The ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians that nobody is talking about

By

 5Pillars

Palestinian-American journalist and author Ramzy Baroud says Palestine’s Christian population is dwindling at an alarming rate to move elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel. 

Christian leaders from Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on October 15. Their gathering was titled: “The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective.”

One major issue that highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of Palestinian Christians in Palestine.

There are varied estimates on how many Palestinian Christians are still living in Palestine today, compared with the period before 1948 when the state of Israel was established atop Palestinian towns and villages.

Regardless of the source of the various studies, there is near consensus that the number of Christian inhabitants of Palestine has dropped by nearly ten-fold in the last 70 years.

A population census carried out by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2017 concluded that there are 47,000 Palestinian Christians living in Palestine – with reference to the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

98 percent of Palestine’s Christians live in the West Bank – concentrated mostly in the cities of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem – while the remainder, a tiny Christian community of merely 1,100 people, lives in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Bethlehem

The demographic crisis that had afflicted the Christian community decades ago is now brewing.

For example, 70 years ago, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, was 86 percent Christian. The demographics of the city, however, have fundamentally shifted, especially after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in June 1967, and the construction of the illegal Israeli apartheid wall, starting in 2002. Parts of the wall were meant to cut off Bethlehem from Jerusalem and to isolate the former from the rest of the West Bank.

“The Wall encircles Bethlehem by continuing south of East Jerusalem in both the east and west,” the Open Bethlehem organisation said, describing the devastating impact of the wall on the Palestinian city. “With the land isolated by the Wall, annexed for settlements, and closed under various pretexts, only 13% of the Bethlehem district is available for Palestinian use.”

Bethlehem

Increasingly beleaguered, Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem have been driven out from their historic city in large numbers. According to the city’s mayor, Vera Baboun, as of 2016, the Christian population of Bethlehem has dropped to 12 percent, merely 11,000 people.

The most optimistic estimates place the overall number of Palestinian Christians in the whole of Occupied Palestine at less than two percent.

The correlation between the shrinking Christian population in Palestine, and the Israeli occupation and apartheid should be unmistakable, as it is obvious to Palestine’s Christian and Muslim population alike.

A study conducted by Dar al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and published in December 2017, interviewed nearly 1,000 Palestinians, half of them Christian and the other half Muslim. One of the main goals of the research was to understand the reason behind the depleting Christian population in Palestine.

The study concluded that “the pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians,” who are finding themselves in “a despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their offspring or for themselves.”

Unfounded claims that Palestinian Christians are leaving because of religious tensions between them and their Muslim brethren are, therefore, irrelevant.

Gaza

Gaza is another case in point. Only 2 percent of Palestine’s Christians live in the impoverished and besieged Gaza Strip. When Israel occupied Gaza along with the rest of historic Palestine in 1967, an estimated 2,300 Christians lived in the Strip. However, merely 1,100 Christians still live in Gaza today. Years of occupation, horrific wars and an unforgiving siege can do that to a community, whose historic roots date back to two millennia.

Like Gaza’s Muslims, these Christians are cut off from the rest of the world, including the holy sites in the West Bank. Every year, Gaza’s Christians apply for permits from the Israeli military to join Easter services in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Last April, only 200 Christians were granted permits, but on the condition that they must be 55 years of age or older and that they are not allowed to visit Jerusalem.

The Israeli rights group, Gisha, described the Israeli army decision as “a further violation of Palestinians’ fundamental rights to freedom of movement, religious freedom and family life”, and, rightly, accused Israel of attempting to “deepen the separation” between Gaza and the West Bank.

In fact, Israel aims at doing more than that. Separating Palestinian Christians from one another, and from their holy sites (as is the case for Muslims, as well), the Israeli government hopes to weaken the socio-cultural and spiritual connections that give Palestinians their collective identity.

Israel’s strategy is predicated on the idea that a combination of factors – immense economic hardships, permanent siege and apartheid, the severing of communal and spiritual bonds – will eventually drive all Christians out of their Palestinian homeland.

Victimisation

Israel is keen to present the conflict in Palestine as a religious one so that it could, in turn, brand itself as a beleaguered Jewish state in the midst of a massive Muslim population in the Middle East. The continued existence of Palestinian Christians does not factor nicely into this Israeli agenda.

