Allah the Exalted has announced in Surat al-Hud (11:111-115):

Your Lord will pay each one of them
in full for his actions.
He is aware of what they do.

Go straight as you have been commanded,
and also those who turn with you to Allah,
and do not exceed the bounds.
He sees what you do.

Do not rely on those who do wrong
thus causing the Fire to afflict you,
for you have no protector besides Allah;
then you will not be helped.

Establish salat at each end of the day
and in the first part of the night.
Good actions eradicate bad actions.
This is a reminder for people who pay heed.

And be steadfast.
Allah does not let the wage
of good-doers go to waste.

Up until now it has been virtually impossible to make any profound reading of the fearsome events in Iraq. The dust of the bombs and the blood of the victims have obscured the view. If Iraq is a nightmare for its people, it also seems to pull into unconsciousness not only those who visit it but those who study it. Nevertheless, the waking world outside and all the events that crowd in on it seem finally to allow us to make a realistic assessment of the meaning of Iraq’s tragedy.

A respected commentator on Middle-Eastern affairs, Robert Fisk, has just produced a massive tome on Palestine. He has a reputation of sympathy for the Palestinians and a certain courage in daring to criticise the Israelis. The cover of the book announces that it is a vast study of the conflict between what it defines as ‘the Arabs, the christians and the jews’. The book is crammed with this same blood and dust, but its noble outrage at the myriad injustices is rendered meaningless because, like an obedient student of Western geo-politics, he sees the conflict as one between the Fellaheen, that is, the illiterate Arab peasants, and the invader-presence of two ancient religions.

Perhaps one should forgive this well-meaning author for being unable to recognise any presence of Islam in the Palestinian conflict. We ourselves look almost entirely in vain for any sign of Islam in Palestine. Our distinguished ‘alim, the present Mufti of Jerusalem, is not only a lone voice but one that is ignored by all the factions. There has never been any question of his attending any of the seemingly endless conferences, re-named Roadmaps to avoid the embarrassing use of that inaccessible term ‘peace’. The leadership of the Palestinian people, with its kafir fantasy of nation-hood, lost whatever territory it had, and when it finally used its massive buried armaments it was only to turn them against its own people. Apart from the dismal Camp David Agreement, the only time its leadership was seen to perform was when it rushed to Paris to force the Swiss bank code-numbers from Arafat’s widow.

Standing against them, and certainly a more true representation of the masses, are those military organisations which have chosen to oppose Israel by applying the doctrine of suicide-bombing and all which that entails of the indoctrination of those masses by the application of an Isma‘ili anthropology. The Isma‘ili doctrine is two-fold. One, the recruitment of new suicide-victims. This is done by the creation of Martyrs’ Memorial Gardens where future practitioners are taken to meditate on the previous victims of their fatal programme. This, as well as ritual parades robed in menacing deaths’-head outfits, and pre-bombing videos to be seen by the whole world. Two – and this is the only politique, the limit point-of-vision of the Isma‘ili programme – the enrolling of the larger community through the inevitable linkage of family after family to martyr after martyr. The masses cannot afford to oppose the conflict, since their sons have just given their lives for it. The hidden aspect of this grisly ethos is that both the masses and the martyrs are trapped in a cycle of death from which the cowardly leaders are, in the inexorable logic of events, the only survivors!

To understand Iraq today, one has to begin with the accepted quotidian slaughter in Palestine. It will be noted that to approach the matter of Palestine one had to begin with the de-construction of a media expert, to observe that the sympathetic outrage and compassion of the author was invalidated by his hopelessly flawed basic assumption. It is one of the strange and vital-to-be-understood elements in the current situation that not only our Muslim masses, but perhaps even more so our political leadership tend to believe the media’s interpretation of events, and much more dangerously, tend to use the political vocabulary fed to the media by the in-back Power Elite. It is important to realise that the media itself does not devise the political vocabulary. Clearly it is not devised by the President of the USA, presented to the world by his own media slumped, struggling to program his iPod. Rather, it is decided by private circles of the banking-military-commodities elite, gathered to sketch their immediate strategies in well-guarded country estates, as they pore over the briefings of their various think-tanks. This almost improvisational method by which the Power Elite define their tactics, so voided is it of long-term goals that it justifies a genuine fear for the future of mankind. This daily reality of political directives, prior to the erection of governmental programmes would be foolishly dismissed as Conspiracy Theory, since, honestly, all the political classes know this is how things are, and because again and again some shocked servant of the system leaks to the media news of some point that proved humanly too much for him or her.

