known to humanity?
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or simply al-Khwarizmi (c. 780 – c. 850), a Muslim of Persian descent, was a mathematician active during the Islamic Golden Age who produced Arabic-language works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820, he worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the contemporary capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. One of the most prominent scholars of the period, his works were widely influential on later authors in both the Islamic world and Europe.
Al-Khwarizmi’s popularizing treatise on algebra, compiled between 813 and 833 as Al-Jabr (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing), presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. One of his achievements in algebra was his demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications. Because Al-Khwarizmi was the first person to treat algebra as an independent discipline and to introduce the methods of “reduction” and “balancing” (the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation), he has been described as the father or founder of algebra.
The English term algebra comes from the shorthand title of his aforementioned treatise (الجبر Al-Jabr, transl. ”completion” or “rejoining”). His name gave rise to the English terms algorism and algorithm; the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese algoritmo; the Spanish guarismo and the Portuguese term algarismo – all meaning “digit”.
In the 12th century, Latin translations of Al-Khwarizmi’s textbook on Indian arithmetic (Algorithmo de Numero Indorum), which codified the various Indian numerals, introduced the decimal-based positional number system to the Western world. Likewise, Al-Jabr, translated into Latin by the English scholar Robert of Chester in 1145, was used until the 16th century as the principal mathematical textbook of European universities.
For this reason, it is significant today that the algorithms that Al-Khwarizmi extracted from Islamic jurisprudence to enable just distribution of wealth within the family, and therefore society, have been adopted by the imperialist West for use in the development of “target-firing technology” which, in a stroke of tragic irony, was applied in the targeted bomb strike in Minab, Hormozgan Province, Iran, on 28 February 2026 that killed over 170 civilians of whom 120 were children sheltered in the prayer hall of a school in the same land where Al-Khwarizmi wrote his famous treatise on mathematics that became the basis for computer science.
The ability to drop a bomb from a jet flying at several thousand kilometres an hour at an altitude of several kilometres to successfully kill 170-plus civilians is no mean feat. It required millions of man-hours in testing of jet engines, testing of missiles, testing of bombs, continuous training using gigabytes of secret datasets of mathematical tables, conditioning and coordination of multiple teams, all the best that society has to offer – from the scientists to the jet fighter pilots, to the shipwrights, layers and layers of elite order, the families that bore the children, the teachers that taught them, the military that identified and recruited them – all organized behind the bomb that killed those 120 children sheltered in a prayer hall in Iran.
It is only an “elite order” that is capable of marshalling the will and mobilizing the resources to successfully deliver death and destruction from such distance and with such precision.
It is the ability to exercise power at such scale and precision, and the inability to defend against it, that makes “the study of elites” – their recruitment, their culturing, their ordering and their maintenance – one that the Global South must contend with and master if it is to declare its existence in the order of humanity and successfully protect itself in the 21st century.
So how is it that a society is organized such that the best of its entire material and intellectual resource is applied to the delivery of death?
To answer this question we need to understand the nature of society, and here we turn to two concepts: One, “The Tree” as metaphor, and two “Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions”.
“The Tree” as a metaphor has been used by religions and in the myths of tribes and nations the world over since time immemorial.
There are many wonderfully rich myths and folklore created with “The Tree” as the main prop. In many myths and folklore of different cultures around the world, “The Tree” reveals the worldview of the society they emanate from, and often also serves as altar and totem. From Asgard and Yggdrasil of Norse Mythology to the Mugumo of the Kikuyu, to the Kabbalah, “The Tree” is literally Axis Mundi, centre of the world – connecting the physical and metaphysical planes for many tribes and nations of the world.
And when you think about it, there is not a living or non-living entity more apt to serve as metaphor for Man, Life, and the Universe than “The Tree” – it grows, it reproduces, it competes and struggles for survival, it has intelligence, it adapts, it communicates, it captures all our intricate complexity, but in a beautiful, elegant, fractal, transcendental simplicity and snapshot summary. It is no wonder it is the most prolific altar.
