The Decline of Arab World: Leaders Who Could Not Lead

by Dr Mahboob A Khawaja

Once the Arabs were leaders in knowledge, creativity, science and human manifestation, progress and future-making – the Islamic civilization lasting for eight hundred years in Al-Andalucía- Spain. But when they replaced Islam – the power and core value of their advancements with petro-dollars transitory economic prosperity, they failed to think intelligently and fell in disgrace and lost what was gained over the centuries. They relied on Western mythologies of change and materialistic development which resulted in their self-geared anarchy, corruption, military defeats and disconnected authoritarianism. The Western strategists ran planned scams of economic prosperity to destroy the Arab culture with their own oil and their own money turning them into redundant beings for the 21st century world. Today, the Arab leaders are so irrational and cruel that they reject all voices of REASON for Change and Human Development only to bring more deaths and destruction to their societies.

(Mahboob A. Khawaja, “Arab Leaders Count Dead Bodies but Peacemaking is not the Aim.”  Uncommon Thought Journal, USA: 2/19/2015).

When leaders live in self-perpetuated darkness, they lose sense of moral and political direction. To be an effective leader in the 21st century knowledge-based and informed age of reasoned politics, one must be truthful and should hold the individual and collective consciousness of evil and righteousness, right and wrong, otherwise, professing to be intelligent could easily be transformed into known stupidity.  Most Arab authoritarian leaders are no exception in this analytical principle and viewpoint.  In absolute authoritarianism as the case across the Arab Middle East, extension of political anarchy and insanity has become a virtue but devotion to truth and political accountability is fast becoming offensive and undesirable. Today, sectarian conflicts have broken down all the features of socio-economic and political normality and devastated the Arab region. But recall the sectarian divides were engineered by the US and Britain in decade long occupation of Iraq to support their military occupation

It could be most abhorrent and preposterous to imagine that all is going well across the heartland of the Arab world. Most of the contemporary Arab leaders hold military alliances with the US and / or West European nations and are selected by the intelligence network of the US or the West European nations,  and are educated and mentored by such states as the US, Britain, France, Italy, Holland and others.  They are Arab by birth but think like British and American by practice. How do we break with the junk history and start thinking of a new vision for change, human development and providing opportunities to enlist the young educated and proactive people of the new generations?  This critical issue was often the core of this author’s thoughtful plan for elite teaching and political change while holding academic positions in the Arab world.  But most often, such visions and proactive endeavors were met with powerful cynical resistance and undesirability by the governing elite who were heavily favored and guided by the “NO System” of the foreign Masters.

The Compulsive Reality of Political Change and Future-Making

The oil production and supply to the foreign master was more vital than the societal intellectual and professional development for a sustainable future-making. This was the conspiracy of the rich and affluent sectors of the Arab societies to deny the prospects of a systematic political change through education and institutional building in most of the oil producing Arab states. Societies and people deny history as a precious learning asset often end-up confronting the future as a tragic abnormality. This is the trend and pattern of the Arab world of the 21tst century unchanged unsustainable kingdoms, emirates and egoistic sadistic prince and princess soon to be replaced by the changing order of time and history. This picture adequately represents Syria, Iraq, Saud Arabia, Libya, Yemen and Egypt.  Unless thinking hubs (if any still alive and operative across these states), initiate navigational change  to reconstruct the societal thinking modes an d priorities, the future appears obscure for the Arab societies to survive another decade or so.

At public consciousness, cynicism about the authoritarian rulers is endemic and there is no systematic cure to rethink of any workable solution in overwhelmingly chaotic socio-economic and political affairs. Time and opportunities for political change were deliberately mismanaged and rejected in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and greater Arabia. It was unrecoverable loss of and waste of time and conducive opportunities to develop the young generations and build new public institutions for systematic political governance but it is too late now.  Much of the Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan and Yemeni war pictures are a record of daily deaths, planned destruction, bombing of the civilian habitats and unfeeling for the living mankind.

Emerging crises clearly indicate the Western policies and practices aimed at incapacitating the Arab intellectual hub into unthinking of the present or future. There seems to be no escape from the current volatile political crises, when the Arab leaders act as if they had no knowledge of what massive civilian deaths and destruction meant to contemporary rational thinkers. Temptation and compulsion of evil embedded in psychological factors of sectarian rivalries operate in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Egypt to perpetuate in-house fear, death and destruction.

Envisaging  Societal “Change”  Beyond the Obvious Politics of Insanity

In their slanted vision, the rulers and their foreign Masters were all complicit in lightning up the dark and sadistic faces of the current reality – where people and humanity are not part of any calculation to restore normalcy, peace and sense of rationality. The US-led bogus war on terrorism has dehumanized the moral and intellectual consciousness of the Arab leaders to just focus on their own survival. Consequently, the Arab leaders are tragically entrapped in a vicious cycle of self-inflicted wars against themselves. The tragic irony of this folly reveals moral and intellectual decadence where once progressive culture and civilization inspired the Western cultures and civilizations for Renaissance and Industrial Revolution.

We the People of the Thinking Humanity are not the enemy of any American, Russian, European or other societies but we have been coerced through mass media propaganda, conflicting political time zones and national interests of the few warlords to imagine others as our enemies and invest in wasteful exercises of time and history to sell weapons for wars and destroy the living mankind.  You will recall that the same insane egoism brought about the collapse of Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini and when all European dragged each other bodies with cruelty and insanity as bombing and killings were normal human acts to safeguard the national borders and flags.