Our Muslim Nation must cast a cold eye on these so-called experts, and certainly none are more chillingly out of touch with the lived reality of Muslim life throughout the world than those who pose as experts on the politics of the Muslim lands, to them outrageously linked to their own invented theses of what they call a terrorism and which they name Islamic.

As Muslims the first thing we have to take cognisance of is the bitter, the very bitter fact that in the present tragedy the Iraqi people are NOT the victims, however much the current view is to blame the abominable invaders. The Iraqi people are the culprits.

Allah the Exalted has said in Hud (11:116-117):

Would that there had been more people with a vestige of good
among the generations of those who came before you,
who forbade corruption in the earth,
other than the few among them whom We saved.
Those who did wrong gladly pursued
the life of luxury that they were given
and were evildoers.

Your Lord would never have destroyed the cities wrongfully
as long as their inhabitants were putting things right.

The crime of the Iraqi people stemmed not from something intrinsic to those of that land, but rather because they participated in the almost wholesale abandonment of the Deen of Islam which seized the Arab peoples at the beginning of the last century, when they became intoxicated by the thrill of an acquired technology and new wealth held out to them by a new jewish elite of bankers who clearly already wielded a controlling hand over the christian imperialists, and even in some cases had become for them imperial governors.

The first Zionist office in Palestine was based in the Rothschild’s Bank. The banking family of Sassoon gained their first wealth in Baghdad. By 1860 the Sassoons had acquired titles in London, and in 1887 the heir to the Sassoon fortune married Aline Rothschild. The banker, Sir Ernest Cassel, who founded the Bank of Egypt was to see his daughter married to Mountbatten and appointed Vicereine of India. Sir Evelyn Baring of Barings Bank, elevated to be Lord Cromer, was a British Agent and Consul General in Egypt from 1883 to 1907. It was Cromer who appointed his friend Muhammad ‘Abduh as Shaykh al-Azhar. Once installed, his first announcement was a proclamation that the interest of the Post Office Bank was Halal. Reference should be made to the important research and analysis on Baring and ‘Abduh in Umar Ibrahim Vadillo’s ‘The Esoteric Deviation in Islam’. We find the bankers ‘Oppenheim, Chabert et Cie.’ in Alexandria, and of course, the great banking houses of the Osmanli Dawlet spread their tentacles through Egypt, Syria and Iraq in what, with the arrival of their man in Istanbul, Mustafa Kemal, and the slicing-up of the whole Middle East zone into helpless, invented national units, led to a veritable invasion of Bankers. The Camondo, Abraham-Behor, the Oppenheims, Emile and Isaac Pereire, Théodor Tubini of Crédit Générale Ottomane, Théodor Baltazzi of the Banque de Constantinople, and Alfred André of Cairo.

There is no doubt that the post-First World War political settlements in the Middle East were experienced by the Arabs as imperialist, but it was in the aftermath of the Second World War that Arab intellectuals, inflamed by the rhetoric and utopianism of the Socialist camp, began to live out their long-nursed fantasies of self-government and political power. An important part of the ensuing tragedy that was to descend on the Arab people was due to their passionate imposition of personality politics onto a world that had become primarily conditioned by corporation structures, centralised distribution, investments and currency exchange.

The final departure of the Arabs from the Deen of Islam was to take place in the Fifties under the malefic influence of Nasser, but the particular poison plant that was to spread throughout Iraq can be dated from 1947. From 1932 an orthodox christian history professor, Michel Aflak, began to develop a complex doctrine of an Arab nationalism which would culminate in a united Arab world from the Gulf to the Atlantic, and this in turn would be founded on a Socialist doctrine which rejected Communism, but also Islam, and here was the significant condition – that Islam would be a cultural bonding-factor of a pan-Arab world governed by materialist doctrines. In other words, Aflak planned an Islamic ‘Reformation’ as Luther had reformed Catholicism. To understand this well, recognise what it meant. In christendom, Papal power was absolute and finance in the hands of the great Monastic orders. After Luther, German and Dutch mercantile banking took over power and the Secular State was born. Aflak was to complete what Mustafa Kemal had begun. Between 1941 and 1947 he founded the Ba’ath Party, which from its inception was not Syrian but pan-Arab.

