by Abu Dharr (Opinion, Crescent International Vol. 45, No. 11, Rabi' al-Thani, 1438)
The clannish rulers of Arabia have abandoned the values of Islam and reverted back to the days of Jahiliyah before Islam. Instead of being slaves of Allah, they are slaves of the Shaytan.
Before Islam, Arabians were nomads roaming the barren deserts with no civilizational character except for their language. Their primitive social condition was akin to the law of the jungle: the strongest tribe exploited the weakest. In this social environment the weakest humans were exploited as slaves and concubines. Possession of turf depended on who had the most “attack power.” The tribal shaykh reigned supreme. His word was the law and it was final. The tribal setup of the Arabian Peninsula then is the tribal setup today as well.
Then came Islam. It was a paradigm shift and brought a sea change in the lives of those impoverished souls. Islam anchored morality into a society that was void of it. The Prophet’s (pbuh) farewell address made it clear that no entity may dispossess another. Violent death became taboo. People now, because of Islam, were equal in the public square and in the court of law. Islam buried Arabian jahiliyah during the years of our dear Prophet (pbuh).
Some of the highlighted features of the Prophet’s (pbuh) farewell address include:
• Complete equality: no Arabian is superior to a non-Arabian, and no non-Arabian is superior to an Arabian; no white person is superior to a black and no black person is superior to a white. The criterion of high quality and favorable position in society is a person’s taqwa (his/her functional awareness of Allah’s power presence).
• Committed Muslims are brothers of each other: none may divest the other against his will.
• People’s lives, family honor, and livelihood are to be inviolate.
• Freedom of conviction and belief are guaranteed for all: there can be no compulsion in matters of din.
• Islam has its own independent social and ideological character: neither materialistic nor phantasmal.
This new and moving reality explains, to some degree, why Islam spread to the four corners of the earth within a span of one century and why non-Muslims were impressed and, therefore, willingly became Muslims.
Alas, this civilizational thrust was stifled by a mental retreat into ignorance. Ijtihad was no longer a feature of Islamic society. In the pre-secular domain of the Muslims prior to World War I, the last line of defense of an Islamic realm was the Ottoman military, which itself became the victim of an all-consuming ignorance. The Ottomans could no longer match the industrial strides made by their enemies who used the opportunity to create a “modern” Islamic civilization in which the Muslims would continue to be subjected to ignorance, only this time by proxy “Islamic” regimes. When Islamic civilization and the Arabic language were divorced from each other every Muslim lost his status in the world of refinement and excellence.
Not absent from this internal unraveling of Islamic sovereignty was the vicious enemy on the outside. The external antagonists took note of that Islamic historical transformation from jahiliyah to Islam, so they plotted a sophisticated scheme of convincing the Arabians that Islam is inferior. Chieftains and tribal chiefs are better than khalifahs and imams. Kings and presidents are modern; khalifahs and imams are outdated. Thus the post-colonial Arabian regimes came into existence as tenants of the neocolonial world order.
And now, without our high Islamic standards, the Arabian polity has recaptured its ancient persona: tribes and entities that raid and kill each other. Instead of having camels they now have F-15s, instead of having horses they have F-16s, and instead of having mules they have tanks and armored combat vehicles. The human beings on camelback then and the human beings in the cockpit now are carbon copies of each other: jahili material, inside and out. Arabian tribal hatred in ancient times is Arabian government hatred in current times. Every official entity hates every other official entity (look wherever you want: from the Arabian Peninsula shaykhs to the kings on their thrones and presidents in their palaces); they all are at each other’s throats. People within these colonial created tribal-states are slaughtered at the whim of the ruler — a very exact caption of the law of the jungle. In these societies in real life and in real time the rulers are the supreme beings!
Taking a look at this pathetic state of affairs it does not take an Ibn Khaldun to figure out that the Qur’an, the Sunnah, qiyas, and ijtihad are all absent from such failing societies.
The crony kings and petty presidents have their religious employees who are willing to issue any fatwa on demand. If the high-and-mighty president or king wants to reach peace with the Zionist colonists they turn to their salaried ‘ulama and motion them to “Islamically” justify a peace treaty with Zionist killers and imperialist annihilators.
The deep-rooted jahiliyah could not live side-by-side with an Islam of morality, equality, and civility. It burst out in the form of the battles of al-Jamal, Siffin, and Karbala’, not to mention the massacre in Madinah when hundreds of Muslimahs were defiled and thousands of committed Muslims were killed in a jahili orgy that continued for several long and bloody days. The Ka‘bah was also assaulted.
Dare we say that following this internal Islamic turmoil, the Persians, upon becoming Muslims, reinvigorated the rational component of Islam, raised the civilizational bar, broke new scientific ground, and became Arabic speakers and thinkers; some of them even mastered the Arabic language on par with the Arabian laureates themselves. Was it not the Amazighis of northern Africa who crossed with their Islam the Mediterranean Sea and went into the dark corners of Europe, only to be branded “barbarians” (Berbers) by the Europeans? Is it far-fetched to equate Ka‘b al-Ahbar of our first Islamic century with Lawrence of Arabia of our last Islamic century?
The Arabian ruling classes of today are the political offspring of tribalists and nationalists who stabbed the Ottoman rulers in the back during World War I, trusting in the British masters who used Arabian nomads for their nefarious schemes and are still using Arabian nomads for their villainous strategies.
In the last century these Arabian chieftains were used by the British to fight against their Muslim Turkish brothers; today they are being prepared by the same British devils to fight against their Muslim Persian brothers. These primitive Arabian desert dwellers in highrises don’t know (and never knew) what it means to be independent. They have no self-governing state in the full sense of the word; they only have tent-states with pieces of cloth they call flags. They have perfected their plots against each other. They finesse instability, and they spend their God-given wealth on every conceivable vice: from military functions to erectile dysfunctions.
They are so beholden to their Zionist and imperialist masters that they cannot think for themselves. They are now insinuating that Islamic Iran is their number-one enemy and Zionist Israel is their number-one friend. What are we to say about Arabian officials who gave Saddam Hussein all he needed to defeat Islamic Iran? Then, when he could not defeat it, these same Arabians said that he was the number-one enemy of the Zionists! And then, on all days of the year, they executed him on ‘Id al-Adha. Then they tried to convince their people that Bashar al-Asad is a dictator who has to go either peacefully or by waging war. Then in the sacred name of Islam and the secular name of democracy, Syria was, by and large, reduced to a rubble state. Its population virtually dislocated inside and outside of Syria.
These Arabians have not had enough: they go to Yemen and try to pulverize an impoverished country! In Egypt democracy was overturned by a dictatorship. In Libya, the Arabian petro-media hyped up the canard that Muammar Qaddafi is a dictator — a foolish and buffoonish dictator. Then came the convenient fatwas authorizing the pursuit of Qaddafi to his death. And so he was killed. The result is a failed state, not to experience the slightest degree of stability any time soon.
This is what happened to Arabians who replaced the Islam of Muhammad (pbuh) with the Islam of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. The neo-Arabian jahiliyah puts the ancient jahiliyah to shame,
Do they seek the rule of jahiliyah? And who could be more suitable for governance than Allah [His authority] for people of cognitive certainty? (5:50).
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