One will notice that the metaphor in “The Tree” differs from age to age, tribe to tribe, geography to geography, implying that it is intrinsically tied to the material condition of the people the metaphor serves, that is, it is an intellectual tool that people use to answer questions that are specific to them about their reality.
Trees have also always fascinated us; as children, for play, as adults, as a resource, and in old age, as sanctuaries for prayer, as objects of beauty, or places of rest. But “The Tree” as a metaphor for “social order” has not been given the attention it deserves.
Trees in the variety of their forms represent the infinite possibility not just of “anatomical forms of man” but also of “structures of society”.
While “Social Order” is fundamentally incorporeal, the physical form of “The Tree” makes a great analogical representation of “Social Order”, and aids in the understanding of the form and nature of “elites”.
Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede’s “Cultural Dimensions”, specifically his concept of “Power Distance”, helps us understand the forms and relations of elite order that make the murder of 120-plus children – as happened on 28 February 2026 – an easy possibility for the West, and a near impossibility for the East.
“The Tree” comprises several visually perceived parts. “The Trunk” represents the Leader who by natural necessity, i.e. political philosophy, is always atomic. Jean-Jacques Rousseau correlates The Leader with “A Father”. He is the source of stability and direction. “The Trunk’s” strength is an integral part of the strength of the tree but it is not “the whole” of the strength of “The Tree”.
The totality of the strength of “The Tree” rises from the combination of the strength of “The Trunk” and its “Root System”.
The “Root System” represents the structure and arrangement of the populace. A scattered dendritic structure of fibrous roots is representative of a scattered, atomized, individualized populace, like the modern Western society.
The “Tap Root” system with its lateral roots represents a populace with highly structured clan or genealogical elites such as the clan elders and tribal chiefs still existent in many countries in the Global South.
The roots channel water – material representation of “Life” and immaterial representation of “Spirit” – up to the rest of “The Tree”.
This is to say that, the level of spirituality the people are capable of absorbing is the level of spirituality that will diffuse up “The Tree”. The strength and complexity of the “Root System” is directly related to the strength and complexity of “The Trunk”. The anchoring of “The Tree” in the ground depends on the “root structure”, its strength and its relationship to the nature of the soil.
“The Trunk’s” strength, breadth and material nature, coupled with its anchoring in the ground via the nature of the “root system”, determine the overall “strength of the tree”. A thick trunk rising from a strong tap-root system with extensive lateral roots is observably stronger than any trunk rising from a fibrous root system.
When we hold the roots as the people and the water they retain as their spirituality, it is consistent then that if you uproot the tree from the ground including its roots, you can move it and successfully plant it elsewhere. An example is the great migration of the Germanic tribes from the north over the Rhine that led to the collapse of Western Roman Empire in 406 BC.
The analogy of “the people” as “root system” holds when looked at from many different angles. For example, if you cut off “The Tree” at the base of the trunk without damaging the “Root System”, “The Tree” can regrow. But if you destroy the “Root Structure”, the entire tree dies. This is how imperialism successfully colonized and occupied African societies. It destroyed the tribes by attacking the ecosystem of “The Roots” in multiple ways. By imposing weaponized foreign religions on the natives, they effectively replaced the fluid nutrition of “The Tree” with poison. The water represents the spiritual and cultural life of the tribe; changing the food systems, killing the leaders, and translocating the tribes had a devastating effect on their existence.
“The Foliage” represents the Government. The Government is the manifestation of Ideology. The leaves are the ideological workers of the State who harness and convert what is in material terms “The Light” – but in metaphorical terms the “framework of ideas” that form the belief system – into nutrients, i.e. the energy that makes “The Tree” strong. The entire system of production and distribution of energy is ordered by the major branches and sub-branches of the foliage. These are, in sociological ordering terms, the organizational ordering of the ideological elites that Max Weber spoke to in his treatise The Theory of Social and Economic Organization and in his disciple Robert Michel’s The Iron Law of Oligarchy. It is important to state here that this type of elites do not exist in Africa; only clan and tribal elites exist – a dying breed with the rise of secular individualism.
