No God But God: Deleuze, Politics, and the End of Ideology
On Freedom, Flux, and the Sacred Order of Becoming
“There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power; and even the most radical ideology is a form of organization.” — Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues¹
لَا إِلٰهَ إِلَّا اللّٰهُ “There is no god but God.”
Recently, on social media, I had posted that my politics and my political positions were essentially ‘Deleuzian’. Some people, naturally, were perplexed and asked what that meant. Though I had written a series of articles last year exploring the thinking of Deleuze — and though they were some of my least read articles to date — I thought I’d take a stab at him again, as I know how much people love exploring the ideas of post-structuralist French philosophers in their spare time. So here we go…
The Root(s) of All Politics
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. (Daniel 3:18)
I’ve been accused of being a contrarian. Perhaps that’s true. But it’s not quite as simple as that. It would be more true to say that I’m a radical iconoclast at heart. I wish to pull down every single idol from its base… and from within our hearts. Be it political, ideological, material, or what have you.
This understanding is at the heart of the main affirmation of Islam: “There is no god but God.” And this is what fundamentally informs my politics.
To affirm lā ilāha illā Allāh is to place obedience to the Ultimate Reality above every human institution, every ideology, every “ism”, every party, every other ‘loyalty’, of every ‘identity’, of ‘Left’ vs ‘Right’…
It is to insist that politics — like economics, identity, tribe — must remain secondary to the One who grounds all being.
In Deleuzian terms, this is a revolt against what he called organizations of power. Ideologies, he noted, are not neutral systems of thought but living machines that seek to channel and command desire. “The unity of language,” Deleuze writes, “is fundamentally political.”² In other words, every system of meaning eventually tries to centralize itself — to become a totality, a kind of idol.
To say that my politics is Deleuzian is to mean that I reject every idol of hierarchy and domination. Power, as Deleuze saw, flows through everything — institutions, language, even our desires. The goal is not to seize that power but to keep it from becoming absolute, to prevent order itself from turning into a false god.
Rhizome and Islamic Political Vision
Deleuze, alongside Félix Guattari, proposed the rhizome as an alternative to the vertical tree — the model of hierarchy that dominates Western thought. “A rhizome,” they write, “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”³ “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”⁴
To me, this image resonates deeply with the Qur’anic vision of community. The ummah — and indeed humanity itself — was never meant to be a pyramid of authority but a web of responsibility. The believer stands before God not as a cog in a system but as a living node in a vast field of moral connection. Each act of justice, mercy, and remembrance is a root extending outward, linking life to life.
Moreover, one can observe that the Qur’an itself exhibits a rhizomatic logic. It does not unfold linearly like a novel or textbook, but layers meaning, connects multiple threads of narrative, law, parable and prophecy — any “point” in the text may link to many others in unpredictable ways. I explored this pattern in an earlier article: “The ‘Nomad Archetype’ and the Great In-Between: Part 6 — Abdal Hakim Murad on Arabic, the Qurʾān and Nomadism”. The rhizomatic structure of the sacred text thereby offers a model of non-hierarchical discourse and multiplicity — not a trunk of ideology, but a living network of meaning whose connections spread and interlace like roots across fertile ground, always drawing from the same hidden source.
This organic pattern — rooted in revelation yet visible across creation — continues to echo in our own social and political life. In the U.S. context, consider how digital movements, grassroots mutual aid networks, and decentralized organizing — from labor and economic justice campaigns, from anti-war activism to privacy advocacy and local food cooperatives — mirror this rhizomatic structure. Yet without a moral axis, these networks often lose coherence. Lā ilāha illā Allāh provides that axis — the remembrance that all human freedom must remain oriented toward the One. Without that orientation, even the most vibrant movements risk dissolving into rivalries of identity or the commodification of activism itself.
