Progress comes through cultural values:

In the West, Muslims are still in the nascent stages of building communities. But it is becoming clear that building massive mosques with Olympic sized gymnasiums are not satisfying our spiritual and ethical vacuousness. Walk into any mosque, all of the disparities of inequality are on full display, racial, economic, political, gender, sect, you name it. Petty interpersonal issues consume the majority of our time. Divorce rates are at 50%, and abuse of all kind is to be expected. Everyone is busy convincing each other that they are engaged in meaningful labor. But yet, we have no fish dinner to show for it.

What is the root cause of our delusion and failure? We convince ourselves that the point of our ritual labor is the prayer, fasting, almsgiving, in and of itself. The result of this empty labor is inequality, abuse, and thus, irrelevance as a minority in the West. Who can build meaningful social ties when everyone is spiritually starving? We fell for the delusion, that capital precedes the labor. We have forgotten that our true social and spiritual labor is the perfection of noble character. We have forgotten that high ethics and noble character is what will feed us and lead us into true progress.