12 March 2005
Allah the Almighty says in Surat an-Nisa (4:89):
They would like you to be kafir as they are kafir
so that you will all be the same.
Our fellow Muslims in France have asked for a ruling in relation to the state ordinance forbidding Muslim girls from wearing a head-scarf in state schools. To begin, therefore, we are anxious to make a distinction between the matter of what is approved-of dress for Muslim women in general, and the situation facing these young Muslim women in France. The basic discrimination is well known and has no debate. It derives from two blessed ayats in the Surat an-Nur (24:30-31):
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.
They should only display their adornments to their husbands
or their fathers or their husbands’ fathers,
or their sons or their husbands’ sons
or their brothers or their brothers’ sons
or their sisters’ sons
or other women
or those they own as slaves
or their male attendants who have no sexual desire
or children who still have no awareness
of women’s private parts.
Nor should they stamp their feet
so that their hidden ornaments are known.
Turn to Allah every one of you, muminun,
so that hopefully you will have success.
The phrase “and not display their adornments” derives from the Arabic root “zeena” (Zeen-Ya-Nun). In its root source this indicates the embellishment or embossing on a shield. From it also come the terms “Zayan” for beautiful, “Zeeyana” for the barber’s trade, and “Tazyin” for ornamentation. Thus in this ayat the principal adornments or beauty of women are recognised as being the breasts and buttocks, that is, the embossed form of the body, but also the hair. This, and the covering of the private parts, contain the ruling. It should be remembered that the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, had indicated that the thighs were included in the term for the private parts. It is clear from this ayat and the ayat which precedes it, calling on men to lower their eyes and to guard their private parts, that the concern for the Muslims is that they should protect themselves from illicit sexual arousal.
On one occasion, in the Haram in Makkah, a black American Muslim asked a renowned Shafi‘i ‘alim for a strict ruling on women’s dress. He expected the answer to confirm his obsessional concern in the strictest manner. The ‘alim smiled and waved his hand over the Haram, and said, “You are at the House of Allah. The women here are all muminat. Take a look around-you will see women from Sudan, Nigeria, India, the Maghrib, and Indonesia. Let your women look at them and choose which dress is most pleasing to them, and they will be pleasing to Allah.”
Two further specific references should be made. Firstly, in the classical time of European Islam under the rule of the Murabitun who had come out from the Sahara to occupy half of Spain, the women’s heads were uncovered while the men were veiled. The men were veiled against the desert sands while riding their camels, and for this they were known as the “Mulathimin”, the veiled men. It should be remembered that during this epoch some of the greatest Muslim ‘ulema emerged, propounding and defending an all-inclusive social ethos of Islamic Law. The Murabitun were lenient on matters of dress but utterly unyielding on all law concerning trade and finance. They defended the essential elements of Islamic Law on finance, that is, Zakat, which implies Halal currency of gold and silver on the Madinan model, trade practice, that is selling from unrented premises, and a strict inhibition of unjust taxes, that is any imposition of extra taxes beyond the Kharaj, and lastly the Jizya tax and the fair distribution of Ghanam. Their motto was “Dawat al-Haqq, wa radd’ul-Madhalim, wa qatt’ul-Magharim.” “Call to the Truth, put right injustice, abolish unjust taxes.” On the arrival of Ibn Tumart’s Muwahid forces, a strict dress code was imposed along with a collapse of the Shari‘at of finance, which in turn permitted extra taxation.
Given the history of the Muslim World Community over centuries, it can now be observed easily that puritanical strictness and the policing of women has always gone alongside a laxity of financial limits and strictures on commerce and conquest. This was especially noteworthy in the case of India. Under Aurangzeb, may Allah be pleased with him, an Islamic financial order was imposed. With the conquest by the English Raj, Zakat was abolished and interest initiated, while the ‘ulema turned obsessively to covering up the women. These preliminary observations allow us to confirm that the matter of women’s dress cannot be seen as a single element on which the Deen of Islam depends, nor can it be separated from other social inhibitions. It has been shown that these other inhibitions impinge on vital, inescapable laws, including the defence of the great Fard of Zakat.