Frantz Fanon, a Marxist, explained how Africa has no “real elites” in the substantive meaning of the term. Africa’s so-called elites are in reality an illusion created by Western imperialist colonialism; they do not build anything, cannot build anything, they have no innate will – he referred to them as “the national bourgeoisie”. He wrote, “The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely channeled into activities of the intermediary type.” That is to say, they merely manage extraction of wealth for Western interests, living the consumptive lives of the Western bourgeoisie while totally lacking the creative will of Western bourgeoisie. African pseudo-elites have the form of elites without the substance that makes elites, elites. To further quote Fanon, “They take the form of the Western elite – dressing in European suits, speaking European languages, adopting European administrative titles, and acquiring Western tastes – but they lack the economic substance or the historical mission of a true capitalist class. They are an elite of consumers, not producers.”
Returning to “The Foliage” of “The Tree”, the energy manufactured in the leaves is channelled through the trunk down through the entire tree, including the roots.
Africa had very weak Trunks and Foliage; political centralization was not ideologically evolved and, therefore, when it came into contact with Western ideological entities – where the youngest, “Germany”, had evolved sufficiently to centralize into a “State” a minimum of 800 years prior – African political entities disintegrated.
Now, there is one part of “The Tree” that is little if ever mentioned in all the metaphors, myths and/or narratives of “The Tree”, yet it is literally “The Tree” before it is “The Tree” – that is, “The Seed of The Tree”.
Within “The Seed” is all the potential, all the possible manifestations of “The Tree”. “The Tree” can never grow beyond “The Seed”. Whatever “The Tree” will become lies within “The Seed”.
The Creed is the Spiritual seed of the society; The Founder, The Protagonist, The Ancestor, is the material manifestation of “The Seed”. The relationship between “The Tree” and “The Seed” is absolute in foreordination; all that can vary is the form, never, ever the essence – no amount of grafting can turn an apple tree into a mango tree, no amount of alchemy can turn softwood into hardwood. Different characteristics of “The Tree” can be changed by soil nutrition and water content, making it a tall mango tree, a fecund mango tree, a short mango tree, but only ever a mango tree.
Hofstede postulated six cultural traits that determine the tribe’s nature and abilities. These are Masculinity, Power Distance, Long-Term Orientation, Indulgence vs Restraint, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism. While all of these traits are relevant to the structure and political nature of a specific society, we shall only apply one, Power Distance, because it has the greatest impact on hierarchical depth. “Power Distance” is a society’s level of acceptance of unequal power; it affects the capacity for command- vs consensus-driven decision-making.
The West has a high “Power Distance” compared to the Global South. It is the reason deep hierarchies are easy in the West but extremely fragile in the Global South.
The atomization of individuals in materialistic Western society makes for individuals who are alienated from family structure and singularly tied to the amoral ideological superstructure of capitalism, making them inhumane bots who see killing people in real life as no different from killing people in video games.
Coupled with the high “Power distance” Western society is capable of, the individual flying a jet has not only “no need to know who he is killing and why he is killing them”, he is also fully able to follow through with the action.
In the Global South, where family structures remain strong and spirituality alive, the threat of reprimand and accountability to family still carries some weight. The individual and social awareness of God in society does compel individuals to understand the reasons for their actions; there are two known cases of jet fighter pilots refusing to follow orders to drop bombs on targets – in Kenya, Captain Jorim Owino Nyamor during the 1982 coup, and in Somalia, Air Force Pilot Ahmed Dheere during the fall of Siad Barre’s rule in 1988. All massacres that have been orchestrated in the Global South have been by modern “Western-style” military institutions, and at the behest of the Western comprador bourgeoisie or even directly by imperialists. No mass murder has ever been orchestrated by native institutions.
To understand how Algorithms went from being used to “justly distribute wealth, hold families together, and build bridges” to being used to “distribute bombs, decimate families and destroy bridges”, we must begin with the seed of The Tree.