The battle that the Muslim Brotherhood lost against their earlier protégé, General Nasser, is still being lost today, exactly fifty years later, against the American puppet Mubarak. Put in crude terms, but terms which well define a misunderstanding that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of young Muslims, the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning has been their failure to submit to the Deen of Islam as understood from the Khulafa Rashidun to Sultan Abdulhamid II, may Allah be pleased with him, due to their prior acceptance of the disastrous modernist deviations of ‘Abduh, Rashid Reda and the Shi‘a agent provocateur, Al-Afghani. It was that false ‘Aqida which, led into a hopeless political cul-de-sac by Sayyid Qutb, assured the total failure of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun to understand the two dynamics of Islam that assure the exercise of triumphant power: the laws of Zakat and its collection on the one hand, and the dynamics of trade and markets which sustain any successfully functioning Islamic Power Elite on the other.

By 1956 Aflak was publicly calling for political union between Egypt and Syria. It is doubtful if people today realise to what a degree the Arabs fell under the Socialist allure of Nasser’s Arab nationalism, nor should they forget Nasser’s open readiness to negotiate with Ben-Gurion. While Nasser strode the world stage in a blaze of glory, the banking powers were hard at work seeking the political framework which would assure their continuous milking of local resources. On 24 February 1955 – and it is perhaps here that we can date the root cause and beginning of the Iraqi tragedy – a complex agreement called the Baghdad Pact was signed. On the face of it there was a defence agreement between Turkey and Iraq, but this was far from being a bi-lateral treaty. It simply set in motion a vast diplomatic and military operation steered by Great Britain with the intention of running a theoretically defensive blockage, sweeping from Turkey to Pakistan, against the Soviet Union. Nouri Saeed, the Iraqi Prime Minister, in signing the agreement with the Western powers, knew that it branded him as a traitor to the Arab nation. Nasser was well aware that the Baghdad Pact had no other end than to render vassal states all the Arab lands of the Middle East, and at the same time to encircle the USSR. On 20 October 1955, Syria and Egypt signed a military agreement as a counter-weight to the Baghdad Pact.

On 26 July 1956 in Alexandria, at 19h30, before 250,000 people, Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. So it was that in mid-Suez-Crisis, on 13 September 1956, Israel began to collaborate with France in acquiring the Jewish Bomb. The Suez Crisis created an active military alliance of air, land and sea attacks by the jewish State, France and Great Britain. On 5 and 6 November, Marshal Bulganin threatened the invaders with use of the Nuclear Weapon. This, and a UNO Directive, assured a cease-fire on November 7.

February 22, 1958 saw the creation of the United Arab Republic, a fusion of Syria and Egypt. The vote for the Union registered 99.99% in favour in Egypt, and 99.98% in Syria. In October 1957 Aflak had met with Nasser, and on 14 January 1958 with Salah al-Bitar, the Ba’athist Foreign Minister of Syria. On 8 March 1958, the Yemen joined the Arab Union. 15 July 1958 saw Baghdad in turmoil. In a nationalist uprising, the Monarchy, undermined by active Communist rebellions, found itself swept away by the military heading nationalist forces. The Prime Minister, Nouri Saeed, disguised as a woman, fled through the streets of Baghdad. The crowd recognised him, beat him to the ground, and tore his body to pieces to the strains of the Marseillaise. General Abdalkarim Kassem and Colonel Abdussalam Arif declared the Revolution – it was the 14th of July! King Faysal had been killed during the taking of the Palace, along with most of his family and followers. Kassem declared his allegiance to Arab unity.

On 19 June 1961 Kuwait was declared an independent state, despite the intense objections of Iraq who claimed that Kuwait was part of its national territory. On April 11, 1961 the ultra-modern Tower of Cairo was erected as a symbol of Egypt’s modernisation. The CIA gave a gift of three million dollars towards the building of the Tower. On 5 October 1961, the great Socialist and humanist foundations of Arabism began to collapse. Nasser was forced to announce the secession of Syria from the United Arab Republic. By the end of 1962, the Yemen became split in a civil war. 9 February 1963: in a coup d’état, General Kassem was shot dead as General Arif, who had been set aside for his Nasserite sympathies, seized power. Nasserites and Ba’athist officers now ruled the country. The Ba’ath, being the only organised party, set about its first task, which was the elimination of Communism. The news of the coup d’état was received with delight in the Foreign Offices of the West.

