Muslim Unity is Not an Illusion — It is an Obligation

By Abu Dharr

Nationalism is a sickness. Racism is a plague. And sectarianism is a cancer. These are the three major illnesses that afflict the Muslims — from the time the first Islamic country came into existence in Arabia over 14 centuries ago up to this very day. Here, we shall try to make a diagnosis of sectarianism, setting aside much of its history.

The words Sunni and Shi‘i have made their way into the political parlance of current events. You may want to review the news items and news commentaries of the Islamic world before the Islamic Revolution in Iran to find out how scarcely the words Sunni and Shi‘i figured into political articles and ideological books then. Now, though, you will find these words tucked into geopolitical analyses and sociopolitical studies about Muslim countries — ranging from the political right to the political left. Even Muslim writers are towing this highbrow line of thought! This “Sunni-Shi‘i” characterization of diplomacy and wars appears to be the fad of the near future.

We neither have the time nor are we straightaway interested in butting intellectual heads with writers and thinkers whose ideas are molded by the high god of Zionism and imperialism. Our immediate concern is with those Muslim writers and journalists who have shacked themselves in the sectarian fleapit.

To begin with, any rational Muslim will tell you that the Muslims of the world, excluding the enlightened ones, will consider themselves either Sunnis or Shi‘is. Ask them: was the Prophet (pbuh) a Sunni or was he a Shi‘i? And you will get an assortment of answers. Not much success there…

Then ask: is your definition of a Sunni or a Shi‘i a definition that brings all Muslims together? Does your definition exclude the other (Sunni or Shi‘i) from being considered an “equal Muslim”? Here, you will have him/her begin to think (quite an accomplishment; as many of these Muslims have inherited their identities without thinking about who they are).

Then ask them: as we all agree that the Qur’an is our ultimate reference, can you produce for me one ayah that substantiates your (hereditary) definition of who a Sunni is? Or who a Shi‘i is? If your interlocutor remains calm and honest, he will confess that there is no ayah in the Qur’an that validates his conventional definition of his own Sunni or Shi‘i assumptions.

Then ask: are there fanatic Sunnis and fanatic Shi‘is around? Can you identify them for me? What makes them fanatics? Is thereany ayah in the Qur’an or is there any consensual hadith, which is compatible with the Qur’an, that explains such fanaticism? If your interlocutor is open, reasonable, and candid he will begin to rethink his inbred beliefs.

All of these questions and similar ones are not meant to demean any Muslim as much as they are meant to reject and rule out the bigotry and the bias that many Muslims have toward each other — precisely the components of today’s sectarianism.

Say good-bye to your friend and take a moment to spend with yourself. Look at the Muslim world and observe how sectarianism has been manipulated by those who have power and wealth; inside the house of Islam and outside of it to wreak havoc on hundreds of millions of poor Muslims who just two generations ago were faintly aware that they are Sunnis or Shi‘is!

It would be asking too much to expect a Sunni to pray like a Shi‘i, or to expect a Shi‘i to pray like a Sunni; in other words, there is not enough maturity in both the Sunni and the Shi‘i Muslims to come to the point where they both exchange recognition of the other in practical terms. Pray like each other. Fast like each other. And perform the rituals of Islam like each other. It is because of this inability that we have Muslims at psychological distances from each other. This is where sectarianism begins.

Okay. Let us move on. If the average Muslim considers the “other” Muslim incorrect in the way he performs his rituals we end up fostering a form of bias and in some cases intolerance and discrimination. Case in point: when was the last time you saw a Sunni scholar give the Friday khutbah in a Shi‘i masjid, and vice versa? Has there ever been a Shi‘i scholar who led the prayers in al-Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, or al-Masjid al-Nabawi in Madinah? Has there ever been a Sunni scholar who led the jama‘ah prayers in Mashhad, or al-Najaf or Karbala’? And even if this was ever to occur, it should not be for public consumption or a showcase event. It should be done with a mass public Muslim recognition of the equality of the Islamic madhhabs (schools of thought). These narrow-minded-cum-mean-minded fiqhi variances attributed to the respected Islamic faqihs, and not to the Prophet (pbuh) himself, is what has kept us from assuming and resuming our socio-political responsibilities.

Taking this to another level, both the Sunni and the Shi‘i historical developments metastasized into bigoted and sectarian drifts. In the Sunni sphere there are those Wahhabis and Salafis who go to the extent of labeling the Shi‘is as kafirs. In the Shi‘i sphere there are those Safawis (Safavis in Persian) and Hujjatis who consider Sunnis to be outside the pale of Islam. Both of these represent the deadly outcome that comes from our initial inability to identify ourselves as equal Muslims (regardless of madhhab) and more importantly to express that by unifying our masjids in a way that it really does not matter whether a particular prayer leader prays according to a madhab other than mine.

