20 March 2011
In the collapse of the three approved Mediterranean regimes we can recognise not some synchronic urge to freedom and democracy but rather the triggered response of the masses to the signals of the banking elite. It takes only a shimmer of intellect to identify a scripted scenario being imposed on the impoverished Arab hordes. Jane Arden, the famous feminist of late 20th century England, called it “The Other Side of the Underneath”, not what the fractured psyche imposed on itself but rather what outer events imposed on that broken self.
With Bahrain we are in a whole different movie. It’s a costume movie. It is about power and it is about how masked, black robed women govern from below. It is part Freud and part Genet, by that I mean it involves both the Freudian model of family crisis (the Oedipal fixation) and the false dramatisation of using mourning to dominate events (the Genet theatre). I mean, therefore, the presence of the psychological syndrome called “Shi‘a”, that anti-Islam that denies Khilafa and meritocracy in preference for genetic inheritance and at the same time a threatened end to events, punishing the existing world. For the core of the Shi’a religion is its denial of political power while claiming a necessity to overthrow existing power, promising an apocalyptic revenge at the end of time.
In other words, the denial of present leaders because of their usurpation of a genetic inheritance. The Khalifate belonged to the father and the orchard belonged to the mother, that is ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib is the wronged and murdered inheritor of power and his wife’s real estate has been confiscated. Their sons have been assassinated and the mourning over one (Hussein) has become a tenet of the new anti-religion. The family are the disinherited to the twelfth generation, all assassinated, all perfect and all to be mourned until the twelfth who becomes suspended, a living dead, with a promise to put everything right at the end of the world – bring social justice when it will surely be too late.
In this new religion the enemy is Islam. Its followers revive themselves not only by ritual mourning of its martyred dead but by cursing the eminent leadership of Islam’s first days – the wives of the Messenger, blessings and peace be upon him, and the almost total majority of the Companions, including those mentioned in Hadith as having been promised the Garden in the Next World.
Its major holy day is ‘Ashura when Hussein was killed in battle against the Muslims. In the judgment of Europe’s greatest Islamic jurisprudent, Qadi Abu Bakr ibn ‘Arabi of Granada: “Hussein was killed with the sword of his grandfather,” i.e. the Prophet, meaning he died a rebel against Islam.
The religion took its name from a Qur’anic term indicating splitting from the people of the truth, thus, from the beginning it meant not a sect, not an innovation, not certainly a true elevation – but rather, an end. A break. An otherness. Over the centuries the Muslims have tried to find accommodation with them, have conferred, conceded and even apologised. It has been met consistently by rejection and even punishment. Hiding behind its new doctrine of Taqiya it tells its followers that lying and dissembling to Muslims is a moral virtue. They, not we, preclude any chance of dialogue once one party considers lying a virtue of their case.
At the heart of the Shi‘a religion lies the broken family. Yet if the father is murdered, disinherited, and his sons dethroned from power, the mother is elevated to a mystical role of preserver and guardian of the wronged lineage. The pretended descendants of ‘Ali are raised up as an inner elite, Sayyids, bearing special turbans, and claiming financial aid. Fatima is the protecting holy mother of the martyred sons. She is in an “eternal” mourning passed on to Shi‘a women in sacred perpetuity. This is the black choddor with its slit-eye mask. This is the uniform of the Shi‘a power elite, like the black uniform of Hitler’s S.S. The black uniform is a Shi‘a creation and the degree to which it has spread in our time and in the Middle East is a proof of how much Shi‘a influence has extended among Muslims since the fall of the Khalifate. It significantly has become a political issue among the non-Zakat practising extremists who today pose as defenders of the Deen.
In Surat an-Nur (24:30-31) we find the key text.
Say to the muminun that they should lower their eyes
and guard their private parts.
That is purer for them.
Allah is aware of what they do.
Say to the mumin women that they should lower their eyes
and guard their private parts
and not display their adornments –
except for what normally shows –
and draw their head-coverings across their breasts.
The first thing we must observe in these two Ayats is that they begin in the same way, with Allah the Exalted instructing the Messenger, may Allah bless him and give him peace, as follows:
“Say to the muminun…”
“Say to the mumin women…”
This indicates that it is a strong, Divinely ordained Sunna. It is not a law with punishment or reward attached to it.
Important to us is the phrase from the second Ayat which specifies:
“ – except for what normally shows – ”
We find in Ibn ‘Atiyya that he relates how Asma bint Abu Bakr was with her sister Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, when the Messenger entered, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. When his wife questioned about the correctness of her dress, the Prophet indicated that she should be covered except – and he mimed the hands and the face. This permits us to say that the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, gave indication about modesty by covering, in accordance with the Qur’anic stricture “ – except for what normally shows – ”. This allows us to say that the covering of the face is not an Islamic practice, but more seriously is a defiance of the indication of our Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.
