Islamic Iran and the Islamic Axis of Resistance: Towards Theodological Integration - Part 6

Mohamed Ousman

Below is a structured synthesis of the themes: allegiance, authority, and governance in Islam, especially Qur’an 4:59 (uli al-amr) as interpreted through Imam Muhammad Al-Asi’s framework, and the three theoretical orientations toward political authority in the Muslim world, including attitudes toward Islamic Iran as a case study.

1. Conceptual Framing: Uli al-Amr (Qur’an 4:59) and the Logic of Allegiance

Qur’an 4:59 establishes a layered hierarchy of obedience: “O you who are securely committed to Allah! Pay heed to Allah, and pay heed to the Apostle and to those from among you who have been entrusted with authority; and when you are at variance over any matter, refer it to Allah and the Apostle, if you are truly committed to Allah and the Last Day. This is the best [for you], and best in the end.”

In al-Asi’s reading, this verse is not a blank check for rulers, but a conditional delegation of authority embedded in accountability. The structure is asymmetrical: absolute obedience to Allah; normative authority to the Messenger and conditional authority to uli al-amr dependent on alignment with the Qur’an and Prophetic model. This produces a governance theory based on: order (nizām), trust (amānah) and Justice (‘adl).

Authority is therefore not sovereign in itself. It is derivative and revocable when it deviates from divine criteria. In this framework, allegiance (bay‘ah) is not passive submission but a contractual moral obligation tied to justice and Qur’anic fidelity.

The Hadith of Allegiance and Political Obligation

The frequently cited hadith: “Whoever dies without a bay‘ah on his neck dies a death of ignorance” is interpreted across Islamic traditions in different ways:

Classical Sunni legal framing emphasizes social order and unity, prioritizes avoidance of fitnah (civil disorder) and often supports de facto authority to preserve stability.

Qur’an-centric framing emphasizes bay‘ah as meaningful only when authority implements justice, upholds Qur’an and protects communal welfare. A corrupted authority does not generate valid binding allegiance.

Thus, allegiance becomes conditional obedience within a moral-political covenant, not unconditional submission.

Three Dominant Orientations Toward Muslim Political Authority (Islamic Iran as a Reference Case)

Across contemporary Muslim discourse, responses to an “Islamic state model” (including Islamic Iran’s system) can be analytically grouped into three broad orientations—not tied to specific individuals, but observable as intellectual tendencies.

(1) Normative-Religious Support Orientation

This view argues that Muslim governance should be grounded in Qur’an and Sharia governance principles, that leadership must actively enforce moral order and allegiance is mandated when leadership maintains Islamic legitimacy. Here, there is strong emphasis on unity of the ummah, acceptance of structured authority and preference for systems that institutionalize Islamic law and identity.

Within this orientation, Islamic Iran is often discussed as a “working model” of Islamic governance (though not without critique) based on Islamic juristic leadership (Walayat al-Faqih) framework. However, this does not imply uniform endorsement—many within this camp still critique aspects of governance while affirming the principle of Islamic political authority.

(2) Geopolitical Resistance / Anti-Imperial Orientation

This orientation evaluates political systems primarily through resistance to external domination, opposition to Western military, economic, or cultural hegemony and strategic alignment rather than theodological validation. Here, support may be instrumental, not theodological, with emphasis on sovereignty and strategic independence. Alliances formed are based on shared geopolitical interests.

In this framework, Islamic Iran is often seen as a major anti-imperial actor in regional politics and a counterweight to Western-aligned regional powers. Crucially, this does not require theodological endorsement of Islamic Iran’s internal system. It is a realpolitik-based alignment lens.

(3) Critical / Non-Aligned Orientation

This view holds that no contemporary state fully embodies Islamic governance ideals. Political authority is often compromised by nationalism, sectarianism, or state interests and bay‘ah cannot be meaningfully applied to modern nation-state structures without distortion. Here, there is skepticism toward centralized clerical or state authority, emphasis on community ethics over state legitimacy and preference for decentralised moral reform.

In this orientation, allegiance is redefined as ethical commitment, not political submission. Modern states, including Islamic Iran, are assessed critically rather than affirmed Islamically.