Sadly, however, Israel has succeeded in misrepresenting the struggle in Palestine – from that of political and human rights struggle against settler colonialism – into a religious one. Equally disturbing, Israel’s most ardent supporters in the United States and elsewhere are religious Christians.

It must be understood that Palestinian Christians are neither aliens nor bystanders in Palestine. They have been victimised equally as their Muslim brethren, and have also played a major role in defining the modern Palestinian identity, through their resistance, spirituality, deep connection to the land, artistic contributions and burgeoning scholarship.

Israel must not be allowed to ostracise the world’s most ancient Christian community from their ancestral land so that it may score a few points in its deeply disturbing drive for racial supremacy.

Equally important, our understanding of the legendary Palestinian soumoud (steadfastness) and of solidarity cannot be complete without fully appreciating the centrality of Palestinian Christians to the modern Palestinian narrative and identity.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His last book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter.

Houthis change rules of engagement with devastating attack on Saudi Arabia

By

 5Pillars

Veteran Arab journalist Abdel Bari Atwan says Yemen’s Houthi movement has completely changed the equation in its war with Saudi Arabia by taking the fight into Saudi territory in such devastating fashion.

The huge fires started by Saturday’s drone attacks on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil production and processing facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia may have been brought under control. But big questions remain unanswered about where the ten pilotless aircraft came from and how they managed to reach their targets apparently undetected and hit them with such devastating accuracy.

These were no ordinary targets. They were among the most strategically important – and one would have assumed most closely protected — locations in the country. The two oilfields and their related plants have a capacity of more than seven million barrels of crude oil per day and process some 70% of Saudi Aramco’s petroleum output.

Saturday’s attack, which at a stroke cut the country’s oil production by more than half, was the third on Aramco facilities this year. In May seven drones targeted two pumping stations on the main east-west oil pipeline and in August the massive Shayba oilfield was attacked.

In claiming responsibility for the latest (and by far most serious) drone raid, Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement offered possible partial answers to the above questions.

Houthi spokesman Yahya Sarie’ said the operation was carried out after a “careful process of intelligence surveillance” of the sites. He did not elaborate about how and by whom this surveillance was carried out, nor did he comment on this apparent breakthrough in the Houthis’ intelligence capabilities.

Neither did he explain how, if the drones were launched from Yemeni territory, they managed to make the 1,000 km-plus journey without refuelling or being detected.

He did, however, make a point of praising “honourable and freedom-loving people” inside Saudi Arabia for their contribution to the operation. This sounded like a reference to the participation of members of Saudi Arabia’s persecuted Shia minority, who are concentrated in the Eastern Province in the attack, or at least in the intelligence/surveillance process that preceded it.

The drones seem unlikely to have been launched from within Saudi Arabia itself. It would have been very difficult to smuggle such large devices into the Kingdom or assemble them there. They were probably fired from a neighbouring country: Iraq is increasingly being identified as the most likely source (the drones that struck the east-west pipeline were also widely reported to have come from there).

There has also been speculation they may have been clandestinely launched from Bahrain, or from a ship sailing off the Saudi Gulf coast.

Resistance Axis

But the precise source of the missiles is immaterial. Since the start of the Saudi-led war on Yemen, the Houthis have become increasingly closely aligned with the regional “Resistance Axis” comprising Iran and Syria and their allies in Iraq, Lebanon and other Arab countries. They no longer attempt to conceal this: their envoys now visit Tehran openly and their leaders express pride about their relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Sarie’, meanwhile, warned that Ansarullah’s list of targets inside Saudi Arabia is “growing by the day,” meaning that more such attacks can be expected until Riyadh ends its war and lifts its blockade of Yemen.

This warning should be seen in the context of two other highly significant warnings that were issued in recent days: the declaration by Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that his movement has new options available for countering U.S. attempts to cripple it and its allies; and the reaffirmation by Iranian leader Ali Khamenei’s advisor Ali Akbar Velayati that if his country is prevented from exporting oil through the Persian Gulf, no other country will be allowed to do so either.

