We have met the most incredible people through this work. Among them is a young man named Anas.
He recently shared registration information for the March to Gaza in the Dust and Tribe Discord server. After looking it over, I signed up. I then invited my daughter, who also signed up. By the time this is published to our weekly newsletter we will, insha Allah, be somewhere in Egypt preparing to march for the Rafah Crossing.
There are approximatey 300 Americans planning to join us. Only a tiny fraction of those are Muslims.
While disappointing, we get it. Marching to Gaza is hard. It’s logistically challenging. It’s physically demanding. There is uncertainty and risk.
In other words, marching to Gaza has all of the elements of your typical Dust and Tribe adventure.
What > Where
When we talk about what goes on our calendar, the first question we ask ourselves is, “What are we going to do?”
It’s not the most revolutionary inquiry, but in a mainstream recreation market that centers destination vacations, “what we do” is often secondary to “where we are.” The latter confers social status immediately through gleeful Instagram posts proving that we visited some currently trending bucket-list location. What we actually do in these places may or may not be as interesting to others, and, for the majority of people, what others think is of critical importance.
More on that later.
Once we’ve decided what it is we want to do, we ask ourselves two more questions: Has it been done before? Is it exhausting?
Novelty and fatigue have always been the twin tines of our adventure fork. By putting people into situations that they have never experienced and challenging them to the point where they no longer have the energy to keep up facades, we facilitate profound levels of connection, camaraderie, and, eventually, confidence. Where we are when all of that happens doesn’t really matter because we’re not looking for social proof.
We’re looking to get right with ourselves, with God, and with those who choose to share the big, scary, exhausting things right along with us.
With praise and thanks to God Most High, we’ve been coordinating outdoor wilderness adventures since 2012. Initially working exclusively with men, in 2016 we became the first Muslim outfitter in North America to host a backcountry camping experience for women only. And in 2019, we were the first Muslim outfitter in North America to host a coed backpacking trip, bringing men and women together across 30 miles through the mountains of Santa Cruz.
In 2020, we were the first Muslim outfitter in North America to center men’s mental health through our Rise climbing program. We continued this in 2021 through our rites-of-passage programming for fathers and sons.
2021 was also the year that we started helping people lose weight for free, as we have done twice a year, every year since.
Despite these and a number of other firsts, our events rarely sell out. We regularly cancel outings for lack of participation. Very few people even know that we exist, and those who do are often confused as to who we are and what we’re about.
And that’s exactly how we like it.
Gatekeeping
We’ve stated before that our work is not for everybody.
It’s not even for most.
That’s because the majority of any group is functionally inert, complacent, and preoccupied only with whatever prevailing sentiments are fashionable in the moment. This statement isn’t just us being surly. It’s understood in sociological circles as the Asch Effect.
Solomon Asch was a researcher in the 1950s who did a lot of work studying conformity. In a nutshell, he demonstrated that for about 75% of people, going along with the group is often more important than doing the right thing. Those are startling results, particularly for those of us who feel connected to some sort of Divine Principle. But a look around and some honest personal inquiry renders the Asch Effect essentially undeniable.
It’s how you stage a genocide.
Our events, indeed our entire organizational structure, is a radical departure from the mainstream Muslim social experience. We build discomfort into our programming. We make things hard. We are not interested in the lecture circuit nor are we interested in those who might be found there. We are not looking for validation from religious or cultural “authorities.” We do not run polls or focus groups or surveys to find out what people want. We are not interested in publicizing our work through vapid, manufactured, and manipulative social media platforms.
Where the majority is found, we are not.
And before dark thoughts lead you to believe that this is all elitist snobbery, let us admit: it absolutely is.
Though not in the manner perhaps suspected.
We do not see ourselves as elite. Rather, our intention is to identify, through our work, the best of you in order that we all might benefit.
To this end, Dust and Tribe has been enormously successful, al-hamdu lillah.
We don’t make budget most months, but we met Anas who told us about the march to Gaza. We met Amin who took us on our first RV trip and convinced us to tackle the Lost Coast. We met Fredi and Jibreel who taught us about seaside foraging. We met Serine who taught us how to pole fish. We met Omar and Randa who kept Dust and Tribe afloat in our most precarious moment. We could go on, and we probably should because once you start mentioning names, everybody who didn’t get mentioned has a legitimate complaint as to why they might be omitted.
But if you’re curious, join our Discord server and talk to them. Have a look at our Events and meet them on the trail. There are amazing people in this world and we have been blessed to spend time with them, and we want that for you.
Cultural Shift
Over the last five years we have seen a glorious proliferation of Muslims calling one another outside through educational initiatives, hiking groups, and retreats. Many of the people championing these initiatives were at some point involved in the work of Dust and Tribe. These are the cream of the crop and, through the favor of God Most High, they found us. They found others through us. Together, they expanded their networks of brilliance and, in less than a decade, our community has more ecological awareness, wilderness literacy, and outdoor recreational opportunities than at anytime in our collective American Muslim history.
We won’t name names. Credit is cheapened when taken, though multiplied when given, and so we’ll leave it to our colleagues in the wilderness space to dispense of their largesse however they see fit. More importantly, whatever role our contributions, mentorship, and inspiration may have played in this wilderness Renaissance, we recognize that Dust and Tribe is only one part of a much larger holistic awakening that includes rebuilding our connections to the created world.
And that’s political.
Because once you begin to care for creation, you can no longer ignore injustice.
In 2021, we raised funds for Gaza as we roadtripped along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nine days after the incursion, we amplified critical aspects of the October 7th surge that mainstream platforms continue to ignore. We told you about Trump. And well before all of these shenanigans, when mosque parking lots in upper middle class suburbs were filled with Teslas, we told you about Musk.
But for information to have value, it must be actionable. The epidemics of anxiety, depression, and attention-disorders are directly attributable to the phenomenon of being so completely saturated with news, data, and gossip that we can do nothing about.
And this a unique property of learning through the wilderness: we process what we receive in real time.
Getting outside, challenging ourselves, building our confidence, balancing our self-reliance with our interdependence, and refreshing our perspective in order to reestablish moral clarity is exactly what we do. And doing that over and over and over again is why my daughter and I did not hesitate when the call to march came.
And unless you set the intention and do the work, don’t imagine that you will be ready.
The majority will never be ready.
The majority are fodder for the cannons and labor for the mines.
Do what they do not.
Leave a comment below for posterity or join us in the D&T Chautaqua Discord to discuss this post with other adventurous spirits from around the world.