The Muslim Community cannot be led into a frivolous and futile struggle at the hands of men and women who do not know what the Deen of Islam is in the first place.
Allah the Exalted has declared in Surat Al ‘Imran (3:32):
Say, “Obey Allah and the Messenger.”
Then if they turn away,
Allah does not love the kafirun.
So it is that when we talk of trouble in Bahrain we are not talking the dialectic of bankers’ democracy versus dictatorship. The issue here is fundamental to our position as Muslims. It is not soluble within the modalities of the current absolutist world system of capitalism. In capitalism money has no intrinsic worth (like gold of feathers). Currency basically is numbers. These numbers can be given new (Euro) or old (Dollar) names, yet they are computed as numbers. Human beings in the capitalist system are regarded identically. They are no longer even men and women. Humans have been named “citizens” and this term has already given way to the term “debtor”. They have no intrinsic value (belief that is higher than the computable), they are statistics.
The beginning of this rule was established in 1947 with the partition of India. Up until that moment a nation was measured by a zone of land allotted to a people. In 1947 the new world order emerged when it imposed its new philosophy. A whole people were allotted a land. It was determined by numbers.
The principle blinded the world to the purpose.
Its purpose was to assure India was not Muslim but Hindu.
So powerful was this passion that they permitted a whole people to be denied the new system. If it was a matter of counting heads then Kashmir could claim independence. Of course India has never submitted to a Referendum – I mean of the whole sub-continent.
In short – the issue was the granting of a state to the Muslims. The deciding principle was that this should be measured by counting heads. This revealed the contradiction between purpose and method. Kashmir revealed the illogicality of the politique. A division of India to give Muslims a state would have necessitated a return to the status quo ante, that is prior to the British conquest, the Mughal Empire. There could only be a Muslim state where there had historically been one on the land, Delhi, Ajmer, from Lucknow to Hyderabad.
In the matter of its past Bahrain is quite grisly. In the third century Hijra a messianic Isma‘ili group set up a proto-communist state, starting in Kufa they set up rule with their capital in al-Hasa. The Qarmatians set up a rule of terror. They lived off raiding the Hajjis en-route to Makkah. In 906 they massacred 22,000 Hajjis. Under Abu Tahir al-Jannabi they sacked Makkah in 930. They filled Zam-Zam with corpses and took the Black Stone to Bahrain. Bahrain became the seat of the Qarmatian Mahdi from Isfahan who abolished the Shari‘at and the Qibla, making any fire a qibla as in Zoroastrianism.
In 976 the Abbasids recovered Bahrain for Islam but had to face another Shi‘a revolt in 1058 from the Abd al-Qays tribe.
In the 14th century Ibn Battuta found the people of the region to be Shi‘a extremists.
By the 15th century the Jabrid dynasty brought back Islam and the school of Imam Malik. In 1791 the al-Khalifis moved into Bahrain. In 1820 they were supported by treaty arrangements with Britain.
As Britain, ruined by World War Two and debt to the USA, tottered out of the region they yielded the territories piece by piece, but the greed of the Emirate states ended up leaving out Bahrain. It became the State of Bahrain on December 16, 1971. Almost immediately it became the headquarters of the U.S. 6th Fleet.
The Gulf Security Council was the anti-Iranian defence instrument. Bahrain made a free-trade agreement with the U.S. in 2004.
The “underneath” of Bahrain is that one look at the map shows that if the US, impoverished as it is, is to survive it needs that jutting piece of land called Bahrain.
The “other side of the underneath” is that there is more to being people than being integers in a Great Game of politics. The safety of the Arab Peninsula is a matter of absolute importance for the world’s Muslims.
Bahrain poses the question which we, the Muslims, must decide: “Is the long-term view of the U.S. vis-à-vis its world policy that Iran must be broken (the current “discourse”), or is it that the U.S. prefers a no-Khalif (that is no rulership) zone with its masses dulled by apocalyptic anxieties and un-interested in the issue of Riba’? A religion itself anti-religion but using the name of Islam, a system with conflicting theological schools and puritanical culture, too busy keeping the women in black bags – and its holy city a necropolis of mourning, Kerbala.
It can always be controlled and broken (which it loves) and put in mourning minority phase while its majority can be captured by sexual mores like in America, plus movies and rock.
Is the Shi‘a system the instrument to bring these masses into capitalism and finish, as they themselves desire, self-flagellating and cursing, the pure Deen al-Haqq once and for all?
What I say is not an attack on Shi‘a men and women. As a Sufi I know that not a single one does believe it or can defend it. It is a politique. It has its own psychology and it is not healthy. A Shi‘a can be cured.
Look at the politically active Bahrainis – note their hysteria, their chadored women denied their true power, and the sobbing frustrated youth. Darkness.
Allah the Exalted says in Surat Al-Isra’ (17:81):
Say: ‘Truth has come and falsehood has vanished.
Falsehood is always bound to vanish.’
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