2 February 2005
In the Noble Qur’an there is a Sura which bears the title Al-Qasas. While this is read in English as meaning The Story, it can be more deeply interpreted as meaning History. One might expand an exploratory translation to indicate ‘This is the meaning of History’. It could be said that the great disaster of our time is the failure of the Arab peoples to read and understand the Glorious Qur’an. In it Allah, glory be to Him, has given clear guidance and clear discrimination, yet in every Arab land the Arabs demonstrate to the world their lack of guidance, their lack of discrimination, and with that the twin impulses, the rush to excessive wealth, like the shameless and extravagant paganism of Dubai, now the world’s pharaonic model, at one extreme, and the poverty of neglected masses as in Pakistan and Turkey, at the other.
While the neglected poor of these countries can make an excuse of ignorance, and plead an absence of right-guided fuqaha as an excuse, the Arab peoples have no way to avoid the inescapable reality – they have failed to respond to and obey the Command of Allah, glory be to Him, to them. The Command has been given in a clear Arabic.
From the gangster leadership of the lawless Palestinian masses to the embittered and dis-enfranchised technocratic class of Iraq, their complaint is voiced in a language voided of Qur’anic wisdom. The former use the language of Jihad, while their actions show an absolute ignorance of its rules and parameters, which rules demonstrate that what they are embarked on is not a Jihad. The latter group, insulting the Deen of Islam itself by declaring they are ‘Sunni Muslims’ in a land where the Muslims are all dead, and the survivors were the active supporters of a kafir regime, also both passively and actively supported the genocide both of their Muslim Kurdish neighbours, and of the oppressed mass of the adherents of the Shi’a religion.
Allah the Exalted says at the opening of Surat al-Qasas (28:1-3):
Ta Sin Mim
Those are the Signs of the Clear Book.
We recite to you with truth some news of Musa and Pharaoh
for people who have iman.
We must remember that in the Qur’an, when Allah repeatedly gives examples of what happened to the earlier Prophets, may Allah give them peace, He, glory be to Him, is indicating that He has never left the peoples without Divine guidance in the face of the tyranny of the kuffar, so that, in that sense, the earlier Messengers are themselves an enunciatory witness to the Great Event of the Final Messenger. Over and against atheist world leadership stands the Prophetic witness. Allah indicates that the people of Iman view the activities in a Prophetic light and not merely with the statistics and logistics of the kafir intellect.
Allah, glory be to Him, continues (28:4):
Pharaoh exalted himself arrogantly in the land
and divided its people into camps,
oppressing one group of them
by slaughtering their sons
and letting their women live.
He was one of the corrupters.
It is important that we understand the meaning of this phrase: ‘He was one of the corrupters’. If we follow the great tradition of the School of Madinah, the purest of sources, then we use the method of ‘Al-Qur’an bi’l-Qur’an’, so that Allah Himself is His unique commentator, and this gives us an absolute authority, since He, glory be to Him, has explained that the Book is consistent in all its parts. Right at the opening of the Book, Allah explains this matter, one could say in the major key, when He declares in Al-Baqara (2:7-12):
Allah has sealed up their hearts and hearing
and over their eyes is a blindfold.
They will have a terrible punishment.
Among the people there are some who say,
‘We have iman in Allah and the Last Day,’
when they are not muminun.
They think they deceive Allah and those who have iman.
They deceive no one but themselves
but they are not aware of it.
There is a sickness in their hearts
and Allah has increased their sickness.
They will have a painful punishment
on account of their denial.
When they are told, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’
they say, ‘We are only putting things right.’
No indeed! They are the corrupters,
but they are not aware of it
It is in the nature of the corrupters that they have a dual attitude towards the Deen al-Haqq. They both make a mockery of belief in Divine power, and flaunt their religion, humanism, which is nothing other than self-worship. They do not worship the Divine, but rather the supremacy of the human creatures, which in turn forces them to worship their own dead in a pseudo-religion, whose practices are the lighting of candles in public places, that is, not in places of worship, and the observation of minutes of silence, as it were to stifle the very voice of reason they say upholds their way. So in the end their atheism becomes a Cult of the Dead, mourning their millions killed in wars and concentration camps – although those were only peoples killed by other peoples. Allah the Exalted warns (2:14):
When they meet those who have iman, they say,
‘We have iman.’
