12 October 2005

Allah the Exalted declares in Surat al-Hajj (22:74):

They do not measure Allah with His true measure.
Allah is All-Strong, Almighty.

Within a few weeks of each other mankind has been struck by two natural disasters. In America, both the atheist and christian baptist population defined it as a natural disaster, the mushriks among them attributed it to their false god, Mother Nature. On the Indian Subcontinent the Muslim population, while they could not deny the Divine authorship of the tragedy, signally failed in all their public pronouncements to recognise the true nature of Allah’s action. In the light of Tawhid the thinking Muslim cannot fail to see deeply into the nature of catastrophe, not only its causes and its inevitability, but the inexorable rightness of the moment when disaster strikes. One of the Names of Allah, may He be exalted, is the Patient One. Patience is one of His Divine Attributes. While our patience, as a borrowed attribute, indicates a tolerance over delay in an action, His Patience covers the matter of His preparation for an action. The Shaykh al-Akbar Muhiyyuddin ibn ‘Arabi has reminded us that Allah governs the universe from inside the universe, that is to say, that His rule, far from being interruptive, far from being an intervention in affairs, is part of an immeasurably intricate web of processes which work themselves out, while functioning entirely under whatever set of physical laws incident requires.

Let us examine the Kashmiri earthquake through what preceded it along their varied paths before all these elements came together in one earth-shattering and punishing instant.

Let us examine the in-time processes that led up to the present tragedy from the point of view of a constantly unfolding and transformative set of events, events which could at any moment have taken a different direction, had men assumed the fullness of that responsibility which Allah had placed upon them. Allah the Exalted declares in al-Ahzab (33:72-73):

We offered the Trust to the heavens,
the earth and the mountains
but they refused to take it on and shrank from it.
But man took it on.
He is indeed wrongdoing and ignorant.

This was so that Allah might punish
the men and women of the munafiqun,
and the men and women of the mushrikun,
and turn towards the men and women of the muminun.
Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

What we are about to see is that in every moment of lived existence the individual, neither the Polity nor the Party, but each individual at each instant may change the course of human events, these events recognised as being but particles of the Event, which is Allah’s action in the universe. While the Subcontinent was under Islamic governance, led by the Mughal Sultan Aurangzeb, upholding the Islamic Shari’ah, India was secure and massively wealthy. The rapacious English pirate-merchants set up a commercial capital among the hindus at Calcutta, and from there began to strip the Dawlet of its astounding wealth. The usurer-merchants soon formed themselves into an army, but as their expropriation of wealth continued they needed an English military presence to defend them. The oppression of the occupying force finally drove the Muslims to rise up. The situation that led to the Uprising could not have occurred if the Muslim nation of India had held to the sublime path of the great Aurangzeb. Ignoring the warnings of the Qur’an, they fell to fighting among themselves, a pattern which was to repeat itself at every stage of the disintegration and disgrace of their Islamic heritage. The obscene event of the assassination of the Mughal’s sons and the murder of their father, Bahadur Shah II, brought to an end the practice of the compassionate Islamic Shari’at and with it the brutal end to the great Islamic civilisation that had spread across the whole of Central Asia, both to the gates and through the gates of kafir China.

In England the bastard Hanoverian Queen Victoria was declared Empress by her jewish Prime Minister, D’israeli. The commercial hindu capital was to be replaced by the Mughal capital of Delhi. This choice of Delhi was to be, then and in the future, the overt declaration of the conquest of Islamic governance by the kafir and mushrik hordes, first by Britain and then by hindu India. Two major groups of ‘ulama left Delhi and set up their bases in Deoband and Barelwi. What came out of these two places were two increasingly different, and in the end conflicting, schools of Islamic fiqh. What must be understood is that prior to the fall of the Islamic ‘Amr, a governing Sultan represented an ongoing practice of Islamic fiqh. What came out of these two Indian villages was an academic exercise devoid of ‘Amr, therefore it was by definition incapable of establishing the Deen. The truth is that when there was ‘Amr there was unity under the Hanifi banner of the great “Fataawa’Al-Amgheeri”, that six-volume witness to a living Islam. For the restoration of the fiqh, of the Deen of Islam itself, what was required was the restoration of Islamic power in Delhi.