The matter before us does not concern the issue in general but its application and the nature of its application in a particular place at a particular time. In order to arrive at a correct judgment on the matter, and since the general case is established and known, the particular case demands that we have a thorough knowledge of the place and time in which this anomalous situation has arisen.
II
Before we examine the prohibition of Muslim girls’ head-coverings in the schools, incorrectly called Hijab, it is first necessary to ask about the identity of the empowering authority, the French state. What is it in the nature of the French state that forces it to legislate on the head-dress of adolescent girls? To arrive at our judgment we must therefore ask-“What is France?” The following dating uses BC/AD for clarification of historical reference.
7000 BC: From the earliest times of Homo Sapiens, there is evidence of communities in France. In Neolithic times the great megaliths of Brittany and the Massif Central indicate primal worship.
1800 BC: Mediterranean people of unknown origin begin to move into France.
1400 BC: sees the arrival of the Proto-Celts who came from Kazakhstan and the Upper Danube.
600 BC: Greeks and Phoenicians are to be found along the Mediterranean coast.
500 BC: saw a massive occupation of French territory by Celtic tribes.
300-200 BC: sees the beginning of cities of the Gaulois.
154 BC: the first limited incursion of the Roman Empire
140-120 BC: saw the conquest of the Roman Province (Provence)
109-101 BC: an invasion of Teutons and Cimbres who crossed the Rhine and the Alps.
70 BC: Caesar’s effective conquest of Gaul, almost entirely.
0-300 AD: France lives through a series of anarchic local rebellions and the expanding presence of christianity
400-470 AD: witnessed the great invasions of the Visigoths and the Huns. Out of Germany, ironically, came the Franks and settled in the western valleys of the Rhine.
481 AD: Clovis becomes King of the Salic French, and current state history books name him as the first French king. This is completely erroneous since he only ruled a small province in the extreme north-east of the country. While Clovis and the Merovingian dynasty ruled, Paris had not achieved the status of a capital. Crowning was at Riems.
719 AD: The Sarrasins cross the Pyrenees and occupy southern France. The country is still broken up into local kingdoms and baronies.
800 AD: The Advent of Charlemagne witnesses the first geographical reality of France and the beginning of the Carolingian dynasty.
843 AD: Already the empire of Charlemagne is dismembered in the Treaty of Verdun, with the country divided into seven independent kingdoms plus Brittany.
987 AD: the end of the Carolingian epoch and the beginning of Capetian epoch. With the crowning of Hughes Capet, the official history books again claim a beginning to the French state. The reality was that a small zone around Orleans was the royal domain, and if a line is drawn vertically from Anvers through Troyes to the west of Arles, to the west of that line was Capetian France consisting of all but autonomous duchies and local Comtés, while to the east of that line, all of Lorraine, Upper and Lower, and all the way from Arles to Nice, is a separate kingdom.
1000 AD: The Capetian monarchy is declared hereditary and indivisible. The reality of the Kingdom is famine, epidemics, feudal chaos, and the Catharist heresy.
1035 AD: William, Duke of Normandy, from his all-but-autonomous dukedom begins the expansion of Normandy.
1066 AD: William the Conqueror forms the Anglo-Norman state.
1146 AD: The second Crusade bleeds the country of one hundred thousand men.
1154 AD: The Capetian kingdom, now based in Paris, is still the smallest province of the country. It should be noted that at this time the Benedictine Order of Citeaux-Clairvaux had an organised social structure of abbeys from Brittany to Provence and centred on Citeaux in the heart of France.
1300 AD: Under Philippe le Bel, the true beginning of French statehood emerges. That struggle involves resistance to the Inquisition, the restructuring of feudal practice, the expulsion of the jewish and Lombardian financiers and the abolition of the Knights Templar, which had become a state within the state.
1328 AD: The Capetian dynasty ends and the Valois dynasty begins with Philip VI.
1336 AD: The Hundred Years War creates havoc between England and the French royal allies, causing civil war between them and the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons.
1453 AD: End of Hundred Years War. England retains Calais until 1558. At this stage, Royal France consists only of the southern half of the country, excluding the Bordeaux territories. From Chinon and Bourges southwards is the territory of France.
1483 AD: At the death of Louis XI there is a unified France with the exception of Brittany, central France and Pyrenean France.