17 April in Cairo: at the demand of General Arif, Nasser was asked yet again to re-launch the Arab Union. 22 July 1963: Nasser declared that he sought union with all of Syria and not the Ba’ath fascists. Ba’athists and Nasserites faced each other more and more violently. 18 July 1963: the Nasserites attempted to seize power, but the putsch was a bloody disaster, with more than 500 dead in Damascus. 18 November 1963: the violent crisis of Syria then engulfed Iraq with an opposite result. The Ba’athists under President Arif soon found themselves out of tune with the Ba’ath Party itself, its secularism and modernism. General Abdarrahman Arif, the President’s brother, overtook the task of breaking the National Guard and overthrowing the Government. Thus the Nasserite fantasy of humanism, united Arab brothers, had set civil war in the three countries adjoining his dictatorship. 1967: on 10 June the Six Day War cease-fire was signed. 20,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed in battle, 700 tanks put out of action, and the air-force destroyed. The Nejeb Desert, Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem were in jewish hands. General de Gaulle sent Nasser a personal letter telling him that his situation was similar to that France had faced in 1940 with the Nazi occupation of its country.

17 July 1968: with the help of the right-wing military, the internal balance of power changed in Iraq, weakening both the Syrian Ba’athists and the Nasserites. Determined to renew the founding concepts of the Party, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein seized power. Immediately, Michel Aflak flew to re-join them in Baghdad. 28 September 1970: Nasser died at 18h15. He was accorded a Muslim funeral attended by the Cairo masses. So it was, that following the death of the renowned President Nasser, Saddam Hussein became the most powerful man in the Middle East. It is important to understand what happened once the Saddamite dictatorship had taken hold in Iraq. One could say that in the early years of his rule, the Middle-Eastern nations present us with a rather repellent but undeniable materialist harmony. What this brief interim gave us were three functioning power systems whose unique purpose was the production of oil for the Western capitalist system: the dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, the rule of the House of Saud in Arabia, and the Saddamite dictatorship of Iraq. Western leaders, that is American and European, dined at the High Tables of all three states. They bought their oil from them and sold their arms to them.

The Anti-gun Lobby in the USA has a motto which says: ‘If you have guns – you’ll use them!’ What the USA failed to recognise at home it clearly failed to recognise in Iraq. Given the commercial protocols with the USA, and the military hardware contracts with Britain and Europe, the inevitable moment came when Saddam was not content just to fire a rifle from the balcony. While Hitler was re-building Germany and restoring his people’s pride, collaboration was possible and admiration understandable. Once he had created the formidable war machine that was the Wehrmacht, it was time to expect aggression. Remember, Churchill’s warning at that time was a lone voice.

Over twenty-five years, remember, the Iraqi State functioned with committed approval from Western governments, and especially the Pope in Rome. During this time things were very different from what people now seem to imagine, surveying the scene of field after field of human skulls dug up. Communists out of the way, the only menace facing Saddam was Islam. At this stage the educated Muslim intelligentsia represented the one threat to Ba’athist atheism. The first mass slaughter of Saddam Hussein was of a significant community of Muslim ‘ulama, a remarkable body of erudite Hanafi scholars, the like of which no longer exist. They were wiped out. Their students were tortured and killed. This epoch of the persecution of the Muslim intellectuals was the same time that he was constructing that very secular, that is atheist, State that Ba’athism and the West required of him. This must be understood. This is the pivotal spiritual and political reality which alone makes the situation today understandable. Twenty-five years is two generations and more in which to create a new breed of atheists whose only linkage to Islam is the civic fast of Ramadan, marriage contracts, and funeral services. All the social mores, all the allegiances of power, all the transactions of commerce, all of these are a new creation that has nothing to do with the great history of Islam and the mighty Islamic tradition of the country of Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Junayd, and Moulay Abdalqadir al-Jilani. During this time that could be defined as the fecundation of a Saddamite society, atheist and brutal, it must be realised that the Muslims were witnessing the abolition of the Deen of Islam. Hasan al-Basri’s words took on a prophetic resonance for that period: ‘Islam is going into the books, and the Muslims are going into the graves.’

The full bitterness of what that period meant can only be grasped when we also record that during that time, no Arab leader did more for the Kurdish people in settling them and supporting them than did Saddam Hussein. As for the Shi‘a, he saw them as the illiterate peasants of the southern cities and the primitive inhabitants of the marsh-lands. They were an under-class, they kept to themselves and they knew their place. At the heart of Iraqi society there emerged a new technocratic elite comprised uniquely of Saddamite atheists and christians, together serving the great dragon of a pipeline that seemed to curl around its shores, cutting it off from the rest of the world.