This same impulse to map connection and relation appears elsewhere in our social thought as well. Contemporary discourse often turns to the language of intersectionality to describe how structures of race, class, gender, and power overlap and interact. In a sense, it captures something of the rhizomatic insight — that no single axis of struggle exists in isolation, that reality is woven from intersecting lines of relation. Yet, in practice, intersectionality often stops at description and identity. It maps the web of oppression but rarely offers a transcendent center from which that web might be oriented toward healing. Detached from a higher principle, it risks becoming another ideology — a new form of totalization that fragments rather than unites, multiplying antagonisms under the banner of empathy. A Deleuzian-Islamic politics shares intersectionality’s sensitivity to connection, but it refuses to let difference harden into resentment. It insists that justice requires not only awareness of interdependence, but alignment with transcendence … and mercy. Lā ilāha illā Allāh becomes the point from which all crossings take meaning — the axis of liberation that keeps multiplicity open, merciful, and whole.
Globally, too, we see the contrast everywhere: surveillance states, ideological echo chambers, polarized party-systems — all symptoms of the tree-model. Power accumulates in trunks, and obedience trickles down the branches. A Deleuzian-Islamic politics resists this by insisting: connect where you must, form offshoots, allow multiplicities — but let your root remain in God.
Desire, Lines of Flight & Sanctified Daily Life
Deleuze reframes desire not as lack but as a productive and creative force that generates new relations and new forms of life.⁵ He speaks of lines of flight (or lines of deterritorialization) that break from hierarchical structures and open new ways of being.⁶
Islam, too, recognizes the force of desire but seeks to purify and direct it. It does not condemn passion or creativity — it sanctifies them through discipline. The five daily prayers, fasting, zakāt, and the bond of marriage are not denials of desire but transmutations of it. They shape desire into remembrance. The energy that could enslave us instead becomes the current that drives worship and community.
In the U.S., the explosion of creative protest — younger generations rejecting old party alignments, mobilizing through networks — may be seen as lines of flight. Yet those lines risk commodification unless tethered to a higher moral compass. My politics says: act with creative energy, connect laterally, but always ask, Whose obedience guides this action? To whom am I accountable?
Flight without direction can become drift; liberation without obedience can become vanity. The question remains: toward what do we flee? A Deleuzian-Islamic politics answers: we flee toward God.
Becoming, Flux, and the Fire of Heraclitus
Long before Deleuze, the vision of reality as flux had already been spoken by the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus. “Everything flows,” he said. “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Beneath that ancient saying lies the same insight Deleuze would later systematize: that being is not a static essence but a continual unfolding, a ceaseless becoming.
Deleuze gives this ancient intuition new vocabulary — multiplicity, deterritorialization, the plane of immanence — but the idea is the same. Existence is movement, not stasis; life is a process, not a product. To think otherwise, to imagine some fixed hierarchy or eternal political order, is to mistake the living current for the stones it rushes past.
Islam, too, recognizes this current. The Qur’an speaks of creation as an ongoing act — “Every day He is upon some task” — suggesting that divine creativity is not a past event but a perpetual reality. The world is being renewed at every instant by the will of God. We live, as Heraclitus said, in the fire — yet for Islam that fire is not blind flux but the radiance of divine command.
In this way, Heraclitus’ ever-living fire and Deleuze’s eternal becoming meet within the Islamic understanding of tawḥīd — divine unity that sustains motion itself. The world is flux, but it is not chaos; it is ordered freedom, an ever-changing world whose very change testifies to its Creator.
To affirm lā ilāha illā Allāh is to stand within the river of becoming and move with awareness of its Source. It is to recognize that the flux of history and the play of politics are not directionless — that every current draws its meaning from the One who set it in motion. When power forgets that Origin, it devours itself; when freedom forgets it, it turns to chaos. But when both remember their dependence on the Divine, movement becomes creative rather than destructive, and change becomes an instrument of justice rather than ambition. To live politically within this remembrance is to act without illusion of permanence, to work in time while remaining faithful to eternity.
