The American Pharaoh: From the Nullification of Magic to Drowning in the Sea

By Dr. Ahmad Al-Shami

It is firmly established—without exaggeration—that the American fits the description of the Pharaoh of this age. He hurls all his tools of magic while proclaiming, “I am your supreme lord,” besieging those who dare oppose him, punishing them, imprisoning them, and even killing them—with a narcissism rarely matched. In doing so, he tramples all international institutions and everything the human mind has produced of laws and norms intended to make life more civilized.

While the spell of American magic was sweeping through many hearts, exposing the latent sense of inferiority within them, and while states and regimes feared it and fell prostrate before it, Moses’ staff has returned to act once again. It devours what the American fashions with his sorcery, lifting the veil from insight and revealing his debased reality and his civilization in its death throes. An arrogant West cannot be free, for there is no freedom without virtue, and no virtue in the absence of faith.

This depiction is not a mere wish of a powerless group or a pastime for broken hearts; rather, it reflects a reality imposing itself forcefully. The world is witnessing the collapse of the image the American West etched into popular consciousness as the highest model of humanity—including in the eyes of Westerners themselves. This West has not only lost its magic; it is heading toward death, as the American thinker Patrick J. Buchanan said in his famous book The Death of the West.

When its soft magic—its dollar and its ideas—was exposed, the American Pharaoh plunged deeper into wars and the tragedies of peoples. This is difficult to disentangle from an ideology inflamed by a desire to seize wealth and assert superiority in status and power over the Other, whoever that Other may be. Here occurs what psychologists call “moral exclusion,” whereby others are stripped of their moral rights and even their humanity—up to the point of killing them.

Once again, the sea has returned to be the arena of the final confrontation. While the American Pharaoh imagines himself the most capable of navigating its depths, boasting of his giant aircraft carriers laden with planes, soldiers, and munitions brimming with rancor—and with an excess of arrogance that reaches the point of stupidity and blindness to the voice of truth—the opposing front is undergoing a serious test to reveal the faith and virtue within its followers that anchor them to what is right. Then Moses’ staff will act again, striking anew and, through a rational luring, consigning this pharaonic folly to an inevitable doom.

For God’s will among His creation decrees that He grants victory to His servants whose hearts He has refined through trial, leading them to humility and steadfast faith in Him, and that He destroys His enemies who grow arrogant and tyrannical on earth until their hearts are steeped in disbelief. This is God’s just balance by which He has dealt with creation from Adam—peace be upon him—until the Day of Resurrection. This balance does not change from one generation to another across time; God’s way proceeds with constancy, without alteration or substitution.