We the Thinking scholars and people of One Humanity are trying to imagine of bridging the superficial differences in human thoughts and official polices and have the consciousness to enjoin the natural bonds of human unanimity and solidarity amongst all the rational and conscientious people of the globe for better understanding of peace, conflicts and global harmony. In a compass of human thought and solidarity with One Global Mankind living harmoniously on One Planet- Earth, we call for recognition and respect of human life, end to mindless wars raging across the Arab world and a return to reasoned politics and system of public governance. If morality and reason are denied its rightful place in human thinking and behavior, it could be beyond wisdom and humanity to imagine creative and plausible workable solutions to irrational and erroneous conflicts which make no sense to any rational thinkers. Logic seeks truth and the truth is unchanging and remains the same as it is today, before and perceivable tomorrow- if there is anything left useful intact across the belligerent Arab lands.

The solution must come out of new thinking and new vision for political change, dialogue between the sectarian divides and competent leadership to pursue the stated goals. What if they were organized as morally and intellectually conscientious people?  What if they knew the complex nature of global politics and the freedom to think, act, and communicate with moral strength to the enemies within the Middle Eastern societies? That is, if there were proactive and responsible leaders enriched with intellectual vision and moral integrity and were flexible to listening and learning from the other side without agreeing or disagreeing. Even across the advanced Western societies, leaders know their limitations of knowledge and intelligence.  Many, if not all, man-made problems could be resolved peacefully via persuasive communication and without resorting to bloodshed and committing crimes against the humanity.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution and international affairs with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution: Approaches to Understand the Current Issues and Future-Making. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, October 2017.

From BRI to Clash of Civilization: Beijing conference refutes Huntington

by Abdus Sattar Ghazali

China hosted a two-day Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (CDAC), to boost exchanges and mutual learning among Asian civilizations. The CDAC theme was “Exchanges and Mutual Learning among Asian Civilizations and A Community with A Shared Future.”

It brought together more than 2,000 government officials and representatives of various circles from 47 Asian countries and other nations outside the region.

Among those attending were: King of Cambodia Norodom Sihamoni, Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, Singapore President Halimah Yacob, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

In his inaugural address, the President of China, Xi Jinping, underlined that this Conference  “creates a new platform for civilizations in Asia and beyond to engage in dialogue and exchanges on an equal footing to facilitate mutual learning”.

President Xi highlighted the importance of the interactions in Asia, as these interactions between civilizations “have enriched each other and written an epic development”. He elaborated also:

“Our forefathers in Asia have long engaged in inter-civilizational exchanges and mutual learning; the ancient trade routes notably the Silk Road, the tea road and the spice road brought silk, tea, porcelain, spices, paintings and sculpture to all corners of Asia, and they have witnessed inter-civilizational dialogue in the form of trade and cultural interflow.”

“No civilization is superior over others. The thought that one’s own race and civilization are superior and the inclination to remold or replace other civilizations are just stupid,” the Chinese leader said adding:

“All civilizations are rooted in their unique cultural environment. Each embodies the wisdom and vision of a country or nation, and each is valuable for being uniquely its own. Civilizations only vary from each other, just as human beings are different only in terms of skin color and the language used. No civilization is superior over others. The thought that one’s own race and civilization are superior and the inclination to remold or replace other civilizations are just stupid. To act them out will only bring catastrophic consequences…. What we need is to respect each other as equals and say no to hubris and prejudice.”

Pehaps Xi was alluding to Huntington’s theory of Clash of Civilizations. In 1992, American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington proposed the hypothesis of the Clash of Civilizations that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Huntington argued: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

In short, Huntington suggests that in the future the central axis of world politics tends to be the conflict between Western and non-Western civilizations. Huntington divided the world into the “major civilizations” in his thesis as such:

Western civilization comprising the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, Australia and Oceania; Latin American, Includes Central America, South America; The Orthodox world of the former Soviet Union; The Eastern world is the mix of the Buddhist, Chinese, Hindu, and Japonic civilizations; The Muslim world of the Greater Middle East, (the Islamic civilization) and The civilization of Sub-Saharan Africa located in southern Africa, Middle Africa.

Huntington’s hypothesis was criticized by various academic writers. They challenged his claims empirically, historically, logically, or ideologically.

Edward Said

Edward Said, the late University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,  issued a response to Huntington’s thesis in his 2001 article, “The Clash of Ignorance”. Said argues that Huntington’s categorization of the world’s fixed “civilizations” omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture. Edward Said (2004) also argues that the clash of civilizations thesis is an example of “the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims” (p. 293).

According to Edward Said “Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make “civilizations” and “identities” into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing.

“This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that “the clash of civilizations” argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.

“These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. “The Clash of Civilizations” thesis is a gimmick like “The War of the Worlds,” better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.”

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky called it just being a new justification for the United States “for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out”, which was required after the Cold War as the Soviet Union was no longer a viable threat.

“We have to support oppressive states, like Saudi Arabia and others, to make sure that they guarantee that the profits from oil (it’s not so much the oil as the profits from oil) flow to the people who deserve it: rich western energy corporations or the US Treasury Department or Bechtel Construction, and so on. So that’s why we need a huge military budget. Other than that, the story is the same,” Chomsky said in a lecture delivered at the Delhi School of Economics on November 5, 2001.

He went on to say: “What does this have to do with Huntington? Well, he’s a respected intellectual. He can’t say this. He can’t say, look, the method by which the rich run the world is exactly the same as before, and the major confrontation remains what it has always been: small concentrated sectors of wealth and power versus everybody else. You can’t say that. And in fact if you look at those passages on the clash of civilizations, he says that in the future the conflict will not be on economic grounds. So let’s put that out of our minds. You can’t think about rich powers and corporations exploiting people, that can’t be the conflict. It’s got to be something else. So it will be the ‘clash of civilizations’ – the western civilization and Islam and Confucianism.”

