Sharing is caring!

“Gaza’s dead children are kept in ice cream freezers: UN warns half a million are now homeless, medical supplies are running out and morgues are overflowing”.

Sound familiar? This is the headline from a British tabloid paper, but not in 2023. This headline is from 2014.

As Muslims – we have to ask ourselves – how is it that these massacres, and atrocities, keep repeating? And not just in Palestine – we have had Bosnia, Kashmir, Sabra and Shatila, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, the Uyghurs in China, and on and on and on.

Every Muslim with a spark of Iman in their hearts knows what is happening in Gaza right now. Every Muslim with a spark of Iman in their hearts wishes for the liberation of Palestine, and the liberation of Masjid al-Aqsa and those around it.

And though out of concern we throw ourselves fully into activities we believe will help, these are normally partial solutions that cannot and will not resolve the situation. Unfortunately, there is a widespread abandonment of what is required, whether due to ignorance, low aspirations, or simply cowardice.

Give charity, raise awareness, and account your local politicians – these are all actions that must be done at this time to help alleviate the immediate crisis in any way. But they are not nearly enough – and doing them at the expense of looking at the bigger picture is an abandonment of our obligations

Give charity? – What use is charity against US missiles, tanks and occupation soldiers? It’s dealing with the outcomes of any violence, by giving support to the victims and alleviating their immediate issues (if the Charity was actually able to reach them, which it currently can’t due to the siege on Gaza), and is noble in and of itself. It however doesn’t deal with the problem causing the violence (the occupation of Palestine by a settler colony manufactured by the British).

Raise awareness to the World of the atrocities committed? – The World can see the atrocities, they are all over media, whether mainstream, alternative or social media. Other previous atrocities such as the atrocities committed in Lebanon or Bosnia were covered by the media at their time. And yet after a month nothing has come of such awareness – other than further realisation that the West will protect what it perceives to be its interest at any cost, and that the so-called “international community” is nothing more than a vehicle for Great power interests. None of this is new – from Rwanda to Srebrenica to Iraq the impotence of the international community has a long and well-documented history showing its failure.

Appealing to the Western politicians? – To what end exactly? For an immediate ceasefire? For a humanitarian pause? For a 2-state solution? The naivete of asking those who represent states who established, supported and have a strategic interest in maintaining their “European outpost” in the Middle East to resolve our issues is another indication of our helplessness and low aspirations.

When any ceasefire comes, and we pray for it to come as soon as possible to help alleviate the oppression of our brothers and sisters – it will be to save the Zionist forces from the swamp they find themselves facing in their ground invasion of Gaza, and not due to the sudden humanity of the Western political leaders. And the cycle will then repeat as we have borne witness to.

The solution will never be in the hands of the disbelievers, in their governments, or in their institutions, and anyone who believes so is blind to the reality on the ground, blind to what history has shown us, and either ignorant or weak of what their Iman and their Deen tells them. We must do what we can to alleviate issues in the immediate timeframe, and the goodwill of the Muslim ummah is clear for us all to see, but we need to question what else we can do.

Until we Muslims liberate ourselves from these ideas alien to Islam and our concept of Muslim unity, rejecting nationalism in its entirety and the political manifestation of nationalism that is the nation state, and replace it with solely Islam and its political manifestation that is the Caliphate, we will continue to see the occupation of Muslim lands, the oppression of Muslims across the World whether in Palestine, India, China or elsewhere.

Allah tells us in the Quran –

وإن استنصروكم في الدين فعليكم النصر إلا على قوم بينكم وبينهم ميثاق والله بما تعملون بصير

“And if they seek help of you for the religion, then you must help, except against a people between yourselves and whom is a treaty. And Allah is Seeing of what you do.”

We have all seen the videos coming from Gaza – several of our brother and sisters asking – where are the Arabs? where are the Muslims? where is the world?

Islamically – the solution is to liberate the land through Jihad. It is not permitted to leave Muslims to be imprisoned, to be tortured and to be slaughtered by their enemies.

While the land remains occupied, the obligation to liberate it falls upon every Muslim until the obligation has been fulfilled.

While our brothers and sisters in Gaza call for our help – it is an obligation upon us to help them as much as possible.

And yet not a single soldier from the more than 4 million soldiers who are part of Muslim armies around the world has moved.

Egypt – has not moved their army, has not cut their diplomatic ties with the Zionist government (which are not permitted in the first place), has not even opened the Rafah crossing properly for aid to support those harmed in these atrocities. They continue their years long collaboration with the occupying forces against the Muslims of Palestine by enforcing the siege on Gaza from the Sinai.

Turkiye – apart from some cheap slogans read out at government demonstrations, the same as above.

Jordan – condemning the atrocities from one side of their mouth, while allowing the delivery of US military equipment through their borders.

This is the hypocrisy of the Muslim governments, repeated across whichever one you wish to consider. The events in Gaza have yet again exposed these governments as hypocrites, unable or unwilling to represent the Muslim masses they dictate over, traitors to Allah, His Messenger and the Ummah of Muhammad, peace be upon him.