The Houthis are closely aligned with Iran

The Houthis have changed the rules of engagement. The message they delivered with the latest attacks is, in their own words, that they will continue striking targets deep inside Saudi Arabia until the country’s leadership realises that “killing more Yemenis will not force them to their knees.”

Saudi fire-fighters may have put out the flames in Abqaiq and Khurais. But the dense smoke from the fires continues to shroud the region, and to conceal, at least for now, many questions about the future of the struggle raging in the Middle East, not just in Yemen but throughout the region.

In the meantime, a question is worth asking: Who is going to buy a stake in Saudi Aramco now? The Saudi government is desperate to offer shares in the giant corporation for sale. But even if they ever go on the market, how much will they fetch? Is it as coincidence that the attacks were launched just as Riyadh was stepping up efforts to proceed with a share offering?

Those unsophisticated mountain-dwelling Yemenis are clearly not as stupid as their enemies think.

Israeli election spells no change for Palestinians

Journalist Robert Inlakesh says it makes no difference who becomes the next Israeli Prime Minister, Palestinians will lose either way.

As Benjamin Netanyahu suffered a major blow to the benefit of opposition leader Benny Gantz in the Israeli snap elections, Israel is now being perceived to have voted for change.

But what sort of change will be coming to Israel, given a Benny Gantz led coalition, and will Netanyahu actually be ousted or will Israel head into a third round of elections due to the current deadlock?

Many will already know a little about the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with his corruption scandals, war-waging and racist rhetoric towards Palestinians and Africans, being just a few of the many dynamics of his infamous career.

For the Palestinian people, Netanyahu is a man who describes peoples of neigbouring countries and territories as “wild beasts”, says that Israel has to build walls to protect itself, and is evidently not a good man to see in a position of power.

But unfortunately for peace and stability in the region, the record of Benny Gantz is not very different.

Who is Benny Gantz?

Benny Gantz could be Israel’s next Prime Minister and is an ex-Chief of Staff for the IDF, having served between 2011 and 2015. He is most infamous for his roles in the killing of 167 Palestinians in 2012 and the Gaza massacre of 2014, resulting in the murder of 2,202 Palestinians.

The Kahol Lavan (Blue and White) Party front man is not in favour of a two-state solution, he does not support any Palestinian state. Rather, he believes in maintaining Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem; he believes in making Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza even tighter; he believes in complete Israeli domination of Jerusalem; and he believes that Israel must maintain its illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan region, as well as annexed Lebanese land in the North.

So Benny Gantz’s foreign policy is essentially the same as Netanyahu’s and if asked to form a coalition government, he will likely carry on exactly where the last Prime Minister left off.

In short, Gantz carries on in a similar fashion to Netanyahu, minus the pictures, diagrams and pointer pen, proclaiming that Israel must never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon and that Israel must crush Hezbollah and Hamas.

Benny Gantz

Speaking at AIPAC earlier this year, his speech could have been an exact double of Netanyhau’s when it came to his rhetoric on Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

Gantz is not only a former Chief of Staff for Israel’s military – his career highlight being the 51 days of destruction in Gaza during “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014 – but he used his past during his campaign in order to garner the votes necessary to challenge Netanyahu.

Gantz even released an ad campaign video in which he brags about killing thousands of Palestinians sending parts of Gaza “back to the stone age”. Interestingly, the very day of the Israeli election there was a Dutch court hearing for a war crimes case against the Israeli ex-general for his participation in the murder of 7 Palestinians killed in a specific airstrike.

Netanyahu’s downfall

Benjamin Netanyahu ran his election campaign on racism against Arabs and specifically Palestinians, inside of Israel and outside of it. He also ran his campaign on whether Israel was wishing to be a more religious or secular society.

A third notable point in his campaign was his “security” component, in which he stirred up tensions with Iraq, Syria, Gaza and Lebanon in order to make himself appear strong.

However, despite his attempt to play to the Israeli public’s racist sentiments and his attempts to divide and scare the Israeli population into submission, he failed.