Jochen Hipplier

Jochen Hipplier, author of The Next Threat: Western Perception of Islam, has said: By caricaturing different cultures, by arbitrarily and willfully misrepresenting Islamic societies we grant ourselves absolution. Others are fanatical, we are not. Other are irrational, we are not.  Furthermore, it is clearly very important for us in the West to feel superior and to see Western culture as the ‘best’ and ‘most progressive.

The term civilization is usually used in the singular to mean Western civilization which since the eighteenth century has been in the West as the civilization that has set about to destroy and obliterate systematically all other civilizations including the Islamic.

To borrow from Hippler: In a certain sense you could call Huntington’s argument ‘culturally racist’. The Muslims (or Chinese) are different from us and therefore dangerous. Unlike in classic racism, this difference is not generically but culturally-based. There is such a gulf between their values and ways of thinking and ours that understanding or cross-pollination is almost unthinkable. Only military solutions can promise result.

Hippler further elaborates this point very convincingly: Huntington’s image of Islam (or of other Asian cultures) is hardly original. It follows the current stereotypes and clichés of popular literature and some of the media. Yet he manages brilliantly to embellish these repeated fears pseudo-scientifically and elevate them ideologically. His success is in making the old clichés acceptable in foreign policy debate. For Huntington, Islam is ideologically hostile and anti-Western. It is also a military threat in itself due to Chinese (Confucian) arms supplies. Islam is bloody, with a long warring tradition against the West. (The fact that Muslims have often been the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence from Bosnia to India hardly troubles him.)

According to Stephen M. Walt, The Clash of Civilizations is also strangely silent about Israel, which has been a central concern for U.S. foreign policy since its founding in 1948. During the Cold War, U.S. support for Israel could be justified on both ideological and strategic grounds. From a cultural perspective, however, the basis for close ties between Israel and the “West” is unclear. Israel is not a member of the West (at least not by Huntington’s criteria) and is probably becoming less “Western” as religious fundamentalism becomes more salient and as the Sephardic population becomes more influential. His silence on this issue may reflect an awareness that making this conclusion explicit would not enhance the appeal of the book, or Israel may simply be an anomaly that lies outside of his framework. In either case, however, the issue reveals a further limitation of the civilizational paradigm. [Building Up New Bogeyman by Stephen M. Walt- Foreign Policy, Spring 1997]

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) 

Enlightenment Unitarianism

European Enlightenment is no stranger to extended flirtations with Islam

Kevin Barrett

Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670–1840 by Humberto Garcia; Pub: Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 2012, 368 pages. Price: $49.49 Hbk; $50.81 Amazon Kindle.

The story of How Islam Created the Modern World, as Mark Graham’s 2006 title puts it, is fairly well known. Even Eurocentric scholars admit that most of the “advances” credited to Western civilization have Islamic roots. Graham shows how the standard Western narrative of Islamic custodianship of the culture, science, and philosophy of the ancient world during Europe’s Dark Ages misses the way the Islamic world adapted and creatively developed its ancient inheritance. The European Renaissance was therefore less of a rediscovery of ancient Greco-Roman civilization than an adaptation of contemporary Islamic civilization.

But Europeans were and still are loathe to admit this. Europe’s identity was largely founded on a rejection of Islam, as reflected in the epic tales of Charlemagne, Roland, and El Cid, and in the theological fulminations of popes, prelates, and even poets (Dante Alighieri, the all-time greatest Christian poet, was a brilliant plagiarist who borrowed most of his material from Ibn ‘Arabi and the Islamic Isra’ and Mi‘raj literature — yet remained fundamentally hostile to Islam).

Despite such hostility, the European Renaissance grew out of an appropriation of Islamic civilization. Since then, the West has adapted and developed what it borrowed, just as the Islamic world has adapted and developed what it had itself inherited from ancient sources. But few realize that Islamic influences on Western culture have continued beyond the Western Medieval and Renaissance periods. One little known area of influence is Islam’s contribution to the English Enlightenment — the subject of an excellent 2012 study by Vanderbilt University professor Humberto Garcia. Thanks to Garcia’s book, I was surprised to learn that some of my Unitarian ancestors were practically crypto-Muslims, and that their Islam-inspired radical agitations were a major force driving the Enlightenment.

Growing up in a Midwestern family of lapsed Unitarians (we visited the famous Frank Lloyd Wright church in Madison, Wisconsin only occasionally) I was never taught what Unitarianism was or where it came from. As best I could discern, Unitarianism means spending one or two Sundays a year in a uniquely beautiful church, singing Kumbaya, and preaching tolerance and diversity with barely a mention of God.

Though today’s Unitarians are a harmless and somewhat ineffectual lot, supremely in tune with the dominant zeitgeist of “secular humanism on steroids,” the founders of Unitarianism were dangerous radicals who challenged the power structure of their day and the belief system on which it was based. The three central tenets of Unitarianism amounted to a harsh dismissal of the central irrational elements of Christianity. First, Unitarians insisted on the unity of God (what Muslims call tawhid) and therefore rejected the Holy Trinity. Second, they rejected the doctrine of Original Sin — the perverse idea that a perfect God would create a totally flawed, “fallen” world, and that human beings were the most horrifically flawed part of creation. Third, they emphasized the importance of using human reason in understanding scripture. In all three of these doctrines, the founding Unitarians were essentially rediscovering truths that had been clearly stated in the Qur’an more than 1,000 years earlier.

Garcia shows how these radical (and radically rational) ideas challenged the superstitions on which the European church-state power structure was built. From the divine right of kings to the trinity to the crucifixion as redemption from original sin, obscurantism and mystification were at the heart of the power process that forced people to unquestioningly accept the oppressive hierarchies under which they lived.