1651 AD: Louis XIV. Ten years later his personal rule begins. Throughout the whole dynastic history of France there has been a continual battle against first catholic christianity and later protestant christianity. Despite the theology, the battle had always been about governance.
1789 AD: Fall of the Bastille. Louis XVI leaves Versailles for Paris. This time sees the emergence of secular and masonic Orders, like their previous catholic equivalents, now called Clubs: Jacobins, Cordeliers, and Feuillants. From them will come the first formulations of secular state values.
1793 AD: The assassination of Marat. The government of the extreme revolutionary Montagnards and the nationally widespread Terror. Alongside the Terror there is the war of the Vendée, royalist and catholic, in an uprising in the north-west of the country and the Atlantic littoral, that would continue until 1800.
1799 AD: Coup d’État of Napoleon.
1800-1815 AD: The formulation of the primal modern atheist state. At the beginning of the Napoleonic state, French is still a minority language.
1800 AD: The foundation of the Banque de France, like the Bank of England, a bank in private hands giving itself a national name.
1815-1915 AD: A period of political dialectics, between monarchism and republicanism, the final disconnecting of the catholic church from the state, and the ineluctable growth of jewish power over the banking and financial institutions.
1914-1944 AD: Named by General de Gaulle the “Second Thirty Years War”.
1956 AD: After a long war of attrition, Morocco recovers its independence under Muhammad V. Tunisia granted a puppet independence. After ten years of struggle, the French evacuate Vietnam.
1962 AD: After eight years of bloody struggle, the Evian Accord is signed granting independence to Algeria.
1969 AD: Pompidou, the nephew of Rothschild, takes the presidency.
1970-2000 AD: The French state sets up an active, armed and controlling security elite force governing Mali and Niger with the use of torture and execution, ostensibly to protect nuclear exports. They carried out the deliberate genocide of the Muslim Tuareg aristocracy.
III
This overview of the French state permits us to make certain deductions. Furthermore, an examination of current events from 1940 up to the present, indicates a decisive viewpoint. It is perfectly clear that there is no such thing as a Frenchman in any racial sense, and that even with the post-Napoleonic modern state there is no genuine patriotism to be found, say, in Brittany, or in the Vosges mountains, or in Provence, let alone in the heartlands or Limousin and Berri.
Pétain surrendered to the German forces because he loved the French and was their military hero in World War One. De Gaulle rebelled against his President and called the French to fight with England, because he loved France. He begins his political biography with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” He goes on to say that he imagines France as a fairytale princess or a madonna on a wall-painting, and as having an eminent and exceptional destiny. He continues, “France cannot be France without grandeur.”
The sense in which De Gaulle, while a political genius, was also a fantasist, lies embedded in the events of his rule. His realistic surrender of the colonies represents his recognition that the grandeur of France is over. His attempt to rescue the anti-Nazi Resistance from the communist forces on the ground in metropolitan France never truly succeeded. The ferocious jewish and communist punishment of the Épuration, or Cleansing Period, exposed the nation as more collaborationist than resistant. De Gaulle’s final act of rebellion, that is, to recover grandeur, was the failed attempt to free France not from Nazi political power but from US-based banking power, by selling France’s dollars to buy gold. For this he was punished by expulsion, and the bankers took over the instruments of government. From then on the jewish vision of a United States of Europe with “democratic governance”, powerless because unable to control the nation’s finance, now securely in the hands of the banking system, became a reality under successive presidents.
The present state of France is clearly one of a terminal decline from which it cannot escape. The increasing impoverishment of the worker and technical class continues as it does throughout the kafir world capitalist system. Agricultural France, that society which still links itself in social memory and practice with old monarchic days, is in the process of collapse, with the Gaullist romantic subsidies doomed by the new banking order. There is a general de-population of villages across France, communities that have known continuity since the Capetian kingdoms. Provence, once a strong, independent mountain region, as depicted by Jean Giono, now finds its hilltop houses taken over by foreigners, jewish and American, playing at being Provençale. All literary activity has nearly ceased, and the great publishing houses, with a few exceptions, are firmly in the hands of ideologically committed jews. It is this exhausted France which has lost its past and hopelessly struggles against encroaching americanisation, which finds itself with a Muslim population of between five and six million people. Even the statistic goes between exaggeration to frighten one group and diminution to calm the other. Now the dwarf minister responsible, Nicolas Sarkozy (a French name?), has imposed on the government the ban on the notorious head-scarf.