But then when they go apart with their shaytans,
they say, ‘We are really with you.
We were only mocking.’
The corrupters are those who say, when confronted with the Muslims, that they are with us. They say, ‘Your religion is the same as ours. Your Iman is like our Iman, so do not deny us since we have Iman too. Does it not follow that all religions are equal, since they are all forms of Iman? Let us come together. Let us have a world brotherhood of believers, since this would give us the world brotherhood that is the foundation of our humanism. Join us, therefore, have tolerance of us, and we can all be humanists together.’
It follows from this that all those misguided Muslims who sit with those of other ‘faiths’, that is other Imans, have themselves taken on the religion of humanism, which is a blatant denial of Allah’s majestic power.
The next Ayat continues (2:15):
But Allah is mocking them, and drawing them on,
as they wander blindly in their excessive insolence.
This is a dazzling revelation of the true nature of what on the face of it appears to be the triumph of the kuffar. Their material success, let us say their political success, is nothing less than the active mockery of Divine power. The blindness of their wandering is that they consider triumphant the unfolding of their policy of granting peoples the illusion of the political power of self-government, called democracy. They remove from them all access to, and government of, all wealth and commodities. They wander because they do not see where their policies are leading them. Outcome is predicated while in reality it is unpredictable. They move ‘blindly’ because they do not understand that in the words of one of their own poets, ‘Just when you think you’re getting out, you’re getting further in.’
‘Their excessive insolence’ is that they imagine that this political technique they invented only a couple of hundred years ago in a sea of blood, can now be imposed on the world, and that the whole world will accept the crime of usury which is planned in the end to give all the world’s resources to a small oligarchy which the French President has publicly admitted is no more than 300 people.
In the next Ayat we are told (2:16):
Those are the people who have sold guidance for misguidance.
Their trade has brought no profit; they are not guided.
This Ayat is of enormous importance because Allah, glory be to Him, makes a linkage which has totally eluded not only the present-day kafir power system but also those Arab nations which have joined in the financial usury system of that kafir world power system. ‘…who have sold guidance for misguidance’ indicates that they have denied Tawhid which recognises that all power comes from Allah, glory be to Him, and decided that power comes from the usurious manipulation of so-called ‘market forces’ and the accepted application of allowing all transactions to be saturated by the categorical imperative of endebtment at interest. So it is that Allah has made the indication of misguidance the reality that, ‘Their trade has brought no profit.’
Continuing our method of taking the Qur’an from the Qur’an we find (2:275-276):
Those who practise riba will not rise from the grave
except as someone driven mad by Shaytan’s touch.
That is because they say, ‘Trade is the same as riba.’
But Allah has permitted trade and He has forbidden riba.
Whoever is given a warning by his Lord and then desists,
can keep what he received in the past
and his affair is Allah’s concern.
But all who return to it will be the Companions of the Fire,
remaining in it timelessly, for ever.
Allah obliterates riba but makes sadaqa grow in value!
Allah does not love any persistently ungrateful wrongdoer.
Here Allah explains why ‘their trade has brought no profit’. It is because the foundational reality of what is today called trade is in fact motored by the active processes of riba. This therefore indicates that Allah’s message is a command to an ‘ibada that cannot be considered ‘ibada until the whole life-process, that is, the Deen, is wholly His. Surat al-Fatiha indicates three paths, the Sirat al-Mustaqim, which means the non-participation in the instruments and institutions of riba, that is banking, debt-instrument paper currency, stock exchanges, futures markets, and corporation structures, the path of those astray, that is, as we have seen, those who ‘wander blindly’, enraged by true Iman, and the misguided, that is, those whose ‘trade has brought no profit’, that in turn means, those who acquiesce in the continued participation of the usury financial system.
Allah further lays down the path to the avoidance of the practice of riba, for it is the non-practice of participating in the instruments and institutions of usury that will open the path to the Sirat al-Mustaqim. Allah the Exalted is categoric in His legal instructions to the Muminun. He declares (2:277):
Those who have iman and do right actions
and establish salat and pay zakat,
will have their reward with their Lord.