Unitarian ideas were so dangerous that they had to be left unpublished, softened, or disguised for public consumption, lest the person expressing the ideas find himself imprisoned or worse. Henry Stubbe’s pro-Islamic The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, for example, was written circa 1671 and privately circulated thereafter. But it remained unpublishable until 1911, more than three centuries later (anyone publishing it would have been risking his neck). Stubbe praised Islam’s policy of tolerating and protecting religious diversity, favorably contrasting it with the repressive practices of Christendom in general and England in particular.

Stubbe’s dangerous ideas influenced several generations of English Unitarians as well as allied freethinkers, radicals, and social reformers of various stripes. In this English Enlightenment tradition, Garcia writes,

Islam is the ally of the radical Enlightenment, an underground international movement that defined its theological and political heterodoxy through borrowed legends, stories, and motifs associated with various prophetic strains of near eastern monotheism.

The Tory defenders of the status quo attacked English Enlightenment figures as “Protestant Mohametans.” In language that sounds eerily like the Islamophobia of today’s right-wing lunatic fringe, Tory pamphleteers imagined a vast international conspiracy of pro-Enlightenment Unitarian protestants working with Muslims from the Ottoman lands and Morocco with the common aim of overthrowing Christian civilization in general and the British monarchy with its state church in particular.

As Garcia shows, these fears, while grossly exaggerated, were not entirely groundless. Stubbe’s work reached an audience of English followers of the Hungarian Count Teckely, who led a Protestant Republican rebellion against the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, allying with the Ottomans and fighting alongside them in the ill-fated Battle of Vienna in 1683. Garcia writes of

English Teckelites, or radical dissenters who grounded a reformist agenda on constitutional principles that required a heretical rereading of the Islamic prophetic tradition. Stubbe promoted such an agenda during the same period that the Hungarian “malcontents” were forming an alliance with the Ottoman Porte. The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism makes three controversial claims: first, that Islam revived Arian Christianity, an anticlerical messianic Judaism that upheld Christ as a prophet and, as a result, was marginalized by the persecution of corrupt Trinitarian churches. Second, that Christianity’s decline and Islam’s rise is a legitimate response to the combined influence of Trinitarianism and the clergy, political theologies that promote despotic monarchies. And third, that Mahometanism is a natural faith worthy of admiration. The Prophet’s civic laws have accomplished in less than a century what Trinitarian Christians could not in over a millennium: his laws have anchored a state-sponsored (rather than ecclesiastical) toleration policy for all religious minorities on a solid constitutional foundation that originated with Noah’s covenant as prophetically renewed by Abraham, Moses, and Christ. Like Teckely, Stubbe treats Islamic toleration as the antidote to the religious and political contentions that have plagued Europe and England since the Protestant Reformation.

The Tory propagandists had good reason to fear that Stubbe and his school might consider allying with Muslim polities against the British crown,

Stubbe has no qualms about justifying Islam’s rise to geopolitical domination, because the true opponents to the Christian faith are the Trinitarians, “enemies to all human learning”: St. Athanasius, for his false teachings about the “son of God,” and Emperor Constantine, for rigging the Nicene Council elections in favor of the Trinitarian heresy. Stubbe argues that Islam was spread not by the sword but by the word.

Garcia’s account suggests that the real source of 17th and 18th century Islamophobia was a sort of unconscious ideological inferiority complex. Stubbe’s critique of Constantinian Christianity, the Nicene Council, and Trinitarianism was difficult to refute, so his opponents resorted to ad hominem attacks.

Stubbe’s influence sparked what Garcia calls “Islamic republicanism” — radical egalitarian opposition to the British crown, the power hierarchy atop which it sat, and the state church it had created to serve its own interests. These institutions ran on mystification whose ubiquitous injunction was to just believe and obey, don’t ever question or critique. And the supreme example of mystification in service to tyranny was the Trinity.

This underground Islamic republican movement resonated throughout the 18th and early-19th centuries, allying itself with other Enlightenment currents that culminated in the French Revolution. Naturally the Islamic Republican affinity for the French revolutionaries, and later its flirtation with a self-proclaimed Mahdi named Napoleon “Ali” Bonaparte, made the movement seem even more terrifyingly subversive to the guardians of the British establishment.

Before reading Islam and the English Enlightenment I had no idea that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem Kublai Khan, which I encountered in English literature seminars, is a disguised disavowal of the great Romantic poet’s earlier flirtation with pro-Bonaparte Islamic republicanism! The “stately pleasure dome” of the poem, Garcia explains, represents the utopian Napoleonic Islamic republican dream that Coleridge and Robert Southey had fallen for in their youth, but grew disillusioned with in later years.

Like Coleridge and Southey, two other leading British Romantics, Percy and Mary Shelley, went through a phase of equating their radical utopian ideas with Islamic republicanism — in their case what Garcia calls “‘Gnostic’ Shi‘ite Islam.” Like Coleridge, Percy Shelley disavowed this phase of his intellectual journey in a poem that has become a canonical classic. In Garcia’s reading, Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam announces Shelley’s own revolt against his youthful Islamic republicanism. Mary Shelley, however, took a different path: Garcia reads her novel The Last Man as critical of her husband’s turning against Islamic republicanism and Islam in general.

Garcia’s book is worth reading not only as a fascinating slice of hidden history, but also as a meditation on the past with suggestive implications for the present. Today, as the Islamic Republic of Iran comes into the crosshairs of a decadent and desperate Zionist-led West, it is instructive to learn that the specter of Islamic Republicanism as a civilizational alternative has been terrorizing Western tyrants for more than three centuries.