What is to be done?
On the one hand we find that there is a puppet Islamic government set up by the atheist state, fronted by the director of the Paris mosque and the utterly disgraceful, self-styled Mufti of Marseilles. On the other hand there are the so-called extremists driving Muslim women into the streets to shout and scream in a manner more befitting the French Commune than Islamic behaviour. In the light of the condition of France, a passive acceptance of the head-scarf ruling is clearly unacceptable since its intention is to ghetto-ise the Muslim community. Equally, a passive submission to subsuming the issue under the programme of the “Total War” of these activists is absurd. Terror for the sake of scarves?
The judgment on this matter is as follows:
The arrival in French territory of this significant population of several million indicates a natural and further development of the historical process which we have here observed as being continuous from prehistoric times. Given the utter moral and financial collapse of the present atheist society of France, with its worn-out and historically irrelevant catholic minority, the indication is that the time has come for the Maghribine community to assert its ascendancy, vitality, and social dynamism by sweeping up the lost and shamed community of other Frenchmen and to bring them under the Muslim aegis. Resisting the state and forcing it to repressive measures will not give us the success we must have. The French state’s powerlessness is precisely because the democratic system has abrogated the power to govern the wealth, which is the only governance the state can know, by handing it over to the banking system.
The struggle is not military, nor is it civic. The Muslim community has to unify itself, establish Amirate, and, given the crisis situation, take, repeat take Zakat and also raise it to the level of the Khums. This procedure should be parallel with similar integration in Britain and Germany. Non-state schooling must be established. Islamic media must be disseminated. Islamic trade must be propagated on a Euro-scale, but not using the Euro. The weakness of the kafir state is its financial system, its instruments of exchange, and its institutions of financial control. This weakness and error is not additional to, but is the evidence of their atheism. Victory for Islam is uniquely dependent in this age on a serious and profound spiritual obedience to the Islamic Shari‘at. By that, only the ignorant and the uninformed can imagine that this is dependent on stoning, cutting hands and wearing scarves. Take up the Muwatta of Imam Malik. The chapter headings alone indicate where the gravity and weight of Islamic Law falls. It is founded on a correct Tawhid and the primal pattern of ‘ibada as found in the Mother of the Madh-habs, the School of the Amal of the People of Madinah. It follows, in sequence but not in time, adherence to a strict set of commercial obligations. All those rules, and we do not deny them, involving personal punishments for criminal acts, are laid down for a practising Muslim community living in an ethos of established worship and abolished usury. For example, the adultery beheadings and the severed hands of Saudi Arabia are a cynical mockery of Islamic Law when neither the rulership nor its currency, neither the political alliances nor the capitalist consumption, are conducive to that proper Islamic behaviour which would be as repelled by adultery as it was by theft.
All Islamic text-books by modernist writers must be put away. The Deen in all its glory, which is the sublime inheritance of the Maghrib and Andalusia, must be restored. The adhan of Madinah, the practice of Salat, the adab of the mosque-all these must be recovered, for Saudi-regime influence and television almost completely effaced them from the Maghrib and Algeria. Simultaneously with this purification, this absolutely necessary purification of the practice of ‘ibada, must come an awakening to a financial evaluation and practice that has been unknown to our Muslim nation for over one hundred years.
The Islamic Dinar and Dirham and Fulus must begin to pass hand-to-hand among the Muslims, as well as being used for international trade, physically and by the internet.
Ancillary to this there should be a massive withdrawal of savings funds from all banks, including “Islamic Banks”, and a transformation of that saved false money, which as in Argentina can be rendered worthless overnight. These monies, if not converted into halal gold and silver, should be used for the purchase of land over significant areas within the state of France. The withdrawal of large quantities of Muslim savings will immediately demonstrate that our Muslim French population has got an enormous and unique power in the country, and one which is denied to the individual secularised slave.