They will feel no fear and will know no sorrow.
This Ayat indicates the method by which the entire kafir world structure of false money, interest-debt, and the illegal structures of corporations and holding companies will utterly collapse and disappear from the face of the earth. Allah will imbue with power the people of Iman embarked on the following programme:
- Right actions. That means the adoption of trade practices and institutions which are in accordance with the Islamic Shari’at in its pure form as specified in great detail, utterly applicable to the modern world, in the Muwatta of Imam Malik and its expanded commentaries. The fatwas, judgments, and licensed practice by ‘ulema in the pay of national governments are by definition unacceptable, since they give judgments to underwrite the continued illicit practice of their State. For example, a ruling minister of the governing House of Dubai, on being informed by his ‘alim that the foundational financial practices of Dubai were in flagrant disobedience of Allah’s law, simply responded by shouting at the unfortunate scholar until he bowed his head, secured his income, and reversed his own position to the delight of his ruler.
What is at issue here is the beginning of Islamic re-awakening. In all of this it is clear that the Arab nations have simply abrogated the Divine contract of Islam and preferred the atheist contract of the world banking system. Allah the Exalted has stated clearly, in this Ayat, their situation (2:26):
Those who break Allah’s contract after it has been agreed,
and sever what Allah has commanded to be joined,
and cause corruption on the earth,
it is they who are the lost.
We take from this that ‘right actions’ represents a total, structured, carefully designed application, in particular and in general, of the whole Shari’at of financial and contractual obligations. This Islamic Shari’at has been reduced, not really by the kuffar but rather by these dreadful extremists who have adopted the policies and practices of atheist nihilism, terrorism and suicide-bombing, and simply placed over them the name of Islam. At their funerals they cry out ‘Allahu akbar’, a declaration which many kuffar admit to be true, but they do not call out the Shahada, which is the Sunna of burial, and the truth itself which the kuffar can never admit.
- The next injunction is to ‘establish salat’. This is a subject of central importance and has implied within it the obvious order that the establishment of salat means that every aspect of it is according to Divine and Prophetic ordinances. It follows from this that the order does not only imply that the standing and the sitting and the bowing are according to the practice of Madinah, but that the adab and the care of the mosques as well as the status, authority and rights of the Imam, are protected. When a kafir State appoints an Imam or licenses him, he is no longer an acceptable Imam. This is not a licence to fight in the streets, or indeed in the mosque. The true democracy of the Jama’at is that the Imam must be acceptable to the people. If someone is imposed on them against their wishes, they must simply ignore him and celebrate the prayer under the man they accept to step forward. The State-imposed Imam is becoming a hallmark of the true fascistic face of what today calls itself democracy. Stalin imposed Imams, so today does the ‘democracy’ of France.
It follows from this that mosque organisation too must be radically revised, entailing the abolition of mosque committees and other internal kafir structures. The governance of the mosques has always been part of the Deen. The naming by Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, of one of his Companions as Sirajuddin, occurred when he placed an oil lamp in the mosque. From then on the lighting and cleaning of the mosque have been the honoured privilege of a group of people within the Jama’at. It is most undesirable that small groups should control a mosque by virtue of their wealth or, even worse, by virtue of some imagined claim to a family ownership. It should be remembered that while it is obvious that we cannot tolerate interference by the kuffar in the affairs of the mosque, its Imams and its Khutbas, by the same token the kuffar have made their Deen to be based on a separation of religion from the State. Yet when they license Imams or order their Khutba to be read, they have joined religion and the State, but made the former submit to the latter. At that point, that mosque and that Imam are in the service of the kuffar.
- ‘…and pay zakat.’ This third injunction for the complete restoration of the Deen of Islam in our time comes with our decision to restore the fallen Pillar of the Deen, Zakat. In order for this to happen, every aspect of it must be in strict obedience to what has been laid down by Allah and His Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. Firstly, Zakat is not given. It is a taken sadaqa. This is in obedience to the order of Allah, glory be to Him, in the Qur’an, when He says, ‘Take!’ This in turn indicates the true organic nature of the Deen al-Fitra. As our great Qadi, Ibn Khaldun, has pointed out, Islam, as at its very beginning, can grow from the smallest group to the greatest empire.