 

Kevin Barrett

The sons of Saud: the scions of Zion

By Abu Dharr

The clannish rulers of Arabia have abandoned the values of Islam and reverted back to the days of Jahiliyah before Islam. Instead of being slaves of Allah, they are slaves of the Shaytan.

Before Islam, Arabians were nomads roaming the barren deserts with no civilizational character except for their language. Their primitive social condition was akin to the law of the jungle: the strongest tribe exploited the weakest. In this social environment the weakest humans were exploited as slaves and concubines. Possession of turf depended on who had the most “attack power.” The tribal shaykh reigned supreme. His word was the law and it was final. The tribal setup of the Arabian Peninsula then is the tribal setup today as well.

Then came Islam. It was a paradigm shift and brought a sea change in the lives of those impoverished souls. Islam anchored morality into a society that was void of it. The Prophet’s (pbuh) farewell address made it clear that no entity may dispossess another. Violent death became taboo. People now, because of Islam, were equal in the public square and in the court of law. Islam buried Arabian jahiliyah during the years of our dear Prophet (pbuh).

Some of the highlighted features of the Prophet’s (pbuh) farewell address include:

• Complete equality: no Arabian is superior to a non-Arabian, and no non-Arabian is superior to an Arabian; no white person is superior to a black and no black person is superior to a white. The criterion of high quality and favorable position in society is a person’s taqwa (his/her functional awareness of Allah’s power presence).

• Committed Muslims are brothers of each other: none may divest the other against his will.

• People’s lives, family honor, and livelihood are to be inviolate.

• Freedom of conviction and belief are guaranteed for all: there can be no compulsion in matters of din.

• Islam has its own independent social and ideological character: neither materialistic nor phantasmal.

This new and moving reality explains, to some degree, why Islam spread to the four corners of the earth within a span of one century and why non-Muslims were impressed and, therefore, willingly became Muslims.

Alas, this civilizational thrust was stifled by a mental retreat into ignorance. Ijtihad was no longer a feature of Islamic society. In the pre-secular domain of the Muslims prior to World War I, the last line of defense of an Islamic realm was the Ottoman military, which itself became the victim of an all-consuming ignorance. The Ottomans could no longer match the industrial strides made by their enemies who used the opportunity to create a “modern” Islamic civilization in which the Muslims would continue to be subjected to ignorance, only this time by proxy “Islamic” regimes. When Islamic civilization and the Arabic language were divorced from each other every Muslim lost his status in the world of refinement and excellence.

Not absent from this internal unraveling of Islamic sovereignty was the vicious enemy on the outside. The external antagonists took note of that Islamic historical transformation from jahiliyah to Islam, so they plotted a sophisticated scheme of convincing the Arabians that Islam is inferior. Chieftains and tribal chiefs are better than khalifahs and imams. Kings and presidents are modern; khalifahs and imams are outdated. Thus the post-colonial Arabian regimes came into existence as tenants of the neocolonial world order.

And now, without our high Islamic standards, the Arabian polity has recaptured its ancient persona: tribes and entities that raid and kill each other. Instead of having camels they now have F-15s, instead of having horses they have F-16s, and instead of having mules they have tanks and armored combat vehicles. The human beings on camelback then and the human beings in the cockpit now are carbon copies of each other: jahili material, inside and out. Arabian tribal hatred in ancient times is Arabian government hatred in current times. Every official entity hates every other official entity (look wherever you want: from the Arabian Peninsula shaykhs to the kings on their thrones and presidents in their palaces); they all are at each other’s throats. People within these colonial created tribal-states are slaughtered at the whim of the ruler — a very exact caption of the law of the jungle. In these societies in real life and in real time the rulers are the supreme beings!

Taking a look at this pathetic state of affairs it does not take an Ibn Khaldun to figure out that the Qur’an, the Sunnah, qiyas, and ijtihad are all absent from such failing societies.

The crony kings and petty presidents have their religious employees who are willing to issue any fatwa on demand. If the high-and-mighty president or king wants to reach peace with the Zionist colonists they turn to their salaried ‘ulama and motion them to “Islamically” justify a peace treaty with Zionist killers and imperialist annihilators.

The deep-rooted jahiliyah could not live side-by-side with an Islam of morality, equality, and civility. It burst out in the form of the battles of al-Jamal, Siffin, and Karbala’, not to mention the massacre in Madinah when hundreds of Muslimahs were defiled and thousands of committed Muslims were killed in a jahili orgy that continued for several long and bloody days. The Ka‘bah was also assaulted.

Dare we say that following this internal Islamic turmoil, the Persians, upon becoming Muslims, reinvigorated the rational component of Islam, raised the civilizational bar, broke new scientific ground, and became Arabic speakers and thinkers; some of them even mastered the Arabic language on par with the Arabian laureates themselves. Was it not the Amazighis of northern Africa who crossed with their Islam the Mediterranean Sea and went into the dark corners of Europe, only to be branded “barbarians” (Berbers) by the Europeans? Is it far-fetched to equate Ka‘b al-Ahbar of our first Islamic century with Lawrence of Arabia of our last Islamic century?

The Arabian ruling classes of today are the political offspring of tribalists and nationalists who stabbed the Ottoman rulers in the back during World War I, trusting in the British masters who used Arabian nomads for their nefarious schemes and are still using Arabian nomads for their villainous strategies.

In the last century these Arabian chieftains were used by the British to fight against their Muslim Turkish brothers; today they are being prepared by the same British devils to fight against their Muslim Persian brothers. These primitive Arabian desert dwellers in highrises don’t know (and never knew) what it means to be independent. They have no self-governing state in the full sense of the word; they only have tent-states with pieces of cloth they call flags. They have perfected their plots against each other. They finesse instability, and they spend their God-given wealth on every conceivable vice: from military functions to erectile dysfunctions.