There are larger fish to fry than to be sinking into the pits of circular arguments pertaining to ritualistic performances. There is a hadith from the Prophet (pbuh) that says, “Allah does not take into consideration your outward show; rather He takes into consideration your internal reality.”

The fanaticism in the Sunni context has taken a major blow — a potential knockout by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Saudi tribal regime and the financial clout it has, or should we say had, throughout the world. Many Muslims are waking up and looking at an ugly and disgusting Saudi regime that is beginning to disintegrate due to its role in the war on populations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc, not to mention its crimes against individuals who are its own citizens from Jamal Khashoggi to the hundreds of ‘ulema’ whao have been rounded up in a humiliating manner, thrown into prison, and either forgotten about or awaiting a kangaroo court to sentence them to long terms in prison or to put them on death row. Islamic activists, writers, scholars, and observers are speaking out against the tyranny and the lackey regime in Arabia that takes its orders from Zionist henchmen and imperialist bosses.

The fanaticism in the Shi‘i context is brewing beneath the surface. Our brothers and sisters in the Islamic Republic of Iran have been riding a crest of well-deserved successes as costly as they have been over 40 long years… But they have to begin to address the cancer of sectarianism in their midst; two scholars, among others, who did just that were the late Ayatullah Mutahhari and Dr. Ali Shariati. Their lessons, articles, and books on this subject, as far as this writer knows, do not circulate; this, in and of itself, proves that the sectarians do have sizeable clout within the Islamic Republic.

Our brothers in the Islamic Republic of Iran have shown the rest of the Muslims a very commendable character of civility and courtesy. Their efforts at bringing the Muslims together are admirable. Their bypassing of the ritualistic issues that divide the rest of the Muslims within the house of Islam is laudable. But we would be naive to make believe that Shi‘i sectarians are negligible and of no influence. Like all nations, Islamic Iran has its share of nationalists and even racists. But that does not concern us as much as the sectarians who can bring the Islamic Revolution to a halt, stifle the Islamic Republic, and reverse most if not all the progress of the past four decades. We dread a day in the future when the sectarian clout reverses Walayah al-Faqih and turns the clock back to the “negative/passive anticipation” of the Imam in occultation. Forewarned is forearmed.

O you who are faithfully committed to Allah [His power and authority]! Be on guard concerning Allah [His power presence and overriding authority] as is due to Him, and do not die except as Muslims [surrendering to His dominance] (3:102).

Understanding the True Nature of Zionism

Israel and Zionism go hand in hand By Zafar Bangash

This article was first published in the CI April 2010 issue. It is being reproduced here in view of recent developments in the Holy Land. In its long tortuous history, Europe has spawned many de-monic ideologies — colonialism, imperialism, na-tionalism, fascism, Nazism, and Zionism, to name just a few — but while most have been repudiated, at least theoretically, Zionism is venerated as a religion. Zionists masquerade it as a badge of honor. It would be difficult to find anyone calling himself a colonialist or imperialist these days, although there are plenty of countries peddling these ideologies under the guise of other labels (humanitarian intervention, the right to protect, etc). Nor would one find anyone openly proclaiming to be a fascist or a Nazi. Yet there are plenty of people who proudly claim to be Zionists. They come in all stripes: Jewish, Christian, Hindu, atheist and (yes) Muslim. It is important to clarify at the outset what Zionism, or to call it by its correct name, political Zionism, is not. Despite strenuous efforts by its proponents, Zionism has little or nothing to do with Judaism, the religion of millions of people. True, Zionist ideology was first propounded by people of Jewish background — Theodore Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky et al. — but they were not religious at all. In fact, they considered Judaism as an impediment in their colonial enterprise. Herzl was a racist. He propounded the idea, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair in France (year 1894), that Jews could not assimilate in other, primarily Christian European societies; they needed a separate homeland of their own. Even before Herzl announced his racist idea at the first Zionist Conference in Basle, Switzerland (1897), most rabbis had condemned political Zionism. The Philadelphia Conference of November 3–6, 1869 adopted a resolution that stressed the radical opposition between the universalist principles of Judaism and those of political Zionism. So how did political Zionism, a racist colonial enterprise, succeed in establishing itself in the heartland of Islam despite strong opposition from leading rabbis and the indigenous population of Palestine? By the turn of the last century, British and French colonialists were busy instigating revolts in the Muslim East (aka the Middle East) by buying the loyalty of Arabian tribal chiefs to use them against the Ottoman Sultanate. The toxic brew of Western colonialism, Arabian nationalism, and political Zionism facilitated the imposition of the Zionist entity in Palestine through the infamous Balfour Declaration. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, in a letter to Baron Walter de Rothschild, outlined the British government’s favorable view of establishing “in Palestine a home for the Jewish people…” While Balfour stated, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” he deliberately ignored their political rights. That the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of Palestine were Muslims and Christians whose fundamental rights were being violated was of little consequence. In typical colonial style, Balfour promised the Palestinians’ land to European Zionist Jews. Unlike European racists that have a long and gory history of persecuting Jews and other minorities in their midst, Muslims have not perpetrated any pogroms or indulged in inquisitions against religious or other minorities. Whenever Jews suffered persecution in Europe or Russia, they found refuge among Muslims, hence the presence of Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey, and Iran to this day. Yet European racists transferred their “Jewish problem” to Palestine. The tiny minority of Jews in Palestine — 7% in 1919 and even at the time of Israel’s creation in May 1948 through a scandalous vote in the United Nations General Assembly (November 1947) — the 30% Jewish population owned a mere 6.5% of the land. Yet it was given 56% of Palestinian territory. The rapid increase in Jewish population from 7% to 30% in 29 years (1919–1948) was not the result of natural growth; it was achieved through illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. Even Hitler’s WWII bloodbath did not convince the overwhelming majority of Jewish people to settle in Palestine. But Zionist leaders missed no opportunity to emphasize the importance of Jewish migration to Palestine and lamented the lack of interest among European and North American Jews.