If the Muslim governments are not moving – then the Muslims have to exert the utmost pressure upon them to move, from descending to the streets demanding their mobilisation, to general strikes, to any other civil and political actions from the masses and people of influence such as media personalities, Imams and others.

And it is here we have let down our brothers and sisters. Give charity, raise awareness, and account your local politicians – these are all actions that must be done at this time to help alleviate the immediate crisis in any way. But they are not nearly enough – and doing them at the expense of looking at the bigger picture is an abandonment of our obligations. Its seems more straightforward and direct for us to give charity, to engage in debates highlighting the hypocrisy of the West, and exposing the atrocities committed. It’s past time for us to move beyond this, recognising they are insufficient to break out of the cycle of oppression and destruction we are witness to.

I wrote the below in similar circumstance in 2014 –

“This public accounting of Muslim governments should take a number of forms, and can include protests, petitions, social media activism adopting the following –

1. Calling upon those governments with diplomatic relationships with Israel to cut all ties immediately
2. Demanding Muslim governments end all economic ties with Israel, boycotting all Israeli businesses and products
3. Ending all cultural and tourism exchanges”

These are all important. But the top priority, the main action that every Muslim should be asking, wherever they are – is for the Muslim armies in the surrounding countries to immediately move to liberate our brothers and sisters in Palestine and the liberate al-Aqsa and to remove the settler colony from its roots. (Alhamdullilah – the IUMS issued a fatwa after 4 weeks of this slaughter making this point).

Anyone who stops short of this call, who neglects it, whether dismissing it or feeling hopeless regarding it, has neglected their duty to support their brothers and sisters with everything they are able. Those who should know better- the scholars, imams, thinkers, and callers to Islam bear a greater responsibility in this respect, and their neglect is therefore a greater and more weighty abandonment on their necks.

We know that it is unlikely, if not impossible, for these armies to move while they remain under the current rulers and systems. We know this as the reality is that it is nation states, an artefact of kufr left behind by the disbelieving colonialists, that are the political entities governing the Muslim lands and maintaining control of the armies. And any nation-state seeks to protect and promote its own interests, or the interests of the colonial power behind it. This is why for example Egypt refuses to take any refugees from Gaza – as the government sees them as a threat to their internal security, and an additional burden on their state. Likewise Turkiye talks a good game, but sees economic and political advantage in allying with the West and the Zionist entity.

Couple this with the issue of Palestine being turned from an Islamic issue, into a Palestinian issue. People talk about the establishment of a Palestinian state, rather than the liberation of Islamic land from an oppressive authority. What national interest is there for any other nation state to involve themselves militarily in the situation? And to work against a regional nuclear power, backed by a World superpower and by the West as a whole?

Consequently, the Islamic solution is unlikely, or even impossible, to be achieved via the current polities and status quo. It is also why the current leaders of the nation-states in the Muslim lands are all to a greater or lesser extent, traitors to the Islamic cause of liberating Palestine.

While the West created the settler colony of Zionists to physically occupy us and act as an outpost for the West among the Middle East, they also left behind another even more insidious colonial kufr legacy after destroying the Ottoman Sultanate – that of the nation state and the kufr ideology of nationalism. Until we Muslims liberate ourselves from these ideas alien to Islam and our concept of Muslim unity, rejecting nationalism in its entirety and the political manifestation of nationalism that is the nation state, and replace it with solely Islam and its political manifestation that is the Caliphate, we will continue to see the occupation of Muslim lands, the oppression of Muslims across the World whether in Palestine, India, China or elsewhere. We will continue to spin from one crisis to the next, unable to resolve them while providing at best partial solutions that alleviate and extend rather than remove the suffering.

It is therefore imperative for every Muslim who cares deeply about their ummah, about their oppressed brothers and sisters wherever they may be, to recognise that Allah prescribed Jihad to liberate us, and that Jihad cannot and will not be led by nation states but requires us to unite under a singular polity implementing Islam and representing Muslim.

Anyone who stops short of this call, who neglects it, whether dismissing it or feeling hopeless regarding it, has neglected their duty to support their brothers and sisters with everything they are able. Those who should know better- the scholars, imams, thinkers, and callers to Islam bear a greater responsibility in this respect, and their neglect is therefore a greater and more weighty abandonment on their necks.

And so save your tears for our brothers and sisters who have been killed in Gaza – they are martyrs with Allah, they are better off than you and I and will bear witness as to whom they left behind and what they did.

Cry over us who are left behind – we who have so far proven to have an inability, an unwillingness, to make the necessary sacrifices to change our circumstance so that we can carry out what Allah has ordained and ordered us with. There is no need for this shortcoming – we are more than capable of responding to this call, and to effecting that change within our countries by the will of Allah. May these events act as a shock to bring us back to life.

Dr. Reza Pankhurst is the author of The Inevitable Caliphate (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Untold History of the Liberation Party (C Hurst & Co, 2016)