As a result of this dichotomy we can trace in the two groups, once voided of Islamic ‘Amr, not only a greater and greater divergence one from the other, but not insignificantly one group upholding false doctrines of Shari’ah, and the other, false doctrines of Haqiqa. Let me explain. The Deobandi, aware that they had been robbed of political power, were led by part of their movement to make concordance and compromise with the ruling British kuffar. Thus one half of their movement more and more succumbed to seeking the approval of Britain, and as a result embraced modernism, which in turn led to a submission to usurybanking and as a result the on-going impoverishment of India. The other part of the Deobandi movement found themselves more and more captivated by the wahhabi doctrines which sought to harden the hearts of men by a dual doctrine in place of the unity of the Deen. Abandoning the accepted Islamic doctrine of Tawhid they elected to teach only one aspect of it – Tanzih – the exaltation of Allah above all forms – of course, perfectly correct in itself, but meaningless without acknowledging – Tashbih – which permits us to state how His Attributes are borrowed from Him by us in an in-time metaphoric mode, as lucidly explained by AlAsh’ari and Maturidi. The present-day result of the surrender of this group of the Deobandi has led to a pro-wahhabi Imam in the Great Mosque of Delhi, and in its precincts a wahhabi headquarters. They have infiltrated from India down to South Africa, and from there have sown seeds of suicide from the Gambia to Malawi and Zanzibar. Thus wherever this group has proliferated, even in Britain, they are to be found not only defending but in some cases activating the doctrines of terrorism. They openly support and justify the act of suicide-bombing, proving that they have become totally divorced from the Deen of Islam.

Allah the Exalted categorically states in Surat al-Hajj (22:15):

Anyone who thinks that Allah will not help him
in the dunya and the akhira
should stretch a rope up to the ceiling
and then hang himself.
Let him see whether his stratagem
gets rid of what enrages him!

The Barelwi, equally deprived of the compassionate practice of the Shari’ah, increasingly tried to preserve the element of the Haqiqa as if it could possibly survive without the Law. While their increasingly opposite number, the Deobandi, influenced by wahhabism, seemed first to diminish and later to denigrate the importance of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the Barelwi began to exalt him in a manner which seemed to forget that he, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, spent his nights supplicating Allah, explaining to one of his wives, ‘Am I not a grateful slave?’

Explaining Ma’arifa, Sayyiduna ‘Ali, may Allah ennoble his face, said, ‘I did not reach Allah by Muhammad. If I had reached Muhammad before I reached Allah I would have stayed with him, but I reached Allah by Allah.’ Now the function of the Shaykh in Tasawwuf is to guide the Murid to Allah. In Ma’arifa, success is with one who has had success. So it is that if you examine the Silsilas of the great Sufic Tariqas in the Subcontinent, the chain of Ruhani inheritance, from Shaykh to Shaykh, is not from father to son, but rather from Shaykh to Murid. Thus throughout the Silsila the inheriting Shaykh is from another family, indeed often another part of India. Confirming this, one of our Shaykhs has said, ‘The exception proves the rule.’ Now what we find on examining these Silsilas is that after the collapse of the Shari’ah, there is an inevitable collapse of Haqiqa. After the fall of Delhi this claimed spiritual inheritance abruptly appears as being passed from father to son. In other words it is no longer the Divine Contract but the family business. Visit the tombs of the Awliya throughout the Subcontinent and you will find proof of this.

The point at which a homeland for the Muslims was conceived proved to be also the point at which this collapse of Islamic teaching seemed to have reached nadir. Of this affair, two issues have to be mentioned. Every element of this narration yields a clear evidence that the determining factors took place by the abrogation of responsibility by Muslim peoples. Firstly the people, secondly the principle. Umar Ibrahim Vadillo in his monumental study ‘The Esoteric Deviation in Islam’ in Appendix 4: Political Dates notes:

1947: Pakistan is born as an Indian reservation for the Muslim people of India. A secular ismaili is chosen as its first leader: Jinnah, often compared to Ataturk. The All-India Muslim League is the first successful model of a political party manoeuvring the Muslim masses.’

On the Muslim side the active protagonists are ismaili, Shi’a, modernist and qadiyyani, the Imperial power being represented by a Viceroy who twice deserted his ship and his men during World War II and was married to the daughter of the great jewish banker who had ‘created’ the Bank of Egypt, Edwina Cassel. As the adulterous lover of Nehru she played a significant part in briefing the hindus in advance of specific map-changes.

The principle on which Pakistan was founded is even worse than were the people involved. Every single treaty decision in modern history bringing an end to war or occupation has been determined with reference to the political past of the terrain. The historicity of the terrain had always been the determining factor. It was here that the kafir Jinnah and the Muslim League succumbed to the doctrines of a modernism, the political implications of which they had not the faintest idea. Anxious to create an entity which represented the principle of political democracy, the Founders of Pakistan determined its existence entirely according to zones which gave a population majority of Muslims. A state was to be founded on ballot-box clusters, yet even that principle had to be cynically abandoned to assure that Pakistan was strategically helpless and India left with dominant frontiers. After a series of blatant deceptions the land of Kashmir, despite its massive majority Muslim population, was handed over to India. Deep down below, the long, slow and eruptive power that moved under the Earth’s fragile crust made the mountains shiver so that in the cool Srinigar nights a strange creaking could be heard among the hills.

The brutal attempt to impose political democracy on a Muslim polity proved to be a dismal failure. Again and again Pakistan’s military had to step in to rescue the country from its inappropriate form of government. Since Islamic Law was never established there was no commanded Zakat to protect the poor, and the necessary re-distribution of land that would have been demanded by a move from a usury-capitalist economy to the just and highly successful Zamindar system of the Mughals never took place – the country began to fall into the anarchy that its hindu and British founders had already intended.