The Sunna of Muslims journeying is that prior to departure one among them is appointed Amir. The establishment of Zakat has built into it a prior set of social necessities. The first is an Amir who will order the collection of the Zakat. The second is that he, and with him, if he has them, his fuqaha, appoint Zakat-collectors. The choice of Collectors has its own guidance and restrictions. One of the necessities of the Zakat is that when wealth is taken, it cannot be in paper money, since as such this is a) of no intrinsic value, and b) a mere uncollectable debt-receipt. It should be observed that the current laws of corporations and holding companies represent in themselves instruments of taxation avoidance. Personal accountability is a necessity in Islam and an abhorrence in the bankers’ system. In the following Ayats, Allah explains further (2:278-279):
You who have iman! have taqwa of Allah
and forgo any remaining riba
if you are muminun.
If you do not, know that it means war from Allah
and His Messenger.
But if you make tawba you may have your capital,
without wronging and without being wronged.
The enormous weight of these Ayats not only indicates how these matters will unfold, but it also indicates that the terrorists and those who think they are waging war by committing suicide, itself an organised defeat, are, far from breaking the kuffar, by their actions that necessary event without which the kafir system cannot continue to exist. From among the kuffar, highly sophisticated and complex political analyses have unveiled the true nature of the current democracy system. According to their most brilliant critic, Jean-Christophe Rufin in ‘La Dictature libéral’, the global capitalist system cannot continue without the equilibrium of a menacing Other, which must continue its menaces over a long period to allow this system to continue with its mythic liberality and freedom. Every terrorist act and every self-exploding suicide is the licence for the continued fascistic control of the world’s masses in the name of democracy. In these two Ayats, Allah makes it so very simple for us to understand. We have to have Taqwa. We must begin in our private and social transactions to withdraw from riba and begin to apply the just rules of trade. This is our responsibility. This is something we can achieve. Ironically, one of the defining factors of the abolition of corporation capitalism will be not the destruction of its people and its buildings, but rather the withdrawal from participation in its forbidden modalities. In my book ‘Technique of the Coup de Banque’, I told the story of an encounter between a woman gambler and the owner of the Monte Carlo Casino.
“At the end of his life Zaharoff bought the Casino of Monte Carlo and married a Bourbon princess. One evening it is reported, as he sat watching the money change hands, recalling his youth as a money-changer in Salonika, only now instead of handfuls of Drachmae millions of Francs entered his business, he was approached by an English lady who had lost heavily. ‘Help me, Sir Basil,’ she said, ‘since you own everything, you must know how to win.’ He icily replied, ‘I can only give you one piece of advice. Not how to win, but how you will certainly not lose.’ ‘Oh, do tell me,’ she asked. He shut his eyes. ‘Madam, do not play!’”
To those who continue to practise and uphold the anti-trade system of bankism, they are warned that ‘…it means war from Allah and His Messenger.’ War from Allah means that in the sealed destiny of coming events, which they, wandering in their blindness, are unable to foretell, they will be destroyed. Unforeseen future events are the arsenal of Allah’s power. ‘…and His Messenger’ indicates that those who follow and are obedient to Allah in their trade, finance, instruments (Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham) and institutions (bayt al-maal, caravanserai, imaret), ‘will have their reward with their Lord,’ meaning the Garden and the Presence of Lordship in the Next World, and that in fulfilling their obedience, ‘they will feel no fear and will know no sorrow,’ in this world, as we found in Ayat 277 above.
The second part of the Ayat is Allah’s contractual promise that the active Tawba of the Muminun will guarantee that they will not lose their capital, and that since by foregoing the capitalist system they have ceased to do wrong, they will be protected, and they will not be wronged.
These reflections have taken us from the Ayat in Ta Sin Mim where Allah designates Pharaoh as ‘one of the corrupters’, to Allah’s defining of what practice is acceptable to Him in that contract of Deen which He has determined as being inclusive of the whole financial and trade practice of the Muminun. He defines it in 2:26:
Those who break Allah’s contract after it has been agreed,
and sever what Allah has commanded to be joined,
and cause corruption on the earth,
it is they who are the lost.