They are so beholden to their Zionist and imperialist masters that they cannot think for themselves. They are now insinuating that Islamic Iran is their number-one enemy and Zionist Israel is their number-one friend. What are we to say about Arabian officials who gave Saddam Hussein all he needed to defeat Islamic Iran? Then, when he could not defeat it, these same Arabians said that he was the number-one enemy of the Zionists! And then, on all days of the year, they executed him on ‘Id al-Adha. Then they tried to convince their people that Bashar al-Asad is a dictator who has to go either peacefully or by waging war. Then in the sacred name of Islam and the secular name of democracy, Syria was, by and large, reduced to a rubble state. Its population virtually dislocated inside and outside of Syria.

These Arabians have not had enough: they go to Yemen and try to pulverize an impoverished country! In Egypt democracy was overturned by a dictatorship. In Libya, the Arabian petro-media hyped up the canard that Muammar Qaddafi is a dictator — a foolish and buffoonish dictator. Then came the convenient fatwas authorizing the pursuit of Qaddafi to his death. And so he was killed. The result is a failed state, not to experience the slightest degree of stability any time soon.

This is what happened to Arabians who replaced the Islam of Muhammad (pbuh) with the Islam of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. The neo-Arabian jahiliyah puts the ancient jahiliyah to shame,

Do they seek the rule of jahiliyah? And who could be more suitable for governance than Allah [His authority] for people of cognitive certainty? (5:50).

Universities should play their part in shaping the new Islamic civilization

Ayatollah Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic 

Revolution, met Wednesday morning with 

heads of universities, higher education 

organizations, science and technology parks 

and research centers. Speaking at the meeting, 

His Eminence highlighted the scientific history, 

legacy and experience of the country before and 

after the emergence of Islam and pointed to the 

role of universities in contemporary history 

particularly during revolutionary activities and 

after the victory of the Islamic Revolution.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution stressed the necessity of planning in universities and scientific centers for benefiting from scientific legacies and experiences, reiterating: “Measuring our scientific need for the present time and the future, preventing the rate of our scientific progress from slowing down, implementing the comprehensive scientific plan in a thorough way, paying attention to quality in higher education, pursuing the issue of the relationship between universities and industries in a serious way, encouraging universities to play their part in the economy of resistance, expanding the environment of religious and Islamic culture, deepening religious and political insight and providing opportunities for students and ideological, revolutionary and pious professors are the requirements that help universities play a role in shaping the new Islamic civilization.”  

Ayatollah Khamenei said: “During the time of Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties, the scientific movement of the country was unfortunately stopped because of certain reasons. At a time when science blossomed in Europe, we could not benefit from our talents, our scientific opportunities and our scientific disposition. This was why we fell behind the scientific movement in the world.”

Pointing to the westerners’ planning for training managers – in so-called third-world countries - on the basis of western thinking and lifestyle and with the help of universities, His Eminence stated: “In implementing their plan in Iran, they faced certain problems because of the Iranian identity and because of the development and depth of Islamic and religious thinking among students and academic personalities. And after the Islamic movement in the year 1341, a great and growing religious movement began in universities.”

He added: “The victory of the Islamic Revolution – which was like an earthquake for the western and eastern world of those days – exerted significant influence on universities and many of the most self-sacrificing and sincere companions of the Revolution emerged from universities.”

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution described channeling scientific articles and PhD theses in line with the current and future needs of the country as an important issue and added: “Nuclear science is one of the needs of the country which has been invested in since many years ago because if the possibility of using oil is eliminated or if oil reserves come to an end, we will definitely need alternative sources of energy.”

Ayatollah Khamenei referred to the attainment of 20-percent uranium by young Iranian scientists, saying: “At a certain point in time, the fuel for Tehran research reactor – which had been designed for making pharmaceuticals – was running out and westerners had set humiliating terms for delivering this fuel, but our talented and religious youth satisfied the need of the country for 20-percent uranium with their round-the-clock efforts.”

His Eminence mentioned that the most difficult stage in uranium enrichment is obtaining the 20-percent uranium and that obtaining higher levels up to 90-percent is very easy, adding: “The reason behind westerners’ nervousness on the nuclear issue was this. Of course, if they had delivered the fuel for Tehran research reactor, we would never have gone after 20-percent enrichment.”

He described the rate of Iran’s scientific progress and the continuation of the scientific movement as very necessary and fundamental as it makes up for the country’s backwardness, further reiterating: “Unfortunately, some people who are academics themselves say to students in universities that our scientific achievements are a lie! If they are a lie, then why does a Zionist research center express its concern about Iran’s scientific progress?”

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution also warned that if the rate of Iran’s scientific progress slows downs, this will be to the disadvantage of the country, stressing: “If the rate of the scientific progress of the country goes down, the gap between us and the scientific movement of the world will widen. Therefore, we should preserve our rate of scientific progress.”

He stressed the necessity of universities’ role in the economy of resistance with the cooperation of knowledge-based companies and stated: “On the issue of implementing the economy of resistance, what should have happened has not happened yet. Executive officials have just delivered a report to me about the plans that have been formulated for implementing the economy of resistance.”

Elsewhere in his statements, Ayatollah Khamenei touched on cultural issues in universities. Criticizing some of the measures that have been adopted, he said: “Some people confuse cultural work with sexually integrated concerts and camps. In order to justify their wrong measure, they say, ‘Students should be happy.’ Being happy is good for any environment, but at what price? At the price of holding mixed ceremonies and camps? Have westerners reaped any benefit – other than the current [sexual] crimes – from allowing men and women to socialize with one another so much so that we follow the same methods?”