Immanence, Everyday Worship & Political Ethics
Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence is often misunderstood as godless, but I see in it a glimmer of something profoundly sacred. He teaches that everything unfolds within life itself, that truth is not found in some transcendent beyond but within the dynamic interplay of the world. The plane of immanence is where all things live, act, and relate.⁷
Islam completes this thought, not by denying transcendence, but by weaving it seamlessly into the fabric of the everyday. God is both beyond and within. The Qur’an tells us, “We are closer to him than his jugular vein.” In that nearness, every act — eating, working, greeting, building, teaching — becomes a site of worship.
In a world increasingly ruled by technocracy and abstraction, where human life is reduced to data and policy, Islam restores the sacred to the small. The just transaction, the honest word, the meal shared in gratitude — these are acts of resistance to dehumanization. A Deleuzian-Islamic politics thus begins not in legislatures or think tanks, but in the micro-ethics of daily life. How we spend, how we care, how we treat the stranger — these are the true political acts, the seeds of a redeemed society.
A Politics of Obedience, Becoming & Global Moment
At this moment — marked by inequality, polarization, surveillance, genocide, war, ecological collapse, and populist demagogues — the world suffers under arborescent politics: trunks of power demanding obedience.
A Deleuzian-Islamic politics would:
- build networks of solidarity — local, cross-faith, rhizomatic, compassionate;
- resist placing ideology before the Lord’s command;
- re-embed daily ethics into political life;
- and affirm multiplicity: many struggles, many voices, many forms of justice.
As Deleuze wrote: “Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such.”⁸ Multiplicity, yes — but not meaninglessness. Diversity, yes — but not dispersion. The unity that Islam proclaims does not erase difference; it sanctifies it. Lā ilāha illā Allāh is the gravitational center around which all becoming revolves.
Beyond Confession: A Universal Vision of Order and Flow
Though I write as a Muslim, I don’t believe this vision belongs to Islam alone. It rests on something that is perennial — the very architecture of reality itself. To say lā ilāha illā Allāh is to acknowledge the principle that no form, no system, no ideology can stand as absolute before the living truth of Being. That principle is not the property of any one revelation. It is seen echoed through the Tao, which moves without striving; through the Logos, which orders all things in love; through Dharma, which sustains the cosmos in balance.
Every great spiritual and philosophical tradition has, in its own language, recognized what Deleuze called the plane of immanence — the living field of becoming. For the Taoist, it is the Way that no ruler can control; for the Christian, it is the Eternal Word; for the Confucian, it is harmony through right relationship. Each points toward a life where action flows from awareness of the Whole.
To live politically from that awareness is to see that justice is not an invention of man but an alignment with reality. Hierarchies may differ, doctrines may vary, but all who honor the Real — who resist the idols of power, ego, and division — are fellow travelers in the same current. Truth does not contradict itself; it only changes its garments as it moves through history.
Universal Appeal & Moral Horizon
In both my adopted Islam and my native Christianity, virtue extends beyond the in-group. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ said: “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”⁹ And Imam ʿAlī (as) wrote: “People are of two kinds — your brothers in faith, or your equals in humanity.”¹⁰
These are not merely moral niceties; they are civilizational foundations. In an age that thrives on division — race, class, tribe, nation, creed — these principles are revolutionary. They echo Deleuze’s own call to dissolve rigid boundaries, to recognize life as a field of connection rather than competition.
To affirm lā ilāha illā Allāh is, therefore, not to retreat into sectarianism, but to expand outward into a universal mercy. It is to look upon humanity — believer and unbeliever, friend and enemy alike — and see reflections of the same divine breath. It is to practice what both faith and philosophy demand: solidarity with all who suffer under false gods, compassion for all who seek truth, and courage to love in a time of estrangement.
Conclusion: The Only Axis That Remains
If Deleuze sought to dismantle the idols of thought and power, Islam completes that task by grounding freedom in worship of the One. For Deleuze, liberation meant freeing thought from fixed systems; for Islam, it means freeing the soul from servitude to anything less than God. The line of flight becomes not a nihilistic escape but the ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm — the straight path that leads through the heart of the world toward divine reality. The rhizome, in turn, becomes not a tangle of endless difference but a living field of mercy and justice, where connection and compassion are sanctified acts.