His racism against Israeli Arabs produced an unprecedented 60% voter turnout from that community, making the “Arab Joint List” the third largest party inside of the Knesset. This is because roughly 20% of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian Arabs. The turnout is understood to be a reaction to Netanyahu in order to combat him.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

His promise of security to Israelis was also not good enough, in part because of his embarrassing losses and inability to deal with armed factions inside of Gaza.

But perhaps the biggest factor in Netanyahu’s downfall was his own former Defence Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who still has the power to maintain or break the current PM. Netanyahu would have formed a coalition government earlier this year, however, the former Defence Minister prevented him from doing so by rejecting an offer to join the coalition.

At the time of the last election, the move by Lieberman was taken due to a disagreement over mandatory conscription of the Ultra-Orthodox into the military. The bad blood however, began with a flare up between the Israeli military and armed factions in Gaza in November of 2018, when Gazan resistance factions dealt an embarrassing blow to Israel, resulting in the resignation of Lieberman after Netanyahu refused to start an all-out war.

What next for Palestinians?

If Benjamin Netanyahu wins, he may follow through with his campaign promise to annex the Jordan Valley – which officially constitutes 30% of the West Bank. However, due to the situation on the ground it’s closer to 40% – meaning that close to 100,000 Palestinians could be ethnically cleansed from their villages and towns.

Netanyahu may also want revenge on Gaza for the resistance daring to fight back, possibly initiating a new massacre of the Gazan population.

If Benny Gantz wins, he has vowed to be tougher on Gaza, which may mean more executions of unarmed demonstrators at Gaza’s Great Return March, as well as a possible tightening of the blockade and a new war. \

Gantz is also a lot less experienced as a politician and could make reckless moves in the region.

One positive to a Gantz Prime Minister win, could be a decline in Israel’s hold over Washington, as nobody has the connections of Netanyahu in the U.S. However if the ex-general is asked to form a coalition by the Israeli President, Netanyahu may try to initiate a war in order to get a third election.

Ultimately, it does not matter whether Gantz or Netanyahu wins the position of Prime Minister, the Palestinians lose either way.

Mohamed Morsi and Aung San Suu Kyi – Two democrats treated differently by the West

By 5Pillars

Left to right: Aung San Suu Kyi and Mohamed Morsi

Mohammed Morsi and Aung San Suu Kyi both believed in democracy, yet the West treated them very differently when they were oppressed, writes Jahangir Mohammed.

The death of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in court after six years of imprisonment and torture, has demonstrated the West’s double standards over democracy.  The West’s championing of democracy as a higher political value does not extend to the Muslim majority world – it is simply a stick to beat Muslims with.

The UK Government has included lack of support for democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual tolerance within its definition of “extremism” (mainly used against Muslims with dissenting views), and a fundamental British value. Yet its own behaviour (like others in the West) in other parts of the world, shows a total disregard for the very values it expects Muslim communities to embrace, and subsequently judges them by.

In six years, the West has made little to no effort to support the first fairly elected president of Egypt or its democracy. Nor has it tried to oppose the intolerance and abuse of the rule of law and human rights in Egypt. Rather, the US other Western nations embraced military dictatorship as a partner in the region.

The case of Mohamed Morsi

Mohammed Morsi and his democratically elected Freedom and Justice Party were ousted in a military coup led by General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi in July 2013. There was no moral outcry in the West. In fact, no sooner had Sisi come to power, some Western countries visited him to secure arms and trade deals.

When Morsi was charged with treason and other trumped up charges, he did not become an international symbol of a “freedom-loving democrat” trying to move his country away from military dictatorship. Nor did Western human rights groups widely champion him as a political prisoner worthy of their highest accolades and mass campaigns. Even the socialists and the left were unusually silent.

Abdel Fatah al-Sisi

When Sisi imprisoned thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and members, and sentenced many to death, there was still no outcry and no political prisoner campaigns.

Western rights groups, politicians and the media appeared to care very little about the masses of pollical prisoners, torture, lack of due process and rule of law.

Yet, when even one European is imprisoned in a country like Iran, they are deserving of the whole machinery of politics and human rights being unleashed.

You would think that the West’s army of feminists would care for the plight of the thousands of women arrested or affected by mass detention in Egypt. Here too they have been largely silent. We have of course seen this before, when 50,000 Muslim women were raped or in camps in Bosnia at the hands of the Serbs, I don’t recall a single Western feminist group taking up the issue.

