16 August 2013

Of course we are appalled at the massacre of a country’s citizens by its own military. We must step back from the frenzied scene of ‘breaking news’ and its dismal commentators. These events are profound in effect and by their nature will reconstruct political discourse as a result.

In these final days of the American experiment it was perhaps inevitable that its last two holders of the high office of Secretary of State should prove inadequate, a woman who had failed in the bedroom, followed by a man who had failed on the battlefield.
Our epoch has been dominated by what began as a loud and boastful rhetoric – that the solution to the problems of injustice lay in universal franchise democracy – and year by year has weakened into the now dead voice echoing across the ruins of Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Egypt.

Adam Ferguson, Britain’s greatest political philosopher, and the dominant intellect of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment put the issue lucidly in his renowned ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society.’

By forming a distinction between civil and military professions, by committing the keeping and enforcement of liberty to different hands, (this policy) has prepared the way for the dangerous alliance of faction with military power, in opposition to mere political forms, and the rights of mankind.
A people who are disarmed in compliance with this fatal refinement, have rested their safety on the pleadings of reason and justice at the tribunal of ambition and of force. In such an extremity, laws are quoted, and senates are assembled, in vain. They who compose a legislature or who occupy the civil departments of state, may deliberate on the messages they receive from the camp or the court; but if the bearer, like the centurion who brought the petition of Octavius to the Roman senate, shew the hilt of his sword, they find that petitions have become commands, and they themselves are become the pageants, not the repositories of sovereign power.

The anarchy in Egypt for the Muslims spells, first and foremost, the end of the Ikhwani deviation based on a false ‘aqida and its western-intoxicated idea that politics lay at the core of the Deen and not, as is the truth, Ibada and just patterns of and instruments of exchange. Further to its denial of Islamic fiqh, following the criminals Abdu and Rashid Reda, it was founded by a man who had not completed his suluk with his Shaykh. From its beginning it was an anti-Islam. They acted ‘brotherhood’ – whereas the Muslims WERE brothers, as any Hajji will testify.

The anarchy in Egypt for thinking men and women everywhere spells out a different message.
That message is that mass-democracy has failed and has been removed. It cannot be re-established, its determinant factors have been destroyed.
Whatever the mechanisms which will be used – the Ferguson critique above reveals an end to the previous process.

What today is happening in Egypt will happen in America. Once the armies of the U.S.A. are withdrawn by the country’s now urgent fiduciary imperatives and return to their homeland they will claim there what they once had abroad – power.
We await the next turn of the wheel with fascination.

Allah, truly, governs existence, by rules.

As Adam Ferguson wrote in 1776 about America:

‘A state…which, by attempting such extravagant plans of Continental Republic, is probably laying the seeds of anarchy, of civil wars, and last of a military government.’

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