The doctrine that had been adopted to end the menace posed by Islam in the Subcontinent was the doctrine of Kemalism. Under a NATO programme, a forceful but basically stupid officer was selected to be the author of the de-Islamicisation of the Pakistani people. He was sent to Turkey. He learned the language. He was initiated into the masonic circles of the Turkish Military. He was taught the Kemalist method. Assassinate leading ‘ulama. Close down the Islamic madrasas by Presidential Edict. Allow an influx of foreign capital. Promise peace on the frontiers. Move from an army-on-the-frontiers military and a passive police at home to a state with a passive army-on-the-frontiers military and an active (anti-terror) police at home. On a mere pretext the Sindi general – owing no loyalty to the Punjabi High Command – seized power in a coup d’état and then proceeded to ‘democratise’ himself through the usual political machinery. The operation was cleverly staged down to the last detail. In an interview, the U.S. President was to be questioned on how well he was briefed on world affairs. Asked to name the President of Pakistan he was to feign ignorance. It goes with the job. Better to be seen as politically ignorant than to be well aware of his masters’ political calculations. Musharraf, the Kemalist kafir dog, started obediently to do his work. He insulted his own people in every way. He mocked his own helpless Parliament. The very worst of people received ministerial posts, and this in a country of spectacular genius. The dog barked at the Pakistanis, and wagged its tail at the Indians. Somehow, he had to give India Kashmir. He initiated the talks.

Deep down below, a turbulence that Allah had been preparing over these same centuries that we have surveyed historically began to reach its point of critical tension. Last week, at exactly the right moment, Allah shook the earth. He, glory be to Him, recognised no Line of Control between the two Kashmirs. From Islamabad and right across Kashmir, Allah shook the earth with a terrible and destroying power. Allah the Exalted says in Al-Qasas (28:57-58):

They say, ‘If we follow the guidance with you,
we shall be forcibly uprooted from our land.’
Have We not established a safe haven for them
to which produce of every kind is brought,
provision direct from Us?
But most of them do not know it.

How many cities We have destroyed
which lived in insolent ingratitude!
There are their houses,
never again inhabited after them,
except a little.
It was We who were their Heir.

It is a terrible warning. What has the disaster revealed? It has revealed that political democracy is a fantasy construct utterly devoid of any political content, of any power system, of any governance watching over a whole people. Political democracy has diminished the wealth of the people and handed over its commodities to foreign exploitation. It has handed over all substantive power not to any political system or person, but to a totally other force, a financial system of global wealth which has made itself utterly inaccessible, hiding itself as it does behind its fire-wall called political democracy. All the nation’s wealth now lies at the service of foreign powers and institutions, and the once great Pakistani Army now rushes around the foothills of the Himalayas looking for an Arab terrorist who had been launched on his path of destruction by the Pakistani Security Services, and who in all probability has been dead for some time.

When Allah’s earthquake struck, the dog Musharraf and his miserable government, and his ruined social services, proved utterly helpless to rescue or to save. All the world media agree – it has been openly stated by CNN, by BBC, by Sky, by France 2 – there is simply no-one in charge. I repeat it. I call on the High Command of the noble Pakistani Army to pay close attention! All the world agrees. There is no-one in charge of Pakistan. Musharraf is not the servant of the Pakistani people – and he is certainly not the leader of the Pakistani people. Allah has revealed with an overpowering command His anger with the Muslim peoples of the area, with those responsible for the wellbeing, safety and protection of the common people. There is no-one in charge! Something must be done.

All democrats must want to see the usurper overthrown. All educated people must want to see a man of probity, judgment and concern, in place of the tyrant. The earthquake is not the disaster. The earthquake is Allah’s metaphor – a metaphor He has taught us over centuries through His actions, and He, glory be to Him, has explained them in the Qur’an. It is a matter of responsibility. It is the matter of who will take the responsibility. The affair belongs to the one who fears Allah and dreads that he should be asked why he did not take that responsibility. I cannot but believe that from among the Punjabi people, and the Kashmiri people, there must be such men today ready to take the reigns of power from the usurper and restore legitimacy, and restore civil order, and restore an active Islam. Today the Niyyat. Tomorrow the action. Allah the Exalted has said in Surat az-Zumar (39:67-70):

They do not measure Allah with His true measure.
The whole earth will be a mere handful
for Him on the Day of Rising,
the heavens folded up in His right hand.
Glory be to Him!
He is exalted above the partners they ascribe!

The Trumpet will be blown
and those in the heavens
and those in the earth
will all lose consciousness,
except those Allah wills.
Then it will be blown a second time
and at once they will be standing upright,
looking on.

And the earth will shine with the Pure Light of its Lord;
the Book will be put in place;
the Prophets and witnesses will be brought;
it will be decided between them with the truth;
and they will not be wronged.

Every self will be repaid in full for what it did.
He knows best what they are doing.