The active dynamic thrust of this financial activity must be a new and pure call to Islam. The Da’wa to Islam cannot be couched in the worthless masonic language of “Tolérance” and “Islamic Principles”. Islam cannot be defined by the kuffar, as at present. Islam means submission to Allah, that in turn demands an adherence to the Divine Order in Surat an-Nisa ayat 59-61:
You who have iman! obey Allah and obey the Messenger
and those in command among you.
If you have a dispute about something,
refer it back to Allah and the Messenger,
if you have iman in Allah and the Last Day.
That is the best thing to do and gives the best result.
Do you not see those who claim that they have iman
in what has been sent down to you
and what was sent down before you,
still desiring to turn to a satanic source for judgement
in spite of being ordered to reject it?
Shaytan wants to misguide them far away.
When they are told, ‘Come to what Allah has sent down
and to the Messenger,’
you see the munafiqun turning away from you completely.
When the christians in the Middle Ages reconquered Sicily, the Muslims of the island sent to Qayrawan for a Fatwa on whether they could continue to live under kafir rule. The considered judgment of these great ‘ulema, in the method of Khalil, who must be studied anew, was twofold. The first part of the judgment was that if people felt that things which were essential to them in their daily lives, such as dress and eating, became unacceptable, they should make Hijra and live under a Muslim Amir. The second part of the judgment was that if they determine that Hijra was impossible or that they desired to remain, then they had an active and quotidian duty to call the kuffar of the land to enter the Deen of Islam. This judgment is utterly valid today as much as it was then. Given the vast nature of the Muslim presence in France, it is the duty of the scholars of the Muslim community to revive the Deen of Islam in all its glory and be mortally aware of the danger of following Shaytans like the self-styled Mufti of Marseilles or the puppets of the kafir French state. Equally, they must beware of being trapped in the nihilistic struggle of Middle Eastern Arabs who have never known the Deen except in its modernist revisions, so profound as to make the Deen unrecognisable. Their signs are that they do not refer to the Book of Allah and they do not adhere to the Sunna of His Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. At funerals, they shout takbirs but they do not shout the Shahadatayn.
The only protection that can assure the safety of our women is a strict adherence to the commercial exigencies as laid down by Allah the Almighty in His Book, by the events of Madinah under the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the Khulafa Rashidun, and the Salaf. To follow in this path is to return to the Muwatta and its commentaries. To return to the Mudawwana. And to return to Qadi Iyad’s ennoblement of our beloved Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, in Ash-Shifa. Look how Allah the Almighty gives His judgment on the protection of women. It contains a moral command of correct behaviour, and that moral command is made manifest by an obedience to protective financial obligations towards women and children. In Surat an-Nisa ayat 127-132 and also in ayat 176, Allah the Almighty says:
They will ask you for a fatwa about women.
Say, ‘Allah gives you a fatwa about them;
and also what is recited to you in the Book about orphan girls
to whom you do not give the inheritance they are owed,
while at the same time desiring to marry them;
and also about young children who are denied their rights:
that you should act justly with respect to orphans.’
Whatever good you do, Allah knows it.
If a woman fears cruelty or aversion on her husband’s part,
there is nothing wrong in the couple becoming reconciled.
Reconciliation is better.
But people are prone to selfish greed.
If you do good and have taqwa,
Allah is aware of what you do.
You will not be able to be completely fair between your wives,
however hard you try.
But do not be completely partial so as to leave a wife,
as it were, suspended in mid-air.
And if you make amends and have taqwa,
Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
If a couple do separate,
Allah will enrich each of them
from His boundless wealth.
Allah is All-Encompassing, All-Wise.
What is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Allah.
We have instructed those given the Book before you
and you yourselves, to have taqwa of Allah,
but if you are kafir,
what is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Allah.
Allah is Rich Beyond Need, Praiseworthy.
What is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Allah.
Allah suffices as a Guardian.
And Sura Nisa ayat 176:
They will ask you for a fatwa.
Say: ‘Allah gives you a fatwa
about people who die without direct heirs:
If a man dies childless but has a sister
she receives half of what he leaves,
and he is her heir if she dies childless.
If there are two sisters
they receive two-thirds of what he leaves.
If there are brothers and sisters
the males receive the share of two females.
Allah makes things clear to you so you will not go astray.
Allah has knowledge of all things.’