The arrival of one man changed all of this. Imam Khomeini. It must not be under-estimated how devastating the impact was of the Shah’s demise. It was a double shock. The old Baghdad Pact was blown to smithereens with the end of the Shah’s regime. The other effect was actually more powerful. When the new Shi‘a regime took over Iran and in their fervour took hostage American personnel, the world for the first time witnessed that this nation, which in their own imagination was so powerful, was utterly helpless. It was not an accidental detail that the massive face-blindfold of the hostages was an exact copy of that used by the Israeli forces on Palestinian captives. Saddam, himself a Revolutionary, was in no doubt that the effulgent Iranian Revolution would have as its first expansion a recuperation of a whole tranche of Iraq covering the Shi‘a sanctified places, Karbala and Najaf. Given the USA’s view of the new Iran, it also signalled that an invasion of Iran would go unchallenged. When the first tanks moved against Iran, the internal balance of the Iraqi State was shattered. The Muslims had been crushed. Now the Shi‘a were a manifest enemy. From that moment began the blood-chilling genocide of the Shi‘a that was to continue up to the present day. Ironically, it was the decision that was forced on Khomeini to sign a peace accord with Iraq that was to assure the last terrible and vengeful genocide of the Shi‘a population in Iraq. Had they fought on, none of this present nightmare would have happened.

With the Iran War out of the way, Saddam looked to his country’s ancient claim on Kuwait. True to every other Arab modernist, Saddam failed to recognise that neither the creation of the State of Kuwait nor his intended invasion of it were political realities in the way that he understood politics. Kuwait was the creation not of an imperial edict but of a rational market policy of the great oil corporations. An invasion of Kuwait was not the kind of leveraged buy-out that the new Power Elite found acceptable. The end of the first Iraq War was to see the third genocide, and the third de-stabilisation inside the State of Iraq. Due to Bush Senior’s shameful deception of the Kurds, their unsupported uprising was met with the implacable fury of the gassing and machine-gunning on bare mountains of the great Kurdish people.

Of the second invasion of Iraq, everything is now known. From it many things had emerged, not the least of which is the numb recognition of the democracies that they elect representatives to stand in for them, but given the nature of political democracy, power is vested in one man with absolute power over his government structures, and at the same time is receiving white papers and orders which reach neither Parliaments nor Cabinets, but come directly in briefings and consultations with the Power Elite, their advisors, and their think-tanks.

* * * * *

In the light of the preceding overview of events, we now have to look at the present situation as defined by the occupying forces. Firstly let us present the invaders’ view of what they are dealing with, which is also the media’s translation to us of what they say is happening ‘on the ground’. According to them, the State of Iraq consists of, and while consisting of also had to be divided into, three separate communities.

  1. Kurds
  2. Sunnis
  3. Shi‘a

To us as Muslims this has to be an outrage. Also to those simpletons who still imagine there is some just application of democratic principles, this division should be almost as offensive. Let us test the division against a proposed franchise in the USA. This would result in the following Census:

IRAQUSA
KurdsBlacks
SunnisProtestants
Shi’aJews

This as the foundational structure of any kind of society is simply unworkable. It is also a guaranteed recipe for civil war.

At the heart of this political doctrine there is something much more disturbing for us, and one which we must react to forcefully, actively and vociferously. There is no such thing as Sunni Islam. The usage of the term in times past by our ‘ulama is within a framework that is simply not relevant today. Allah has named the Deen – ISLAM. Allah did not name us Sunni Muslims nor define a Sunni Islam. Allah named the Deen Islam and was pleased with it. On the other hand, Allah, glory be to Him, makes absolutely no reference to Shi‘a Islam in the Qur’an. The Shi‘a called themselves Shi‘a. They chose to separate – to go out. We regret that choice, but we insist that what they have is simply not Islam, quite apart from their choice of separation. Our responsibility is to do Da’wa to them. What sets them apart from us is their turning away from the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, in the light of their own later choice to elevate Sayyiduna ‘Ali, may Allah enlighten his face, as well as a cult of the coming of the Mahdi which of its nature renders meaningless the need for and the necessity of both the Qur’anic Revelation and the life and example of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. Belief in the Mahdi abrogates the necessity of the Muslim to put right the wrongs in his time and establish the good. Waiting for the Mahdi is itself a false religion which obliterates the unconditional existential responsibility of the Muslim to change the present. The fundamental difference, however, which is why Shi‘ism is not a sect of Islam but a separate and quite new religion, is its political difference. The Shi‘a reject ‘Amr. They reject Khilafa. They defer being governed, therefore by implication seeing themselves as a persecuted under-class who await the blessed liberation of metaphysical intervention in the shape of a Ruler who will come at the end of time, the Mahdi. Their Mullahs are a priesthood whose leaders call themselves Signs-of-Allah. They and only they can negotiate the rulings of the Twelve Invisible Imams.