In the six years that followed the detention of President Morsi, there was little concern about any of these human right abuses and torture. Instead, the West was more concerned about whether the Muslim Brotherhood and former President Morsi cared about or held the same social and political values as the West (both the political Left and Right). The message appeared to be unless you are a Muslim that is like us, you are not worthy of our support.

When sadly he died, there were no tributes from Western leaders or expressions of grief or even anger. Morsi was dead and his belief in democracy mattered not one jot. It was his belief in democracy and faith in the democratic West, that contributed towards his tragic death.

The case of Aung San Suu Kyi

Compare the treatment of Mohammed Morsi to another former political prisoner fighting for democracy. Aung San Suu Kyi rose to prominence in the uprisings in Myanmar against military rule in 1988.  She then became the President of the National League for Democracy (NLD).  In the 1990 elections, the NLD won 81% of the seats in Parliament. The military refused to hand over power and she remained in house detention for 15 of the following 21 years until 2010.

Suu Kyi became the world’s most prominent political prisoner thanks to international Western support. In 1990, she was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, in 1991 the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2012 she received the United States Congressional Gold Medal. She became an iconic figurehead for democracy and human rights organisations, and was championed by politicians and movements on both the left and the right of the western political spectrum.

Rohingya refugees in a camp in Cox Bazaar, Bangladesh.

Her “bravery and struggle for non-violent commitment to democracy” were saluted across the Western world. She was seen in the West as “one of us” with little concern to consider her own Buddhist values and political views. Only since her party came to power in 2015 have her Buddhist and political views been criticised, especially in light of her attitude towards the minority Rohingya Muslim community (whose persecution she has denied).

Western imperialism and supremacy

The West’s approach and policies towards Muslims, and the Muslim majority world (irrespective of Left or Right) is still rooted in its pre-colonial relationship and interaction with Islam. This was, and largely still is, infected by ignorance, stereotypes, anti-Islamic propaganda with an attitude of Rudyard Kipling’s supremacist civilising mission.

Muslim social, moral and political beliefs and values have to be just like the West’s to be deemed worthy of their support. Hinduism and Buddhism on the other hand have tended to be viewed in the West in a romantic way as some exotic religion Westerners can study and gain some spiritual benefits from. Islam and Muslims have always been seen as a rival to Western religious, and now secular values, and its global power.

At the time of colonialism, European countries entered Muslim lands saying they were there for trade which would make us prosperous too. Sadly, most Muslim leaders at the time believed this. After the 9/11 attacks, the West told us they were invading our countries to install democracy in the Muslim world. Many believed them. On both occasions, the only thing Muslims got was death, destruction and impoverishment. It is time for Muslims to learn that if we are going to bring an end to tyranny and oppression in the Muslim world, we are going to have to do it all by ourselves within our own traditions and struggle’s.

In a real sense, the Egyptian people’s revolution died at the hands of democracy and the belief that the West would support those Muslims who embraced it.

References to the “West” and “Western” are at the political level, and not directed at ordinary people in the West.

Arabs now realise the Golan Heights can only be recovered by armed resistance

By Abdel Bari Atwan 

Veteran Arab journalist Abdel Bari Atwan says that by recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, the U.S. is telling Syria it can only recover its occupied territory by force.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights did not come as a surprise. It was only to be expected given the shameful defeatism Arab regimes are displaying these days.

Their failure to react forcefully or practically to Trump’s recognition of occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital” removed any obstacle to his latest move. In such circumstances, he could soon go on to recognise the annexation of the West Bank, which he no longer considers to be occupied, and to support Israeli designs on other territories.

A senior Hezbollah official who spoke to Raialyoum suggested that there are positive aspects to this decision: It has ruled out any prospect of any Syrian government seeking to recover its occupied lands through negotiations, and left it with no option other than armed resistance in all its variants – ensuring that the country remains within the “Resistance Axis” for decades to come.