While Zionists denounce anti-Semitism and advance it as the principal justification for the creation of a separate homeland for the “Jewish people,” anti-Semitism is a twin of Zionism and needed for its survival. Herzl himself wrote, “The Jews constitute a single people and cannot be integrated into other peoples. But they do become assimilated by any society if they find themselves secure in it for a long period. And that will never be to our interest.” Thus, Herzl considered anti-Semites as indispensible allies in his quest to create the Zionist State in Palestine. Today’s Zionists are no less eager to align themselves with racists and bigots. In fact many Zionists, especially in the US, are leading Islamophobes. In Palestine, the Zionists have not only expropriated Palestinian land — today the Zionists control more than 93% of the original land of Palestine through theft, forcible occupation, and other illegal means — they have also built roads, neighborhoods, communities, and settlements reserved exclusively for theJews. This is what apartheid South Africa had done, hence the designation of Israel as an apartheid state. The apartheid wall through which the Zionists have cut off Palestinian families and villages, stealing in the process more Palestinian land, caps it all. In a ruling handed down in July 2004, the International Court of Justice described Israel’s apartheid wall as illegal. Zionists are also masters at forging history. From the biblical claims that “God promised them this land” described as a “land without a people” (Palestinians are non-people in Zionist mythology), they have gone about uprooting Palestinian families from their homes and villages, often at gunpoint and frequently using it as well, to indulging in mass starvation and killings. By using the Bible as a real estate manual, ironically by people that do not even believe in God, the Zionists have added the myth of selective history to their spurious claims to Palestine. They claim that they have a historic link with Palestine because Prophets David and Solomon (a) ruled the Holy Land 3,000 years ago. It is as if in Zionist mythology, nobody existed before the Hebrew tribes arrived in Palestine — not the Philistines (hence the name Palestinians), the Moabites, the Hittites, the Amorites, or others — and subsequent to the 73-year rule of David and Solomon nobody else inhabited this land until the Zionists arrived to inhabit it. The guilt-ridden Christian West that has historically perpetrated bloodbaths against the Jewish people accepted such infantile claims at face value. Nothing could be more spurious than the claim of Christian charity assuaging the guilt of European Christendom. Christian charity requires the good believer to give from what he has; nothing could be more un-Christian than to “give” stolen property to someone else. Similarly, nothing could be more personal than Christian morality, and so how is Christian dogma appropriated to govern the behavior of nation-states, which in reality wanted to solve the Jewish problem through expulsion? The fact is, Europe and the numerous squatter/colonial entities it spawned — America, Australia, New Zealand, to name a few — never stopped being racist; long before the Third Reich, the so-called “final solution” was discussed in Britain, and a thoroughly assimilated Jew, constrained most of the time to live in his own ghetto, was still not tolerable to the European racist. And so European racism set upon a course to solve two problems with one master stroke. Perceiving themselves to be locked in a life-and-death struggle with Islam, the real purpose of the creation of the Zionist State of Israel was to position a colonial beachhead in the heartland of Islam that would empty Europe of all its Jews and simultaneously act as a permanent impediment to peace and progress in the Muslim world. Israel admirers never tire of reminding the world that it is the “only democracy” in the Middle East. Hitler’s Third Reich was also a democracy yet it perpetrated the biggest bloodbath in European history. The Zionists are busy replicating the Nazis’ horrible record in the Holy Land. There are also a number of racist laws in force in Zionist Israel. One is the Law of Return. Under this law, any Jew living anywhere in the world is automatically entitled to Israeli citizenship upon setting foot there. That the overwhelming majority of Jewish people who occupy Palestine today have no links with the land whatsoever is of little consequence. Palestinians who have lived there for millennia, have to prove their ownership to land or property before they are given any rights. Their papers were often stolen or destroyed by the very Zionist marauders who invaded Palestinian villages and towns in 1947–1948. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were murdered and others driven out through a campaign of terror — and this was before 1948. This is even more critical for Palestinians in Jerusalem; if they are away from the city for more than three months, they lose the right of return. Similarly, every effort is made, fair and foul, to force them to leave. Palestinians are denied building permits not only for new homes but are also refused permission to rebuild. Palestinian home demolitions are a common practice of the Zionists to target Palestinians involved in resistance activity. Concurrent with this was the policy of land grab, the most important consideration after illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. If a core group of Jewish settlers, the vanguard of the Zionist movement, did not occupy a core area of territory, the Zionist enterprise would not succeed. This is what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling referred to as “territoriality” being at the centre of the Zionist project. At the time of Israel’s creation, the 30% Jewish/Zionist population owned only 6.5% of the land yet they grabbed 56% of the territory, quickly expanding it further through terror. Three instruments were particularly effective in this theft: the Jewish National Fund (set up in 1901), the Land Ordinance Act of 1943 and, the Emergency Laws decreed in 1945, the latter two courtesy of the British colonial occupation of Palestine. The first stipulated, in typical colonial style, that land acquired by it cannot be resold or even leased to non-Jews. The Land Ordinance Act was applied under the rubric of the “public interest” while under Emergency Law the military governor was given powers to suspend all the rights of citizens. The most convenient pretext used was that of “security” or by declaring certain areas “prohibited.” The Zionist occupiers of Palestine have all these repressive instruments to dispossess the indigenous Palestinian population. All this is done under the absurd and bogus claim that Jewish people are superior to Palestinians and they cannot live side by side with them as neighbors. How else should one describe racism? And regardless of what the cowardly Western rulers and their puppets say, Zionism is racism. What most people — and unfortunately the bulk of Muslims falls into this category as well — fail to recognise is that Israeli racism is integrally connected to the Israeli nation-state. Were it not for the state apparatus, the military, political, economic, and criminal resources required to pull off this grand deception and occupation of the Holy Land would not be possible. Zionism will never become a bitter historical memory unless its eradication is coupled with the dismemberment of the State of Israel and the thorough dezionisation of its Jewish inhabitants. However even this is not enough, as the tentacles of Zionism extend far beyond the borderless pariah State of Israel into the Arabian and imperialist capitals of the world. It is not enough to say that imperialist America and colonialist Europe prop up the Zionist cancer in the Muslim world. The Zionists would never have lasted a day without the willing 80-year complicity of Arabian despots, dictators, presidents, and princes from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. And we are witnessing this complicity explode into the open with the Arabians’ embrace of Zionist Israel. Thus the will to make Israel disappear into the pages of history must also be the will to look for an Islamic post-national alternative to the nation-state fiasco that currently grips the whole world. Were such a will to reassert itself into people-to-people associations across the world, then Jews would once again be free to settle anywhere in the Muslim world, not just in the walled-off military bunkers of Tel Aviv and Haifa. And this directional course has its starting point at the heart of the Arab world, indeed the entire Muslim world: Makkah. Jerusalem will never be free so long as its sister holy precincts in Makkah are not liberated from the crypto-Zionist clan of Saud and its people are not cleansed of their tribal-cum-nationalistic perversions acquired from the sons of Israel. This is the only way to eradicate Zionism — as ideology and as social construct. All partial solutions will land us in the same spot we are in today. Until this racist ideology is uprooted and eliminated utterly and irrevocably, there will be no peace in Palestine or anywhere else in the world.