Imam Muhammad Al-Asi’s Qur’anic Governance Lens

Within al-Asi’s interpretive framework, several key principles shape political legitimacy:

• Authority is conditional: Obedience to leaders is valid only when aligned with Qur’an and Prophetic method.
• Accountability is communal: The ummah is not passive; it is responsible for monitoring leadership.
• Justice is non-negotiable: Any deviation from justice removes moral legitimacy from authority.

He critiques systems where power becomes hereditary or elitist and where political authority is detached from moral qualification. The implication from this perspective is that no state is inherently sacred; legitimacy is continuously tested against Qur’anic norms.

Allegiance (Bay‘ah), Authority, and Modern Islamic States

When applied to modern contexts such as Islamic Iran or other Muslim-majority states, the theoretical tension becomes clear:

• Classical Sunni political theory often prioritizes unity and stability
• Qur’an-centric theory prioritizes conditional legitimacy
• Geopolitical theory prioritizes resistance and sovereignty
• Critical theory prioritizes ethical non-coercive authority

Thus, “bay‘ah” today is not a single unified doctrine but a contested interpretive field shaped by theology, political structure, modern nation-state realities and global power relations. A rigorous reading of Qur’an 4:59 through al-Asi’s lens reframes Islamic political obedience not as blind allegiance, but as: a conditional moral contract grounded in justice, accountability, and Qur’anic authority.

The modern Muslim world does not exhibit a single unified stance toward any state model. Instead, it reflects overlapping interpretive traditions that differ on what constitutes legitimate authority, when obedience becomes obligatory and whether modern states can embody Qur’anic concepts like uli al-amr or imamah.

Islamic Republic of IranAxis of Resistance

Bay‘ah, Governance, and the Islamic Movement - Part 5

 Mohamed Ousman

Bay‘ah/Allegiance as the Core Political Problem in Muslim Thought

The hadith “Whoever dies without a bay‘ah/allegiance on his neck dies a death of ignorance (jahiliyyah)” has functioned as one of the most politically consequential statements in Islamic thought. Across centuries, it has been used to anchor arguments for political unity, state legitimacy, the obligation of obedience and avoidance of rebellion.

Yet its interpretation is far from uniform. The central question is not merely whether bay‘ah is required, but what constitutes a valid bay‘ah in a Muslim world parcelled into nation-states?

This question becomes more complex when read alongside Qur’an 4:59: “O you who are securely committed to Allah! Pay heed to Allah, and pay heed to the Apostle and to those from among you who have been entrusted with authority; and when you are at variance over any matter, refer it to Allah and the Apostle, if you are truly committed to Allah and the Last Day. This is the best [for you], and best in the end.”

Reframing Bay‘ah: From Political Submission to Moral Contract

Classical Sunni political theory often treated bay‘ah as a stabilizing mechanism, a safeguard against civil chaos (fitnah) and a legitimizing bond between ruler and ruled. However, in Qur’an-centered readings, bay‘ah becomes a conditional trust (amānah), accountability-based governance and revocable political consent.

Imam Al-Asi’s interpretive framework insists that obedience is conditional, not absolute and that authority must be continuously measured against Qur’anic justice, Prophetic conduct and communal accountability. From this foundation, bay‘ah is not symbolic allegiance to any ruling structure; it is a moral contract tied to divine guidance and social justice.

Thus, the hadith of bay‘ah is not a blanket endorsement of any authority that claims power. Rather, it implies a Muslim community must not exist in a state of political orphanhood. The legitimacy of authority, however, depends on justice and Qur’anic alignment. This transforms bay‘ah from a static obligation into a dynamic accountability structure.

Imam Muhammad Al-Asi: Qur’an 4:59 and Conditional Authority

Al-Asi’s reading of uli al-amr minkum emphasizes three governing principles:

• Authority is derivative: Political leadership is not sovereign in itself; it is valid only insofar as it reflects divine instruction.
• Obedience is conditional: The Qur’an does not grant unconditional obedience to rulers; obedience is structurally subordinated to obedience to Allah and the Messenger.
• Justice is the legitimacy threshold: Authority that deviates from justice loses moral and Islamic legitimacy.

In this framework, bay‘ah becomes meaningful only when leadership implements justice (‘adl), governance reflects Qur’anic ethics and rulers remain accountable to the ummah. Otherwise, the binding force of allegiance collapses into coercion rather than covenant.

Imam Zafar Bangash and the Sirah as Political Methodology

Bangash’s sirah-based approach reframes the Prophet’s life not as biography, but as a strategic model for civilizational transformation. Key sirah-derived political principles include,

• Incremental institutional formation: the Prophet ﷺ did not immediately establish a static state structure; he built a moral community in Makkah and after migratory consolidation (Hijrah) he ushered in constitutional governance (the Madinah Charter). This indicates that political authority in Islam is process-based rather than purely structural.
• Authority grounded in moral credibility: Leadership legitimacy in the sirah is not inherited or coercively imposed but earned through trustworthiness (amānah), truthfulness (sidq) and justice in dispute resolution.
• Collective participation (shura): The Madinan polity demonstrates that governance is not authoritarian, but consultative within a divinely bounded framework.

The implication, within this sirah methodology, for bay‘ah is not blind obedience to a ruler, but a conscious pledge to a moral-political project rooted in Prophetic method and collective ethical discipline. Thus, legitimacy is inseparable from process legitimacy, not just institutional continuity.

Dr Kalim Siddiqui: Islamic Movement Theory and the Dynamics of Political Renewal

Dr. Siddiqui’s Islamic Movement theory introduces a macro-historical lens: the Muslim world is not a collection of static states but a field of competing civilizational trajectories. The key concepts include:

• The Ummah as a revolutionary agent: The Muslim community is understood as historically displaced from its political agency, structurally fragmented under nation-state systems and in need of reactivation as a unified moral force.
• Movement vs. State distinction: The Islamic movement is dynamic, ideological and reform-driven whereas the nation-state structures are static and often compromised by external power systems.
• Leadership as mobilization, not mere governance: Leadership is evaluated by its ability to mobilize the ummah toward Islamic objectives, resist ideological assimilation into dominant global systems and sustain moral clarity under political pressure.

The implication for bay‘ah, within this Islamic Movement methodology, is that it becomes a pledge not merely to a ruler, but to an ongoing Islamic movement aimed at civilizational restoration. Thus, legitimacy is movement-oriented, not merely administrative.

When al-Asi, Bangash, and Siddiqui are read together, a layered theory of Islamic political legitimacy emerges:

A. Qur’anic Layer (al-Asi) where authority is conditional on justice, obedience is never absolute and the Qur’an is the final referent of legitimacy.

B. Prophetic Method Layer (Bangash) where leadership emerges through process, not imposition and the sirah provides a developmental model of governance in which participation and trust define authority.

C. Movement Layer (Siddiqui) where the ummah is an active historical force and political legitimacy is tied to mobilization and direction in which states are secondary to civilizational mission.

Rethinking the Hadith of Bay‘ah in This Integrated Model

The hadith “whoever dies without a bay‘ah dies a death of ignorance” in this synthesized framework does not mean unconditional allegiance to any ruler or state. Instead, it implies three obligations:

1. Political belonging is mandatory. The Muslim cannot exist in a state of political disintegration or anarchic isolation.

2. Leadership must exist but it must be accountable. The ummah requires leadership, but leadership must embody justice, reflect Qur’anic values and remain open to correction.

3. Allegiance is ethical, not blind. The bay‘ah becomes a commitment to moral order, a pledge to justice-based governance and a rejection of nihilistic political disengagement.

Thus, jahiliyyah in this hadith is not merely absence of political authority, but absence of ethical structure, accountable leadership and collective moral direction.

From State Allegiance to Civilizational Commitment

When read through al-Asi’s Qur’anic hermeneutics, Bangash’s sirah methodology, and Siddiqui’s movement theory, Islamic political allegiance is transformed fundamentally. Bay‘ah is no longer unconditional submission to rulers, passive acceptance of state authority or symbolic ritual of political loyalty. Instead, it becomes a dynamic, conditional, and morally accountable commitment to sustaining a just Islamic order rooted in the Qur’an, Prophetic practice, and civilizational movement. In this synthesis, authority is legitimate only when just, leadership is valid only when accountable and allegiance is binding only when ethically grounded. And most importantly, the absence of bay‘ah is not the absence of rulers but the absence of a morally coherent, justice-centered Islamic political order.