Successive Israel prime ministers tried to lure Syria out of that axis by holding out the prospect of giving back the Golan Heights through negotiations. Successive U.S. presidents colluded in that deception. But the Netanyahu/Trump duo has made things clearer – it has demonstrated that the negotiations were a lie, the promised peace was a mirage, and the prospective return of the Golan Heights was never more than a big ruse.

The same happened in the case of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the PLO and the 1994 Wadi Arba agreement with Jordan.

With his decision, Trump has unwittingly legitimised the launch of armed resistance to liberate the Golan Heights – as in the West Bank, Gaza, and South Lebanon. So does the near-unanimous international opposition that encountered his endorsement of Israel’s annexation of the Heights.

Armed resistance 

Israel is trying to use force to impose facts on the ground, while exerting pressure on its allies to accept them as new realities. It has been proven in practice (in South Lebanon, Gaza and during the early stages of the 1973 war) that this policy can only be countered by force.

It was painful to witness some of the reactions to this provocative and insulting American step. Worst of all was the failure of the Syrian opposition to come out clearly and frankly against this theft of a precious part of their country with no legal or moral justification. The Golan Heights do not belong to the current Syrian government or to President Bashar al-Assad, who these factions oppose, but to all Syrians since time immemorial.

The Golan Heights

The reaction of the Arab regimes was nearly as bad. Some of them dragged their feet before issuing statements opposing the move – for more than a day in the case of some Gulf governments. That was disgraceful in the full sense of the word.

The Israeli occupation state was thrown into a state of confusion by a single missile fired by besieged resistance fighters in Gaza that hit a building north of Tel Aviv. One can only imagine what would happen if many more missiles, much more capable, were to start hurtling down on Israeli targets from a reactivated Golan Front.

Some say this idea is far-fetched. They note that the Golan Front was kept quiet by the Syrian regime for over 40 years. That is true. But times and circumstances have changed. The US has now blessed Israel’s annexation of this part of Syria, after trying for eight years to fragment the entire country but failing due to the resilience of the Syrian army and state. Syrian air defence missiles ended Israel’s impunity in the skies, and now it faces the prospect of being confronting with thousands of ground-to-ground missiles.

The army that succeeded in recapturing most of Syria’s cities is certainly capable of recapturing the Golan Heights. It represents the entire country, and has acquired unprecedented combat expertise and skills. This is not only our judgement: Israeli military experts are saying the same thing.

What’s the real plan?

A final point needs to be mentioned: Trump’s unlimited and naked support for Netanyahu, and his flagrant intervention in the Israeli elections in his favour, suggest that a plan is being prepared. Its features may not emerge until after Netanyahu is re-elected with the support of the president of the world’s strongest power.

What could these be? Waging war on Iran and its allies after the implementation of the second phase of sanctions that aim to stop all Iranian oil exports? A re-occupation of the Gaza Strip? An assault on Lebanon in a desperate attempt to destroy Hezbollah? Or possibly a military invasion of Syria?

These are hypothetical questions to which we have no answers. What we can say, in all confidence, is that any US plans – whether in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine – are doomed to fail, and to backfire catastrophically on those who hatch them.

Netanyahu has been bombing Gaza relentlessly, yet still seeks Egypt’s mediation for the third time in less than two months to halt missiles strikes from the Strip. He has ordered more than 200 airstrikes on Syria, but failed to achieve any of his aims, whether removing Iranian forces from the country or preventing missile deliveries to Hezbollah.

The writing, therefore, is on the wall.

95 years without the Caliphate: History, reality and the future

“We must put an end to anything which brings about any Islamic unity between the sons of the Muslims. The situation now is that Turkey is dead and will never rise again, because we have destroyed its moral strength, the Caliphate and Islām.”

This bold statement, or rather stark warning, was allegedly made by the former British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, at the House of Commons after the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, when the Ottomans were defeated in World War One. The reason why Lord Curzon’s alleged statement should be taken with so much weight is because it correlates with the following ḥadīth of Prophet Muḥammad (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam):

“The knots of Islām will be undone one by one, each time a knot is undone the next one will be grasped, the first to be undone will be the ruling and the last will be the prayer.” [1]

Today marks 95 Gregorian years since the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate, arguably, the darkest chapter in Islamic history after the death of Rasūl’Allāh (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam). The Ummah continues to suffer from the after-effects of this calamitous event, for the very reason, which Lord Curzon mentioned – the Muslims currently have no collective “moral strength”, which is embodied in the form of an inclusive Islamic polity.

The Middle East and North Africa were subsequently carved up between Britain and France, as Mark Sykes and Francois Georges Picot planned the future of the former Ottoman territories with a pen and ruler. What has followed since was an uninterrupted chain of secular dictatorships and petrol rich sheikhdoms. Many of these regimes came to power via military coups, dressed up as pseudo-liberators, whilst the Gulf monarchies unashamedly enjoyed the fruits of their forefathers’ betrayal during WW1.

The Caliphate

The history lesson aside, the concept of the Caliphate, and the general Muslim populous’ desire for it, continues to be maligned by academics, journalists, Western policymakers and governments. Secular liberals and modernists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, from across the political spectrum, appear to have adopted the attitude of Lord Curzon, but with rehashed rhetoric that a Caliphate is simply incompatible with the modern world, rendering it barbaric and despotic. The irony is that they all seem to conveniently forget that for over a thousand years Islamic civilisation under successive Caliphates, from the Umayyads to the Ottomans, led humanity in science, philosophy, arts and technology. Furthermore, agenda-driven critics and muscular ideologues also overlook that not only did every Caliphate have the trappings of a modern state, but they were the beacon and example of modernity for their relevant period in history. Again, I cannot do justice in explaining Islām’s contribution to the world as we know it today, when libraries are filled with books and historical testimonies of non-Muslims who substantiate this undeniable fact.

However, it must be stated from the onset that the Caliphate is not regarded as a utopian state, conceptually or in practice. This was never the case when Prophet Muḥammad (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) ruled over Madīna, or when the Khulafāh Rāshidūn (Rightly Guided Caliphs) expanded the Caliphate, or those that came after. In fact, when the Caliphate entered hereditary rule and kingship, there were cases of internal corruption, theological deviation and infighting. Rather, this polity is what followed the end of Prophethood, and the practical manifestation of Allāh’s (subḥānahu wa taʿālā) divine law on Earth. This is evident in the following ḥadīth of Rasūl’Allāh (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam):

“The Prophets used to manage the political affairs of Banī Isrāīl. Whenever a Prophet died another Prophet succeeded him, but there will be no Prophets after me; instead there will be Caliphs, and they will number many”. The Companions asked: what then do you order us? He (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) said: “fulfil allegiance to them one after the other. Give them their dues. Verily Allāh will ask them about what He entrusted them with”. [2]

The virtues and societal conditions sought from the Caliphate, deduced from the classical scholars after scrutinising the Sharīʿah, is to establish social justice, to protect the honour and property of its citizens, and the preservation of the Islamic way of life. Now this may be a sour grape for the intolerant ‘tolerant’ who stubbornly comprehends the Islamic governing system through the lenses of a secular paradigm, assuming that liberal democracy is the default benchmark against which every governing system should be compared to. But there is also a political context to this ideological objection of the Caliphate, and that is the conflation of Europe’s systematic separation of the ‘Church and State’. This period of secularisation, which is symbolised in the era known as the ‘Christian Reformation’ has never occurred in the Muslim world during the existence of a Caliphate, nor would it be befitting.

Islam and the West

Those that attempt to conflate Islām and western Christianity under the arbitrary term “religion” invariably superimpose the pre-reformation Christian historical baggage onto Islām. The fact of the matter is that Islamic history is not plagued with the same repressive church-like institutions that stifled human advancement, and the classical Islamic governance already secured the rights that the Enlightenment sought to secure, and more.

The notion of a Caliph is an employee that represents and is accountable to the people, and Islamic history shows a level of accountability that we still have not yet seen in Western politics. Despite this, there were attempts during the 19th century to minimise the legislative powers of the Caliph, and to modernise certain aspects of the declining Ottoman Caliphate, to make it more ‘palatable’ with its thriving European contemporaries; but the idea of a systematic separation of “religion and state” was unthinkable.

Additionally, Islām’s worldview that was represented by the Caliphate had always clashed with other empires it encountered; from the Persians, Byzantines, Mongols, Crusaders, right up to the colonial powers of Europe. Hence, after the destruction of the Caliphate on 3rd March 1924, Christian Europe had successfully eradicated the only superpower that it had been in a constant state of conflict with for nearly a millennium. Of course, Europe had suffered centuries of bloody internal wars, but the fight against the ‘Mohammedans’ was a unique one due to the cultural and religious dissimilarity.

After the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Francis Fukuyama had arrogantly stated that humanity had reached the “end of history” – implying that liberal democracy was the only natural form of government to have survived the testing waves of global change.[3] Fukuyama was clearly naive in his assessment of the world, because he assumed that in the absence of the Caliphate, the Islamic mind would also be non-existent – he was grossly mistaken.

The 9/11 attacks, and the subsequent US-led ‘war on terror’ that followed is a testimony to this. After the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rise of armed groups in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, it became unavoidably clear that the desire for the return of the Caliphate was very much existent.

The Arab Spring, or what remains of it, is another example of the Islamic sentiment of the general Muslim masses in wanting Islām to play a greater role in society. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and more evidently in Syria, are prime examples of this. The revolutions which spread like wildfire in 2011 initially began as a grassroots movement, in order to attain self-determination in a region, which had been ruled by Western-backed dictators for decades.

Unfortunately, with the interference of Western powers and their regional proxies, the sincere efforts of those who lost their lives during the uprisings, had been sidelined and forgotten by political opportunists in search for power. Naturally, cosmetic changes were made to the ‘new’ post-Arab Spring countries, but in nearly every case, the oppressive regimes and state apparatus remained.

ISIS

The emergence of the group known as ISIS, which claimed to have restored the Caliphate on 29 June 2014, was a dream come true for the West. The former chief of the British Armed forces, Sir General Richard Dannatt, justified the occupation of Afghanistan, and Britain’s involvement in the war on terror by stating that it was to prevent:

“…the historic Islamic caliphate, running through south Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and up through south and south-east Europe.” [4]

Lo and behold, the West had at last found its medieval Caliphate in the form of ISIS, which in reality was a doctor’s sick note to continue its destructive foreign policy in the Middle East. The criminality of ISIS has been used as a stick by Western politicians to beat the Muslims with, and a tool to demonise the noble concept of the Caliphate. The media continues to refer to ISIS as an “Islamic State”, knowing that the majority of Muslims have unequivocally rejected their claim to the Caliphate.

The abhorrent actions of ISIS cannot be used to pressure Muslims into rejecting the concept of the Caliphate for two very simple reasons.

Firstly, there is a unanimous consensus amongst classical and contemporary scholars within Sunni Islām that the Caliphate is the ideal form of governance for Muslims, and to work for its re-establishment is an obligation. However, Muslims will inevitably differ in the methodology of how the Caliphate should be restored due to theological and political differences, but the scriptural evidences and scholarly works emphasising its importance is too overpowering.

Secondly, the fact that Rasūl’Allāh’s (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) burial was delayed until a Caliph was appointed could not have been a more significant indication of how serious the Companions (raḍiy Allāhu ʿanhu) took the matter of the Caliphate. The aforementioned reasons, coupled with the dire situation the Muslim world is currently in, as a result of seeking liberation by adopting failed secular ideologies, the only real option remaining for the Ummah is to return to a system which, for all its previous mistakes, protected Islām and safeguarded its citizens from harm.

Those who are adamant that the Caliphate is incompatible with the modern world, and to anticipate its return is a romanticised idea, need to appreciate from an Islamic perspective, that the Prophet Muḥammad (sall Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) has prophesised its permanent return,[5] and Allāh (subḥānahu wa taʿālā) has promised the Muslims authority on Earth. [6]

This article was first published on Islam21c.

References

[1] Musnad Aḥmed, ḥadīth no.31

[2] Saḥīḥ Muslim

[3] https://ps321.community.uaf.edu/files/2012/10/Fukuyama-End-of-history-article.pdf

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/20/faces-2009-richard-dannatt-tory

[5] Musnad Aḥmed, ḥadīth no 273

[6] Al-Qur’ān, 24:55