As the Empire takes down the People most horridly in the case of Gaza, a flashpoint for humanity, it has finally become apparent to humans across the planet that mere protests and talk and feel are not valid anymore, and that together, we need to fight for and create a sustainable, cooperative, loving and secure future for humankind. In the wake of the violence that we are seeing unfurling in real-time on our screens, we are awakening all over the planet, together. One key aspect of the movement of awakening is divestment from businesses and projects that feed the tyranny of the Empire. And that, while exciting, presents us a new challenge: are we prepared to move past the Empire and create new, sustainable systems that will ‘catch’ the humans falling out of the nets of the Empire, even as artificial intelligence is developing capacity by the day, working to replace humans in several fields of life.
May be, may be not. May be the answer is local, and differs.
But this is exactly the time and place when we most urgently need frameworks like The Salaam Matrix that are built for grounded, ethical, and humane development and progress, and answer complex questions while leading to integral, sustainable solutions.
The Salaam Matrix guides us as we are finally waking up to resisting and dismantling an era of colonization. In the theory of Ramala Hubb’Allah, the teacher and creator behind The Salaam Matrix, colonization is in fact a mental framework of control and perpetuation that fails to read the codes and systems of Life in real time, and therefore becomes possessive and ‘dehydrated’. It seeks preservation and perpetuation. The faces and names of colonizers and controllers change, their behavioral patterns remain the same.
As someone who attempted to decolonize in her personal capacity since 2005 in particular, I had to swim against the tides as a very successful and prominent MBA and media management person, who wasn’t “allowed” to jump off the boat of a normative life and prevailing definitions of success. And yet I did. That very year, I was intuitively led to teach entrepreneurship to MBAs, and it was in the final class of my first teaching of a self-developed course that I saw The Salaam Matrix appearing on the board in response to a student’s question. It then became a paper, and now, just when the world finally awakens to the need to take action, this is a model that I suggest can help in more ways than one to let the new cadre of leaders and businesspersons serve their communities and markets better. Amen.