Islamic Republic of Iran

Hormuz: A Corridor Everybody Needs, and Claims (Part III)

Muslim Mahmood

By May 2026, the fight over the Strait of Hormuz had migrated from missile ranges and mine-clearing helicopters into a subtler theater: competing legal memoranda. On May 4, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a map extending its claimed zone of authority across a stretch of the strait that reached into Omani and Emirati territorial waters, and days later Iran established what it called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority to authorize and regulate transit. Neither move was accidental, and neither was merely rhetorical — both were attempts to convert a temporary wartime disruption into a permanent shift in who gets to say what “passage” through Hormuz actually means.

The underlying dispute long predates 2026. Iran and the United States are not parties to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and each has spent decades reading that gap to its own advantage. Washington argues that the convention's regime of “transit passage” — continuous, expeditious movement for commercial vessels, warships, and aircraft alike, unencumbered by a coastal state's discretion — has hardened into binding customary law that applies whether or not a state has ratified the treaty. Iran counters that transit passage was a negotiated bargain internal to UNCLOS itself, available only to states that signed on to the whole package, and that in its absence the older, narrower customary standard of “innocent passage” governs — a standard under which a coastal state retains real discretion to judge whether a given vessel's passage is harmless, and to bar it if not. Oman, which ratified the convention and jointly administers the strait's traffic-separation scheme with Iran, occupies an uncomfortable middle position: bound by transit-passage rules it accepted in law, but leaned on by both Washington and Tehran to bend its practice toward one interpretation or the other. Legal scholarship has increasingly converged on the view that the modern law of straits was built for exactly this scenario — to prevent a single bordering state from converting a chokepoint into a discretionary tollbooth — and that the balance of that law runs against Iran's broader claims, even if particular questions, like whether transit passage binds non-parties at all, remain genuinely contested among specialists.

What makes 2026 more than an academic dispute is that Iran did not stop at asserting innocent passage. Its stated conditions for a final settlement have included formal international recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the strait and a permanent toll regime — reportedly split with Oman — administered through the same Revolutionary Guard command structure that had spent the preceding months attacking tankers. Iran's foreign ministry has invoked precedents such as Turkey's Montreux Convention authority over the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and Egypt's toll-collecting authority over the Suez Canal, as models for what it wants at Hormuz. The comparison does not hold on its own terms — Montreux is a multilateral treaty Turkey negotiated and every relevant power signed, and the Suez Canal is an artificial waterway built and owned outright by Egypt, not a natural strait shared with a second sovereign coastline. The International Maritime Organization has said explicitly that no international agreement permits a coastal state to charge for transit through a strait used for international navigation, warning that an Iranian toll would set a precedent other chokepoint states — from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Strait of Malacca — would have every incentive to copy.

The Coalition That Could Not Quite Form

Diplomatically, the crisis produced an unusual split among Iran's traditional external partners. Russia and China vetoed a Bahraini-drafted UN Security Council resolution in April that would have condemned Iranian attacks on shipping and called for coordinated international efforts to defend transit — a veto consistent with Iran's own decision to grant unimpeded passage to Chinese, Russian, Indian, Iraqi, and Pakistani vessels while continuing to obstruct ships associated with the United States, Israel, or their allies. That selective enforcement is itself legally significant: a coastal state permitted to regulate passage for genuine safety reasons is not permitted, under the transit-passage framework Washington invokes, to discriminate among flags based on political alignment — which is precisely what both the Iranian and American blockades, in their different ways, ended up doing to each other's associated shipping.

Into that vacuum stepped a European initiative distinct from both Washington's naval posture and Beijing and Moscow's Security Council obstruction. Britain and France hosted two conferences on reopening Hormuz through 2026, gathering a joint statement from 38 countries expressing readiness to help secure passage and condemning attacks on commercial shipping, and by mid-April had committed to building a defensive mission once a durable ceasefire took hold — the UK offering autonomous mine-hunting equipment, counter-drone systems, Typhoon jets, and naval vessels including HMS Dragon, France contributing its Charles de Gaulle carrier group. Iran's response was blunt: any such deployment into the strait would draw what Tehran called a decisive and immediate response, a warning consistent with the same underlying claim — that whatever the text of UNCLOS says about transit passage, the practical reality of the strait's narrowest kilometers running through Iranian and Omani territorial waters gives Tehran a veto that lawyers in London and The Hague cannot write around.