His Eminence stated that religious and political insight is very important for youth as it prevents them from making grave mistakes. He reiterated: “The reason why many individuals – who were not bad people - slipped up in the fitna of the year 1388 was lack of insight. When the other side says, ‘Elections are just an excuse and the essence of the system is the main target’ what should a person who believes in the system do? If there is no insight, one cannot fulfill one’s duties at the time of need.”

He described lack of self-confidence as the gravest danger that exists for a people, stressing: “Lack of self-confidence and underestimating the capabilities and power of the people and the country make some people inside the country say, ‘We are nobodies and we are isolated.’ This is while everyone is acknowledging the power and influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region.”

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution reiterated that educating youth who believe in intellectual, political and economic independence is an essential cultural task in universities. He added: “The news that I receive about certain universities and that I hope is not true shows something else as [I have been told that] religious, revolutionary and broad-minded groups are pressured in universities.”

Referring to his deep and long-standing interest in universities and academic societies, Ayatollah Khamenei said: “Today, universities and students are the target of the greatest plots. The enemies of the country are intimidated by the presence of academic personalities with a revolutionary and offensive spirit in the arena because they can eliminate their red lines, raise the flag of knowledge and highlight revolutionary slogans. This is why they plan for and invest heavily in confronting this movement.”

His Eminence stressed the necessity of promoting values in academic environments, saying: “We should pay attention to the concerns that ideological and revolutionary students and also thousands of pious and revolutionary university professors have in universities and we should thank and appreciate the value of such university professors.”

Dr Kalim Siddiqui: Muslim political culture as a basis for the unity of the Ummah

Crescent International

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the death of Dr KALIM SIDDIQUI, one of the leading intellectuals of the contemporary Islamic movement. Here we reprint an abridged version of an article first published in 1983.

It is my object to indicate some of the ways in which the unity of the Ummah has taken shape through history. Despite the issues that appear to divide us, a solid mass of the Ummah is united at many levels. The apparent causes of division operate only on the surface. It is my view that the history of Islam has produced a political culture that is common to all Muslims. Muslims throughout the world, whatever their political, cultural, linguistic or ethnic origin, or whatever their other preferences may be, all belong to a common political culture.

By political culture I mean a combination of a common set of memories, a common historical experience, a commonly defined and felt current situation, a common enemy and a common expectation of the future. Within this framework we can go as far back as Adam (a.s.). It is part and parcel of the political culture of Islam, the ‘stored’ memory of the Muslims. The earliest common experiences of history itself were shaped by Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, through a long chain of prophets. We are the people who are responsible for the defence and promotion of this Divine tradition of history and history-making.

Within this framework we have certain primary roots. The primary roots of this political culture, which has found expression in various ways throughout history, go back to the Qur’an and to the tradition of revealed knowledge as a whole. The secondary roots of our political culture are spread throughout Islamic history. Some of us prefer to rely on some secondary roots, others to rely on other secondary roots. As a result of these preferences over our secondary roots, we have "schools of thought" in Islam, but the primary roots of our common political culture are the same and commonly shared, and about them there is no dispute among the Muslims: there has never been, there is not today, and there never will be in the future.

Having said that, I want to move to the contemporary situation, and deal with the unity of the Ummah, which has been severely damaged by the colonial system. The colonial rulers over Muslim lands have taken great care to divide the Ummah in a way that will prevent the Muslims from acting together as a single force in the making of history. It is this scheme of the colonial powers and the western civilization that has been defeated by the power of the Muslim political culture expressed in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I have over the last few years defined and analyzed the Islamic Revolution in terms of its four major characteristics. The first of these is the Islamic Revolution’s commitment to unite all Muslims into a single movement.

The complete mobilization of all Muslims in the pursuit of a single set of goals is the first basic characteristic of this Revolution. If we go right back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) we would find that this was also the primary characteristic of the Ummah that was created by him in the Hijaz. The goals were revealed to the Prophet and they remain unchanged to this day for all Muslims. The mobilization of the Ummah of all Muslims in pursuit of a clearly defined set of goals is the basic quality of the Islamic Revolution in Iran today, and this was also the basic quality of the original Islamic movement that was led by the Prophet 1,400 years ago.

The second feature of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is that the people of Iran produced from among themselves a leadership which was committed to the goals of Islam. This was not a middle-class leadership, or a leadership created by a particular class of people or political party in order to pursue their particular interests. This is a leadership which is muttaqi. There is one basic characteristic of taqwa: that it is contagious. The taqwa of the leadership has been transmitted to the young generation of Iran today. There are some in Iran, in their middle age, who seem to be in a no-man’s-land as far as taqwa is concerned. But the young people in Iran are a muttaqi generation, and this, I think, is a very hopeful pointer to the future of the Ummah, the future of the Islamic State and of the Revolution. Thus the mobilization of the masses and the emergence of a muttaqi leadership are the first two of the basic characteristics of an Islamic movement. A movement that fails to produce a muttaqi leadership or fails to mobilize the Muslim masses cannot bring about an Islamic Revolution or establish an Islamic State.

The third characteristic of the Islamic Revolution is produced by the combination of a muttaqi leadership and the mobilized masses of Iran. This combination has released the energies of the people and committed these energies to the restructuring of the entire socio-economic and political order of Iran. It is no longer a case of merely changing the government of Iran, which is what people like Bani-Sadr wanted. This is a question which has been positively decided in Iran in favour of a complete change in the socio-economic and political order at every level, from the colonial culture that had become dominant.

