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Paper short abstract

Through a young imam's transformative 'dream-like' spiritual encounter, this paper theorises yaqeen (certainty) as pre-reflective, somatic knowledge—accessed beyond discursive cognition and material ontology—enabling personal healing and collective resistance within securitised, racialised Britain.

Paper long abstract

This paper theorises yaqeen—Islamic certainty—as pre-reflective, somatic knowledge accessed through dream-like experiences, arguing that such embodied epistemology enables transformations unreachable through discursive-cognitive consciousness alone. Drawing on ethnographic research with progressive Muslims in London, I examine a young queer imam whose encounter with a spiritual being fundamentally reoriented his relationship to self, faith, and world. Yaqeen emerged not as propositional belief but as felt certainty—love, peace, safety, universal connection—apprehended beyond the ego-narrative self and its cognitive-material constraints.

Following the insight that the master's tools cannot dismantle his house, I argue that discursive rationality alone cannot generate radical alternatives—yet this is not its dismissal but a call for epistemic pluralism. Liminal-oneiric experience constitutes a distinct epistemic domain—paralleling Indigenous Dreamtime epistemologies and contemplative traditions—where knowledge gains certainty through direct somatic apprehension. Here, queerness operates not merely as identity but as epistemological orientation: knowing and world-making from the margins. The interplay between oneiric, somatic, discursive, and analytical modes generates the resources for sustained transformation. This 'idealist' dreaming grounds' realist' praxis: embodied yaqeen provides somatic certainty that makes aspirational imaginaries inhabitable, fuelling persistent counter-hegemonic action.

Ethnographic examples demonstrate how embodied yaqeen fosters social transformation across scales. Individually, pre-reflective certainty enables post-traumatic growth. Communally, it sustains participation in inclusive Muslim spaces enacting intersectional feminist, antiracist, abolitionist ethics. Structurally, these communities constitute 'counter-worlds' resisting securitised neoliberal governmentality, racialised biopolitics, and patriarchal nationalist temporalities through which Muslim life in Britain is rendered suspect and disposable. Islam, as embodied yaqeen, remakes selves and communities and confronts necropolitical state rationalities.