Oman, for its part, has tried to hold a position that satisfies neither patron. Washington has threatened to sanction Muscat if it facilitates any Iranian toll mechanism — a threat Iran's foreign ministry denounced as an attempt to coerce an independent state in violation of the UN Charter — even as Oman itself proposed, in June, a service-fee framework of its own for shipping companies using the strait, distinct from and calculated to preempt the IRGC's tolling scheme. That a state whose entire post-1979 foreign policy has been built on quiet mediation between Washington and Tehran found itself simultaneously threatened by one and instrumentalized in the other's rhetoric is, in miniature, the position every small Gulf state has occupied throughout this crisis: geographically indispensable, politically expendable.

What the Strait Teaches About Power

Read across five centuries — Portuguese blockade, Safavid-English expulsion, three centuries of quiet, twentieth-century oil discovery, the tanker war's failed closures, a war game Iran won on paper in 2002, and now a year in which the strait has been closed, reopened, blockaded, tolled, and legally contested nearly simultaneously — the throughline is not that any single power has ever definitively controlled the Strait of Hormuz. It is that every power operating near it has had to reckon with the fact that no one else can either, not durably, not without cost disproportionate to the gain. Portugal held it for a century through naval supremacy alone and still lost it to a coalition it could not out-position. The United States has spent nearly four decades asserting a freedom-of-navigation doctrine it has never had to test against a determined, technologically modern Iranian denial effort for longer than a few months at a stretch. Iran has spent the same four decades demonstrating that it can disrupt the strait credibly enough to move the global oil price, while never demonstrating that it can hold it closed long enough to convert that disruption into a durable settlement on its own terms.

That asymmetry — real coercive power, but not enough to compel outright victory, on every side — is what has produced 2026's peculiar rhythm of ceasefires signed and broken within days, closures declared by one Iranian institution and denied by another within the same news cycle, and a toll regime that exists in practice for the handful of vessels that have paid it while remaining, in the judgment of nearly every state that is not Iran, illegal on its face. It is tempting, watching that rhythm, to conclude that the strait's legal status will eventually be settled by whichever side outlasts the other militarily. The history argued against that conclusion in 1622, when Portugal's naval supremacy proved insufficient against a land-and-sea coalition it never fully anticipated; it argued against it again in 1988, when eight years of tanker attacks failed to close the strait or force a favorable peace on either belligerent; and it is arguing against it now, as Gulf oil producers who bear no responsibility for the war between Iran, Israel, and the Trump regime absorb losses measured in hundreds of stranded tankers, while their own sovereignty over the outcome remains, as it has for five hundred years, distinctly secondary to the ambitions of whoever currently holds the coastline.

Strait of HormuzIslamic Republic of Iran

Will the Enslaved Persian Gulf States Regain Their Freedom?

Kevin Barrett

When Musa [Moses] (عليه السلام) led his people out of slavery, some of the liberated captives were not quite ready for freedom. The Qur’an recounts an episode that is also found, with slightly different details,* in the Torah:

And [remember] when you said: “O Moses, indeed we cannot endure but one kind of food; pray, then, to thy Sustainer that He bring forth for us aught of what grows from the earth - of its herbs, its cucumbers, its garlic, its lentils, its onions.” Said [Moses]: “Would you take a lesser thing in exchange for what is [so much] better? Go back in shame to Egypt, and then you can have what you are asking for!” And so, ignominy and humiliation overshadowed them, and they earned the burden of God’s condemnation: all this, because they persisted in denying the truth of God’s messages and in slaying the prophets against all right: all this, because they rebelled [against God], and persisted in transgressing the bounds of what is right. (2:61, Muhammad Asad English interpretation).

The verse is addressed to Bani Israel, that is, the tribe that ascribes its descent to the common ancestor Israel, or Jacob, known to Muslims as Yaqub ibn Ishaq. Bani Israel is still a reasonably accurate description of today’s tribe whose members self-identify as “Jews.”

But though both the Qur’anic and Torah versions of this story address the Jews, the episode’s significance transcends tribal identities. The story of Musa’s liberation of his recalcitrant people is humanity’s best known slavery-to-freedom narrative. It has inspired countless generations of people from different cultures, notably including enslaved Blacks in the Americas, to embrace the dangers, hardships, and sufferings that moving out of slavery and into freedom always entails.