And so it is that those who have broken the contract that they had already made by being Muslim find themselves in exactly the same situation as the great kafir ruler. This means that Pharaoh, the rulers of Dubai and Arabia, the new democratic Iraq, not only its leadership but its people, have set themselves against the Divine Command. That is, they have moved from the Deen of Islam into the United Millat of Kufr.
Thus the three hundred or so of the banking elite who presently rule the world are committedly in a unified programme of disobedience to Allah and His Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, alongside terrorists, the population of Dubai, the political leadership of the Western powers, and even the world’s International Aid Organisations – all these have joined hands to sustain the present disastrous condition of mankind. Military resistance is a suicidal folly, just as much as the act of the self-exploding bomber. All that is then required is for the Muminun, who with fear of Allah know they must themselves go to the Yawm al-Qiyama with an answerable Book, to start today those procedures, on the face of it actions worthy of the mockery of the pragmatic kuffar, but that series of actions will bring light into the darkness, and educate a new generation who have come into the world trailing the Fitra of their newness, so that they will live to see the restoration of Islam.
It is the Muminun holding to the Deen and taking from the original sources that are the trustworthy proofs of the Deen, who will be that noble elite that Allah in His glory has destined for every age to renew the Deen. Again and again in the past we have seen the Deen snatched from our hands by tyrants. We have seen Makkah itself, the Ka’aba itself, the Black Stone itself placed in extreme danger. We have seen the Khalifate change its name with the smashing of dynastic inheritance. We have even seen the Khalifate – not abolished, for no kafir could abolish it – cast out of its historic home in Istanbul. We have seen the Arab peoples first tolerate, then adhere to, and then exploit the false doctrines of the wahhabis. We have seen the Arabian king, placed on his throne by the kuffar, in turn confronted by the civil war of his own people because his regime in turn had even deviated from the deviators.
Now today we see the triple degradation of the Iraqi people. I do not refer to the Shi‘a entity, for they are a different affair. In the end of the day they have gained a respite from the ghastly persecution inflicted on them, but its price is a historic indication that the Shi‘a religion is already settling into the mould of the greater world system. We can understand the Shi‘a as we can understand the Kurds for having made their terrible error in judgment, once we see it in the light of their recent persecution. But to the Arab people of the cities – the former home of a great Khalifate, great fuqaha, Imams of Shari’at and Haqiqat, Imam Abu Hanifa, may Allah be pleased with him, and Imam Junayd, may Allah be pleased with him – it is urgent that they face up to the bitter facts of their treachery to Allah, to His Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to the Deen of Islam, and to their own bayat to the kafir dictator Saddam. This four-fold treachery has culminated in their fifth and ultimate betrayal, their abject and greed-inspired obedience to taking on the Millat of kufr. We may bow our heads in acceptance of their submission to the Liberal Dictatorship when we hear them rejoice in their illusion of democracy, but we fiercely reject the ultimate outrage, that they have called themselves by the name given to them by Western media and governments, the ‘Sunni Muslims’. The kuffar named it Sunni Islam in order to legitimise their passive resistance to, and ultimate elevation of, the Shi‘a and its leadership.
Allah, the Majestic, declares in Surat al-Ma’ida (5:3):
Today the kuffar have despaired of overcoming your deen.
So do not be afraid of them but be afraid of Me.
Today I have perfected your deen for you
and completed My blessing upon you
and I am pleased with Islam as a deen for you.
It is from this triumphant Ayat that we take the strength to look on the present events in Iraq, in which no party has raised the banner of Islam, so that we nevertheless are filled with the renewed hope that from this will come a turning-point for the great Muslim Nation. Allah in His Mercy has reminded us in Al-Inshirah (94:1-8):
In the name of Allah, All-Merciful, Most Merciful
Did We not expand your breast for you
and remove your load from you
which weighed down your back?
Did We not raise your renown high?
For truly with hardship comes ease;
truly with hardship comes ease.
So when you have finished, work on,
and make your Lord your goal!