As an intellectual elite, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi emerged from a society based on a creed of Divine Revelation, implying deep spirituality.
The development of algorithms was to enable the fulfilment of the “law of inheritance” dictated in the Quran-e-Karim, the Holy book of Muslim faithful and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), the Messenger of Islam.
A notable distinction becomes apparent when we juxtapose Muhammad al-Khwarizmi with Norbert Wiener, an American computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher born on 26 November 1894. A child prodigy, Nobert Weiner became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and as an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, he contributed work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
During World War II, in 1941, exactly 1,111 years after his academic forbear Muhammad al-Khwarizmi published the foundational work on Algorithms and Algebra, Al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābalah, Nobert Wiener, a Jew of Russian descent who, having been rejected by the army several times, was finally appointed to the National Defense Research Committee of America, a society based on secularism and founded on genocide. Nobert Weiner joined the NDRC’s Fire Control committee, unironically to work on the “automatic aiming and firing of weapons” using knowledge initially developed to ensure justice and build infrastructure.
It is this technology that – 1146 years after Muhammad al-Khwarizmi published the primary text on algorithms – would, on 28 February 2026, be applied to kill over 170 civilians, 120 of whom were little children huddled together in the prayer hall of Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran, 1,400 km from Bait ul-Hikmah – The House of Wisdom – where Muhammad al-Khwarizmi first produced and published this great work.
The seed of “freedom from divine revelation” gave rise to the “freedom from family” manifest in individualism and “freedom of action”, creating a society where social opprobrium can have no effect.
The fibrous root structure of scattered individuals of Western society creates a social medium in which a secular, godless ideological foliage can find and culture individuals devoid of moral inkling. An easy analogy can be drawn from the now well-established fact of a proportional relationship between crime and fatherless homes. If one looks at the “structured clan or tribe” as “The Great Father”, using Jordan Peterson’s phraseology, one can see clearly that if an individual without a father is at greater risk of criminal or moral malfeasance than one with a father, then it follows that a godless materialistic ideological administrative system would find greater ease in recruiting individuals to commit war crimes in an atomized society than in a society with strong family structures.
By comparison, in the clan-based society to be found in the Global South, the tap-root and lateral-root structure of the clan anchors individuals in the family’s religious beliefs and roots the community in such a way that the individual does not depend on the government for provision or identity or basic social security and can therefore afford a moral compass and to reflect on consequences.
Based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the East has low Power Distance, compelling shallow hierarchies that favour consultation, whereas the West has the exact opposite; deep hierarchies that are command-based, making it easy to distance an individual from the decision-making process while still having the ability to compel him to action. The decision-making process that generated the order to bomb Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school is, in the modern Western institutional order, far removed from the murderous bombing action. This is unlike in the ancien régime and prior (age of tribal chiefs, warriors, kings and queens) where societies jointly made decisions to go to war, and all those who made the decision to go to war would also all be involved in the actual fighting.
For Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere in person was the material part of “The Seed”; socialism was the spiritual part. Given that socialism is materialistic, its social criterion is equality. Equality is completely averse to the traditional mode of family which is patriarchal, strictly hierarchical. Julius Nyerere organized the newly founded state using socialism and deliberately avoided directly challenging the traditional patriarchy, choosing to quietly institute policies which promoted equality without preaching about it.
If we look at Tanzania through the lens of “The Tree as Man”, we realize it is not a unified, living tree. Tanzania is actually two different trees coupled together, one with a strong underlying “Root System” but undeveloped “Trunk” and “Foliage”, the other with a poorly developed “Root System” but strong “Trunk” and “Foliage”. The Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) “Foliage” is a real ideological government system, and this can be seen in the “policy-based” rather than “tribal-based” elite politics of Tanzania compared to neighbouring countries like Kenya.
What does Africa need to do to evolve a true civilization and state?
Africa needs a system of government that emanates from an ideology that recognizes “The Family” and not “The Individual” as the basic unit and building block of society. An ideology that firmly anchors “The Family” on the Land while at the same time unifying the entire populace under a single ideological “Foliage”.