Today, as the world undergoes tectonic geopolitical shifts, the story of Musa’s flight to freedom is especially relevant to the Arabian rulers of the US-occupied Persian Gulf states. After generations of enslavement to the west in general and the zio-American empire in particular, a new “Musa” has arisen—the Islamic Republic of Iran—to lead regional nations out of the slavery that they have grown so accustomed to, and become so comfortable with.

But regional rulers are balking at the prospect of freedom. Like the stubborn people of Bani Israel who rebelled against Musa, the ruling elites of the Persian Gulf family dictatorships are habituated to eating their usual dishes—which are usually more elaborate and sinful than simple herbs, cucumbers, garlic, lentils, and onions—and reluctant to endure the risks, unknowns, and potential hardships of charting a new course, a course towards freedom and autonomy and sovereignty under the all-embracing sovereignty of Allah swt.

Like the Israelites in the story of Musa’s flight to freedom, the Persian Gulf’s Arabian dictators could, if they used their reason, see the long-term benefits of freedom over slavery. Their current status as vassals of the United States, itself a vassal to Israel and the global zionist oligarchy, is supposed to offer them protection as well as exploitation. Their masters, the zio-Americans, are supposed to “defend” them by planting military bases on their territory. In exchange, the masters extract the lion’s share of the oil wealth.

But since the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, murdering the Leader and his family members as well as 168 schoolchildren at Minab among other martyrs, the Islamic Republic of Iran has conclusively demonstrated that US military bases in the Persian Gulf region are security liabilities, not assets. The US cannot protect those bases, much less the countries that house them. It cannot keep the Persian Gulf open for business. It cannot keep the Red Sea open for business. It cannot protect pipelines, refineries, refueling stations, electrical infrastructure, or desalinization plants. All it can do is offer Iran targets for drones and missiles, which are raining down on the Persian Gulf monarchies because those bases are there, not in spite of them.

What are all those US bases doing, then, if they can neither protect themselves nor the countries that house them? As the current war drags on, the answer has become clear. They are there for one reason and one reason only: to protect the Genocidal Zionist Entity.

Just one week after the Empire’s initial murderous strikes on Iran, which the Gulf Arab regimes were not warned about and didn’t want, the Associated Press reported: “There is a belief in the region that the operation has focused on defending Israel... while leaving Gulf countries to protect themselves.” That perception has only deepened as the US has shipped most of its interceptors to Israel, leaving its bases and Arab allies totally exposed to incoming Iranian fire.

The reality is simple and ugly: “Israel” hijacked the United States and its blackmailed president to wage war on Iran, and the Arab regimes are collateral damage. Allowing themselves to be occupied and enslaved by the Empire, such that the US would use its Gulf bases in the war, put those Arabian regimes in harm’s way.

Now they are suffering ever-worsening damage because they refuse to eject the Americans. And if the Americans continue to escalate attacks against Iranian infrastructure, Iran will retaliate against Gulf Arab infrastructure, potentially leading to the elimination of electricity and drinking water and the forced evacuation of the American vassal states of the Persian Gulf.

Enslavement to the Empire is leading the Gulf states toward complete ruination. But because the rulers are fat and happy and comfortable with their status as well-fed slaves of the zio-Americans, they are finding it difficult to summon up the critical reasoning skills that would allow them to understand that the only way out of their predicament is the complete ejection of the Americans from the region, and the establishment of a new security arrangement led by regional states with the participation of honest near-outsiders like Turkiye, Pakistan and Egypt, and honest far-outsiders like Russia and China.

This new security arrangement would recognize the obvious truth that there is only one serious threat to stability in the region: the genocidal zionist entity and its western zio-oligarch mafia backers. The Zionists openly boast that they are planning to invade, occupy, and genocidally lay waste to all or parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye, as part of their campaign to create “Greater Israel.” Obviously all of those countries need to unite against the zionists. In this, Iran is their ally, not their enemy.

What’s more, Iran is reliable, while the US is not. Iran keeps its promises. It carries through on its commitments, as evidenced by its adherence to the JCPOA and MOU among other documents that the grossly unreliable USA has torn up and used for toilet paper.

The US is no more reliable in its relations with its supposed “allies” (in reality vassals) than with its enemies. As I write this, Trump promised Saudi Arabia a nuclear program complete with enrichment, then the next day withdrew the enrichment offer and made the whole thing contingent on the Saudis surrendering to Israel and its Shaitan Accords. Who knows what Trump will say or do tomorrow. This kind of grossly unreliable behavior by American rulers is one reason why Henry Kissinger famously said: “To be America’s enemy is dangerous, but to be its friend is fatal.”

Given the above realities, and the fact that US bases in the region are now mostly smoking ruins, it doesn’t require any special strategic genius to see that the Arab leaders of the Persian Gulf region need to eject the Americans and unite against the zionists. So why haven’t they yet?

Besides inertia—their preference for the habitual foods of enslavement—there is also another factor: fear. The family dictatorships of the Gulf countries are terrified by the zionists’ propensity for murdering leaders who stand in their way.

This fear is not unrealistic. Ronan Bergman, the official Mossad stenographer, reports in his book Rise and Kill First enough Israeli assassinations to award the zionists first place in the international dastardly deed contest. And Bergman leaves out the most sensitive Mossad assassinations, including those of the Kennedys and, more recently, Charlie Kirk. Clearly “Israel” has conducted more assassinations than all other state on Earth put together.

Part of the discomfort of leaving slavery behind is the risk that freedom entails. By ejecting the US and uniting against “Israel,” the Gulf rulers would indeed be courting a degree of risk.

But the prophets, including Musa (عليه السلام) knew that sometimes we need to risk our livelihoods and lives in order to follow a Godly path. The reward, if it doesn’t come in this life, is guaranteed in the next. That is what great spiritual heroes and rightly-guided men, like the martyred Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatullah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, have always known.

The luxury-loving Gulf despots cling to the good things of the dunya almost as desperately as do the Jews, “the most greedy of people for (this) life” (2:96). It would be too much to expect them to walk the path of the righteous martyrs. But despite their obvious limitations, they need not descend into the lowest depths of the foulest shayateen. They can still be men—even statesmen.

To become free human beings, rather than abject slaves, the leaders of the Arab Gulf countries must avail themselves of the current God-given opportunity to liberate themselves and their people from an evil, ungodly, genocidal empire.

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*A comparison of the Qur’anic and Biblical accounts supports the Qur’an’s claim that the Torah has been distorted while the Qur’an corrects it. Most obviously, the Torah claims that over two million Israelites followed Moses, while the Qur’an says the Israelites were a small band. Archeologists agree that the “two million” figure is absurd, and that any such incident would have involved a small band, so the Qur’an appears right and the Torah wrong. Additionally, in the Torah version, the Jews’ conflict with God is all about rote obedience, while the Qur’anic version portrays a deeper, more spiritual test of shukr (gratitude).

GCCGulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

Hormuz: The Strait Where Dollar’s Dominance is Irrelevant

Waseem Shehzad

Can the US and the wider west-centric global economy afford a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz?

The short answer is yes, but only in a very narrow financial sense. It is similar to how a prisoner can technically survive on water and dry bread.

Prior to delving deeper into this question, let’s look at the yes side of the issue.

The US possesses greater economic resilience than any other country in the world. It enjoys a special privilege that no other major power has ever possessed to the same degree: the greenback being the world’s primary reserve currency. This allows Washington to finance military operations on a scale that would bankrupt any other country.

It can borrow vast sums, issue treasury securities that remain in high demand globally and when necessary, expand the money supply through its financial system.

Yet this financial advantage has led some observers to a faulty conclusion, that because the US can print endless supply of dollars, it can absorb every economic shock easily or indefinitely.

History and economics suggest otherwise.

The real question is not whether the US can pay for another war or another geopolitical crisis. The more important question is whether money alone can solve disruptions to the real economy.

The answer is a clear no.

Especially considering that Iran’s ability to resist American aggression in West Asia is multidimensional and economic factors in the ongoing regional war are interlinked with military, political and social dimensions. There are certain domains where Islamic Iran has a strong upperhand than many have assumed.

The Strait of Hormuz is not merely another shipping route. It is one of the world’s most strategically important logistical chokepoints. It is not only about oil and energy products anymore. It is now about global logistics and the shipping industry as a whole.

A long closure or a sustained period in which commercial shipping becomes prohibitively expensive because of military threats, insurance premiums, or repeated attacks, will inevitably impact multiple industries simultaneously.