Impediments in the path of Muslim Unity

Two laments are common among Muslims: lack of unity and negative projection of Muslims in the Western media. Most Muslims believe cooperation between Muslim rulers and governments constitutes unity. The desire for favourable projection in the Western media is based on an equally faulty assumption that journalists do not know the truth about Islam and Muslims. If only Muslims made the effort to write letters to editors, the media would correct their negative reporting.

The very existence of Muslim nation-states is a violation of Allah’s (swt) designation of Muslims as one Ummah (21:92, 23:52). The nation-state structure is a European colonial imposition to divide Muslims. By adopting this concept, Muslims are ipso facto, guilty of rejecting the Qur’anic command of living as part of the Ummah. To accept that the beneficiaries of such division will forgo their interests and work for unity is unrealistic.

Reasons for negative reporting about Islam and Muslims in the Western media must also be properly understood. Western reporters are not ignorant about Islam; their distortions are part of a wider war: to project policies that advance the corporate elites’ agenda of rapacious greed under the rubric of civilizational mission to promote human rights. Creating enemies — real or imagined — is part of this agenda. Since the Muslim world has resources, primarily oil and gas, that the West covets and the fact that the Muslims are a soft target, they are projected as the enemy to justify the wars being waged against them. If multinationals do not care about their own people, why should they care for Muslims in distant lands?

Muslim rulers work in tandem with and for the interest of the West because their personal survival depends on it. Thus one is confronted with a curious paradox: while hundreds of millions of Muslims live in abject poverty their rulers lead a lifestyle that would be the envy of most people in the West. Expecting unity from such people is unrealistic. What Muslims and the Islamic movement must strive for is to change this situation but the question is: how? Getting rid of individual rulers may help assuage Muslim anger but it does not solve the fundamental problem of illegitimacy of the systems imposed in their societies. The Islamic movement must work to dismantle these systems rather than vent their anger by killing rulers, hateful as they may be. We can compare the situations in Iran and Egypt. In Iran, the Muslim masses led by a muttaqi leader, overthrew the oppressive order in 1979 and ushered in an Islamic system. In Egypt, the Muslims killed then President Anwar Sadat in October 1981 but they are faced with an even more oppressive dictator.

How did Muslims end up in this sorry state? The answer lies in our history, both distant and recent. The seeds of disunity were sown in early Islamic history when the khilafah was subverted into mulukiyah. This was the fundamental breach in the divinely-inspired system that occurred so soon after the Prophet (s) left this world. The deviation at the core worked its way through the Islamic polity and a thousand years later Muslims were so weakened that they easily succumbed to the colonial onslaught. The nation-states that emerged from the bowels of colonialism were infected by the same germs that had weakened the Ummah in the first place. There was also a deadly virus attached to it: sectarianism. This virus has wreaked havoc in the Ummah and has been used to deadly effect by the enemies of Islam.

We must also add nationalism to the viruses infecting the Ummah. Nationalism is little more than glorified tribalism, a primitive social construct that was challenged and defeated by the liberating influence of Islam in Arabia 1,400 years ago. Muslims that imbibed the Islamic spirit fully had to contend with the jahili spirit of tribalism. The Umayyads, the principal standard bearers of tribalism, were the first to strike at the core of Islamic values. Jealousy was also a factor. Before the advent of Islam, the Abd Shams clan to which the Umayyads belonged considered itself superior to the Banu Hashim clan of the Prophet (s). Muhammad’s (s) prophethood upset this hierarchy of power and prestige in Makkah. The Umayyads did not reconcile with such loss, hence their staunch opposition to the Prophet (s) and his message until the very end when it was no longer tenable. Abu Sufyan led the Makkan mushriks in all the battles against the Prophet (s) except Badr. On that occasion Abu Sufyan was leading the Qurayshi caravan on its way back to Makkah from Syria. Muslim threat to the caravan was the main reason for the battle of Badr.

It appears little has changed in the Middle East in 1,400 years. The early opponents of the Prophet of Allah (s) are alive, their jahili spirit manifesting itself in their descendants who rule the Middle East today. They not only promote tribal loyalties but are also aligned with the enemies of Islam. The Middle East has once again become a cauldron of intrigue and superstition. Instead of supporting the struggling Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon or joining hands with the Islamic State of Iran for dignified existence, Arabian rulers are openly aligned with the US and Israel.
They are busy stoking the flames of sectarianism to divide Muslims.



If Muslims want to change their present sorry state, they must first develop a better understanding of the reality facing them. Killing one or two rulers, trying to infiltrate the military to bring about a coup or hoping to win power by participating in fraudulent elections is not the answer. The Islamic movement has to bring about a revolution through non-violent resistance in their societies. For this, the emergence of muttaqi leadership that has clear directional course is an absolute necessity. There are no short-cuts in the Islamic movement.

Crescent International