In this field Iran has another very important role to play. For the first time in modern history we now have a living, dynamic laboratory where policy options based on Islamic concepts can be tried out. When we say that Iran is Islamic, we do not for one moment mean that everything in Iran is right. Iran is Islamic because a genuine attempt is being made to find policy options from the prescription of the Qur’an and the Sunnah in order to solve the problems of a modern society. Of course, much of what is happening in Iran is experimental and provisional; these are experiments shaped by Islam and controlled by a muttaqi leadership. Alternative hypotheses will be tried out until successful models can be created at all levels of the socio-economic, political and cultural order of the Islamic State of Iran. If we refer back to Madinah we find that this is precisely what happened there. Every single existing relationship was changed by Islam. Families were divided, fathers against sons and sons against their fathers, and properties were redistributed. Change is the basic and permanent condition of Islam and the Islamic Revolution. This we find in the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, and this is what we have witnessed in Iran since the Islamic Revolution.

Finally, I would draw your attention to the confidence and ability with which a social order controlled by the Islamic movement, led by a muttaqi leadership, deals with the outside world. It is not possible for the superpowers, or any other powers, close or distant, to divert a Muslim people who are mobilized in the pursuit of the goals of Islam. One of the major achievements of Islam throughout history has been that Islam has defeated all those who have tried to stop it from becoming dominant in its immediate environment. Islam is not, and cannot be, subservient to other civilizations. An Islamic State cannot be a colonial State, it cannot be a State controlled or manoeuvred from outside. Islamic civilization cannot be half Iranian, half Afghani, half Arab and so on. It is perhaps inevitable that even today we still suffer from the disease that we are trying to cure. But the basic and fundamental point is that the Islamic civilization and the State cannot be subservient to any other kind of civilization, or any other kind of State, either a single State or a combination of States. The Islamic State and Islamic civilization must always be dominant over their environment. If the Islam of an ‘Islamic State’ is in any way subservient to some other social or cultural value, there is some weakness in its particular application of Islam. Islam does not allow any form of compromise, or some kind of ‘working relationship’, with its enemies, particularly not with those who are committed to the destruction of Islam.

These being the core values of Muslim political culture, I view the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a powerful expression of Islam in the world today. The Muslim political culture has been shaped by history itself. Nonetheless, we have to take account of another stream of history which has become powerful and hence controls a large part of the world. This particular stream of history is known to us as the western civilization. In my view, the western civilization stands for everything that Islam does not stand for. If there were any, or there have been any, or there can be found any similarities between the Islamic civilization and the western civilization, these are entirely accidental and superficial: these must not mislead us to believe that there is anything common between us and them. This is the mistake that was made by some Muslim thinkers when the powerful western civilization, emerging from Europe, overtook the lands of Islam. Some Muslims took the view that the western civilization was a Christian civilization and that we would be able to adopt and convert it into an Islamic civilization. As a result of this totally mistaken view, men like Sayyid Ahmed Khan in India, and many others in different parts of the world, preached that Muslims could profit from working within the western civilization. The result is that the west has found among us people who serve their interests; this has also enabled the west to destroy a great part of our heritage, our history and our society.

Now, however, we are well on our way to destroying the western myth that Islam is medieval, out-dated, and unable to create and support a State or society in the twentieth century. According to their history and historiography, religion was merely a product of man’s ignorance and superstition. Man, they said, had now grown up, become scientific and rational. They wanted to consign Islam to the same void as they cast Christianity.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran has shown that, despite the emergence of men like Mustafa Kemal, the Saudi royal family, and the leaders of Pakistan and many other countries, the Muslim political culture is still capable of restoring history to its original intended course. What Muslims everywhere must realize is that of all the nation-States and their political and economic systems that exist today, none is a creation of Islam or can serve the interests of Islam. All these so-called Muslim nation-States are the creation of imperialism and have nothing whatever to do with Islam or Islamic history. We have destroyed one pillar of western civilization in Iran, and all the others are destined to meet the same fate. There can be no difference of opinion among the Muslims on this particular point.

The western civilization controls the world by its economic policies. There is an alliance between the rich of the rich countries and the rich of the poor countries. It is through the latter that the former control our societies, our countries and our cultures. The Islamic Revolution in Iran has shown that when the Muslim political culture takes hold of the society, it takes us beyond the reach of the western civilization. The Islamic Revolution in Iran has destroyed the whole bag of political tools that the western civilization has used against Islam for the last 200 years. The colonial powers and the communist terrorists had hoped that the economic hardships created by trade sanctions would persuade the Muslim masses of Iran to overthrow the Islamic leadership. We have seen, however, that the Muslim masses, once they are mobilized by a muttaqi leadership, are prepared to undergo any amount of hardship in order to achieve the goals set by the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, peace be upon him.

In the case of Iran, two other points may be noted. One is a total commitment to do the right thing, whatever the cost. For instance, the Islamic Revolution in Iran has its own Constitution. It has been adhered to completely by everyone in Iran. Whatever the external consequences, the people of Iran have steadfastly believed that they should carry on with the internal working of the Constitution. The second is the emergence of a new set of institutions, such as the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Inqilab-e Islami (the Revolutionary Guards), the Jihad-e Sazindagi (the Jihad for Reconstruction), and the Baseej (Mass Mobilization for War), among many. These institutions are slowly but surely taking over from the old institutions set up by the monarchy. I hope that the Islamic State of Iran will now help to create new institutions in the Islamic movement outside Iran. This is its natural role as the leading edge of the global Islamic movement.

[This article was first published in Crescent International, March 1-15, 1983. It is based on Dr Kalim Siddiqui’s speech at the International Unity Conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from December 28, 1982 to January 2, 1983.]