The US enters this scenario with undeniable strengths. The dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. US financial markets remain deep and liquid. American government debt continues to attract global investors, giving Washington immense borrowing capacity.

If the success of military operations were based only on hundreds of billions of dollars, the US could almost certainly finance them without facing an immediate fiscal crisis.

However, financing a war and maintaining western imposed global economic order are not the same thing.

Modern economies do not run on money alone. They run on energy, industrial production, transportation networks, global supply chains, skilled labor and investor confidence. Governments can create liquidity, but they cannot print oil, manufacture additional cargo ships overnight, reopen blocked sea lanes or instantly replace disrupted logistics networks.

A prolonged disruption of Hormuz creates problems that monetary policy alone cannot solve.

While the most discussed immediate consequence is energy, other sectors are also in the process of being damaged.

All of this is taking place as western regimes are already facing significant structural pressures. Europe has undergone a major transition away from inexpensive Russian pipeline gas following the war in Ukraine.

Economic policies chosen to fight an indirect war with Russia in Ukraine consume public resources that might otherwise have been directed toward domestic investment, infrastructure development and debt reduction.

A major economic and infrastructure disruption in the Persian Gulf adds another layer of economic stress to the already struggling western economies.

If commercial vessels face sustained threats while transiting the Strait of Hormuz, shipping insurers will dramatically increase premiums. Some operators may reroute vessels through the Cape of Good Hope or even cancel trade traffic altogether. Delivery times would lengthen beyond break-even point for businesses and manufacturers relying on just-in-time supply chains would encounter irreparable disruptions.

Modern industrial economies are deeply interconnected. A disruption in one strategic maritime corridor will affect factories, ports, retailers, and consumers thousands of kilometers away.

Money alone cannot eliminate these bottlenecks.

Another often overlooked dimension is international capital.

For decades, western-backed GCC regimes have accumulated substantial amounts of money and invested hundreds of billions of dollars in western economies through sovereign wealth funds, government bonds, infrastructure and financial institutions.

Regional conflict which is in the process of damaging their critical infrastructure, will force these regimes to send less money to the west. Reduced capital flows will add another headwind for western economies already facing serious problems.

This illustrates an important economic principle. The greatest risks rarely arise from a single shock. Rather, they emerge when several problems begin reinforcing one another.

Higher military spending coincides with elevated public debt. Higher energy prices contribute to inflation. Inflation sustains higher interest rates. Higher interest rates increase government debt servicing costs. Supply-chain disruptions reduce productivity while increasing production costs. Reduced investment weakens long-term growth. Each individual challenge may be manageable; together they create structural pressure that is far more difficult to offset.

History provides an instructive parallel.

Britain did not lose its position as the world’s leading power because of one failed military operation.

By the end of the second European War, Britain remained a formidable military power, but it was already burdened by enormous wartime debts, slower economic growth, and heavy financial costs of maintaining a global empire.

The 1956 Suez Crisis did not create Britain’s decline. Rather, it exposed structural weaknesses that had accumulated over many years. When financial pressure mounted and the United States refused to support the British pound, London lost its hegemony. Historians widely regard Suez as the moment Britain publicly ceased to function as an independent global hegemon.

Today, there are many parallels between the Suez Crisis and Iran’s assertion of its sovereignty over the Hormuz Strait.

It is not necessary that the US will follow Britain’s exact path of decline.

America’s economy is significantly larger, more diversified, and supported by the unparalleled advantage of the dollar as reserve currency. The lesson is that hegemonic powers rarely encounter strategic limits because they suddenly run out of money. More often, those limits emerge when multiple economic and geopolitical pressures gradually reduce their room for maneuver.

Can the US afford a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz?

Financially, yes. It possesses extraordinary capacity to absorb shocks that would overwhelm almost any other country. However, economics and geopolitics are not about finances alone.

The cumulative effect of pressures related to Iran’s valiant and well planned resistance is in the process of building a perfect economic and geopolitical storm for ending American economic resilience.

A recent Pew Research Centre survey found that people in most of the 36 countries surveyed now view China more positively than the US. This is another reminder that the world is moving beyond a west-centric order. An order which Iran’s assertion of sovereignty over the Hormuz Strait is going to speed up in an unprecedented manner.

Strait of HormuzIslamic Republic of Iran