Our age does not suffer from a lack of ideas but from a lack of orientation. The modern mind swims in information yet drowns in meaning. What we need are not new ideologies but living ethics — a way of being that binds freedom to responsibility, creativity to conscience. We need networked solidarity that serves humanity rather than worships at the idols of clan and ideology, daily submission that disciplines desire without extinguishing it, and creative liberation that turns rebellion into beauty and reverence.
Lā ilāha illā Allāh is the axis upon which all these possibilities revolve. It reminds us that there is no absolute system, no infallible party, no perfect civilization — only the continual effort to align the human heart with the divine will. To say “there is no god but God” is not to retreat from the world but to re-enter it rightly ordered, to see that every movement, every connection, every act of love or struggle finds its true measure only when it participates in that remembrance.
In that light, ideology itself is revealed for what it is — the last idol of modernity, the attempt to replace living faith with systems of thought divorced from Being. The end of ideology does not mean the end of conviction, but its purification: a return to the Real, to a politics of worship rather than control, of service rather than domination.
Everything else — politics, movements, activism, community, desire — gains meaning only insofar as it bends toward that truth. And when it does, the world ceases to be a battlefield of competing idols and becomes, once more, a garden of becoming: plural, merciful, and alive in the light of the One.
Afterwords: On the Risk of Synthesis
“To think is always to follow the flow of life, to become with it.” — Gilles Deleuze
Looking back over these thoughts, I can’t help but be a bit self-critical. (It’s in my nature.) I can easily question what I’ve done here. Perhaps this effort to bring Deleuze and Islam (or even the Sophia Perennis) into conversation smooths over tensions that should remain sharp. Deleuze was never comfortable with fixed systems, and faith itself is easily turned into one. It’s a strange place to stand — between a French post-structuralist philosopher who refuses transcendence and a religious worldview that affirms it, between the movement of politics/action and the stillness of prayer.
There’s a danger in drawing lines and making clear distinctions, in naming what ought to stay fluid. I feel that danger in my own words. But writing, like faith, is a kind of risk — a gesture made in the dark with the hope that it might carry some light.
What I have written here isn’t final. It’s an attempt to think with both rigor and reverence, to listen for what happens when two ways of seeing touch without consuming one another — and yet oddly complement each other. If the result feels unfinished, that may be its truest quality. Perhaps all real thinking must remain unfinished — still turning, still alive, still listening for the next word.
Mashallah.
Footnotes
- Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 36.
- Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 7.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 25.
- Ibid., p. 7.
- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 26.
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 9–11.
- Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyer (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 27.
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 182.
- Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Book 2, Hadith 13.
- ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Letter to Mālik al-Ashtar, in Nahj al-Balāgha (Peak of Eloquence), trans. Sayyid Ali Reza (Tehran: World Organization for Islamic Services, 1996), Letter 53.
Appendix: Key Deleuzian Concepts
Rhizome
A non-hierarchical network of connections that grows in multiple directions without a single center or origin. Rhizomes resist rigid order, allowing for multiplicity, interconnection, and continual change.
Line of Flight
A pathway of escape, transformation, or creative movement that breaks free from established systems, enabling new ways of living or thinking to emerge.
Multiplicity
The concept that reality is composed of dynamic differences and relations rather than fixed identities. Multiplicity emphasizes variation, process, and the coexistence of many forms of being.
Deterritorialization
The process through which existing structures, habits, or meanings lose their fixity, opening space for renewal or reconfiguration. It describes movement away from rigid frameworks toward new creative territories.
Assemblage
A temporary constellation of diverse elements — people, ideas, technologies, affects — that come together to form a functional system or event. Assemblages are fluid and responsive rather than permanent or centralized.
Synthesis
For Deleuze, synthesis is not unity imposed from above but the generative process by which differences combine to produce something new. It is the creative engine of becoming rather than reconciliation or totality.
Contemporary Resonance
Deleuze’s ideas have renewed relevance in today’s interconnected but fragmented world. They invite us to see politics, culture, and thought as dynamic networks of relation — fluid, decentralized, and always in motion.
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