We really have to remind ourselves who we are, for a young Muslim would not be wrong in thinking it would seem as if we had forgotten! Contrary to current media analyses, we do not have clerics, or priests, or rectors as the French atheists like to call our Imams. Islam is a power structure, and the leader among us is given our Bayat, or allegiance – a practice initiated by the Messenger during his lifetime, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. The logical outcome of this is Personal Rule – in these mountains an Amir. Over these islands, Sultans. Across a continent, Padishahs. And in a great configuration stretching over continents, Khilafa. All these, including kingdoms, indicate the underlying principle of personal governance, of kingship and Khalifate, which has been the practice of the human species from the earliest recorded documents of civilisation. Personal Rule is part of the Fitra of mankind, and a practice confirmed in Islam. Without it, there may be Muslims, but there cannot be Islam.

To return for a moment to this tri-partite division made by the conquerors – we have mentioned the primary offence, which is to call us Sunnis, when we must insist that if there are any Muslims, they cannot be separated out into a racial group and an openly non-Islamic group. It follows, therefore, a further offence against the Kurds. The Kurds in the greater part in Iraq are Muslim, while there is a remnant of Communists and an even smaller group of pagans. What this means is that the terrible political deception told to the world by the occupying forces defines Iraq as a Muslim country with three separate loyalties that leave them divided irreconcilably. What they are then being offered is the outrageous humanist fantasy that they can all come together under a political system which of itself denies them any access to power, since power is invested in wealth always, and also, when they accept their status as citizens of the Iraqi National Census, they will then discover that they are debtors to the tune of billions of a currency which as of today is worthless on the world’s money markets.

Let us now propose the division of the Iraqi people into three parties according to our reading of Qur’anic wisdom and our Shari‘at. Allah the Exalted says in Al-Ma’ida (5:44):

Those who do not judge by what Allah has sent down,
such people are kafirun.

The first community in the State of Iraq are the kafirun. They are atheists, Ba’athists, and christians.

Allah the Exalted says in Al-Ma’ida (5:45):

Those who do not judge by what Allah has sent down,
such people are wrongdoers.

The second community in the State of Iraq are the Dhalimun. They are the Terrorists.

Allah the Exalted says in Al-Ma’ida (5:47):

Those who do not judge by what Allah has sent down,
such people are deviators.

The third community in the State of Iraq are the Fasiqun. They are the Shi‘a.

There is no doubt that Allah has visited a terrible punishment on the Iraqi people, and that because of the terrible crime that they did commit, to us the worst crime that can be committed. The Iraqi people who had been blessed by Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Junayd and Moulay Abdalqadir al-Jilani in person, and who had been gifted the great gift of Islam, rejected it and let their own families be slaughtered when they tried to hold to it. That same Iraqi people became rich, richer than all the other Arabs, and then they followed a kafir Ruler. His evil and corruption, and that of his regime, were known to the Iraqi people through generations. They did not remove him, indeed, they were his obedient executioners and torturers. We saw the newsreels of his soldiers kicking to death those who had rebelled. We have seen the fields of skulls. Saddam did not kill them. The Iraqi people killed them. They have feasted the feast and now the bill has been put in front of them. If they go into the charade of political democracy which has been initiated not for their liberation but for their even further degradation, and for a new kind of impoverishment, then this is very bad news, not just for them but for all of mankind.

Allah the Exalted says in Surat al-Baqara (2:158-163):

Those who hide the Clear Signs and Guidance
We have sent down,
after We have made it clear to people in the Book,
Allah curses them, and the cursers curse them –
except for those who make tawba
and put things right and make things clear.
I turn towards them.
I am the Ever-Returning, the Most Merciful.

But as for those who are kafir and die kuffar,
the curse of Allah is upon them
and that of the angels and all mankind.
They will be under it for ever.
The punishment will not be lightened for them.
They will be granted no reprieve.

Your God is One God.
There is no god but Him,
the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful.