“This is the reality of UAE, a regime that clothes its betrayal in silk, gold and a veneer of righteous piety. Like the hypocrites of Madinah, its officials speak the language of Islam while harbouring contempt for its message and its people. Just as Allah forbade the believers from worshipping in Masjid al-Dirar, a masjid built to divide and deceive, what excuse remains for any conscious Muslim to admire, endorse, or remain silent about this regime?” The Devil’s Deception: Dubai
In the ninth year after the hijra, a group of men from among the munafiqun, the hypocrites, of Madinah built a mosque on the edge of Quba. Ibn Ishaq records their case for it, and it was a reasonable one on the surface: they had built it, they said, for those living closer to it who had an ailment, the one in need, and the rainy and cold night.
They asked the Prophet ﷺ to pray in it, and so to give it his sanction. He was leaving for Tabuk, and told them he would attend to it on his return.
Before he did so, Allah responded to their invitation.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱتَّخَذُوا۟ مَسْجِدًۭا ضِرَارًۭا وَكُفْرًۭا وَتَفْرِيقًۭا بَيْنَ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَإِرْصَادًۭا لِّمَنْ حَارَبَ ٱللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُۥ مِن قَبْلُ ۚ وَلَيَحْلِفُنَّ إِنْ أَرَدْنَآ إِلَّا ٱلْحُسْنَىٰ ۖ وَٱللَّهُ يَشْهَدُ إِنَّهُمْ لَكَـٰذِبُونَ
And those who took a mosque for harm, for disbelief, for division among the believers, and as an outpost for whoever had warred against Allah and His Messenger before. They will surely swear: we intended nothing but good. And Allah bears witness that they are liars. (9:107)
The passage sits within the long sequence on the hypocrites. The building was raised by enemies of Islam who cloaked themselves in outward professions of belief. They were internal traitors, working to undermine the Muslims from within: men who prayed, were counted among the community, who came to the Prophet ﷺ asking for his blessing on their work.
Allah described their scheme with four characteristics:
Dirar: harm
The harm was institutional. A second mosque beside Quba drew worshippers from the first, weakened it, and set up a rival centre answerable to different men. Nothing about it looked illegitimate on the surface. It faced the same qibla. It had a congregation, and a case for existing. What it did was compete with the thing it imitated in an attempt to sow discord, harm the community and dilute and deform the message.
This is the function the Emirates has built at scale, in their ongoing campaign to deform and secularise Islam, a form of re-engineered Islam that keeps the population subdued, the kings in power, and the resources largely under the control of the disbelievers. Fatwa councils, forums for peace in Muslim societies, ministries of tolerance, endowed chairs, prizes, international conferences: an entire structure of Islamic authority built to serve their re-engineering purpose. The damage is done to Muslims, by men who claim to be Muslims, through institutions Muslims are invited to use in good conscience.
We intended nothing but good. Empty words that the Qu’ran threw back at them.
Kufr: the entrenchment of disbelief
The mosque at Quba was raised to give disbelief a base of operations inside the Muslim community, wearing the architecture of the deen of Islam.
What issues from the Emirati apparatus is a re-engineered Islam: Unquestioning obedience to the ruler, originally installed by the British, is true Islam; holding him to account is disorder. Anyone who speaks out against the wrongs of the regime and asks for justice is a Khariji and an ikhwani. Anyone who disputes their authority is a deviant, to be censured at best and eliminated at worst. Abdullah bin Bayyah, who chairs its fatwa council, has ruled that the full normalisation process with the occupation falls within the prerogatives of the ruler, and soldiers of the occupation army now holiday there openly.
Ritual is preserved in full. Prayers, melodious recitation and long nights of tarawih. What is removed is every obligation that would bring a Muslim into conflict with power.
The Emirates is yet another regime that has turned the quietist fiqh of surrender, fiqh al-istislam, into an export industry: quietism packaged as moderate, mainstream Islam and shipped to Muslim minorities in the West with the prestige of a wealthy Muslim state behind it.
Downstream it no longer needs scholars. A layer of online dawah personalities carries the same content in the register of the platform: that politics distracts from the work of the self, that concern for the ummah is the first step towards extremism, and even the simple act of boycotting is mocked.
Alongside it runs something cruder, in which Islam becomes a route to personal enrichment with the Emirates as the proof: halal wealth, halal branding, the property portfolio, the residency, the deen as an optimisation project for the individual and nothing beyond him. A secularised religion with the vocabulary retained. Every capitalist dream wrapped in a thawb, with a ya’ni thrown in to make it really authentic. The Dawah Bros turned into the Dirham Bros.
The other half is not promotion but attack. The Abu Dhabi Secrets leak showed the Geneva firm Alp Services paid more than 5.7 million euros through an Emirati-linked entity to identify and discredit Muslim individuals and organisations across at least eighteen European countries: a ruling on which Muslims are permitted and which are marked, issued from Abu Dhabi and enforced by European police. Quietism is promoted, while those who call for accountability are pursued all over the world.
Tafriq: division among the believers
The Emirates backed the 2013 counter-coup in Egypt, the destruction of an elected government and the killings that consolidated it. It has armed factions in Libya against other Muslims. In Yemen it has cultivated separatist forces within the coalition it joined. In Sudan it is the principal backer of the Rapid Support Forces.
In every theatre, Emirati money and weapons arrive on the side that will exclude any scent of independent Islamic political expression from the outcome. The division is not a by-product of some strategic policy, rather it is the policy itself. Just like its former colonial masters, it tries to exert influence through divide and rule.
Irsad: an outpost for the enemy
Irsad is not a general word for an outpost. It comes from rasada, to watch, to lie in wait; a marsad is a watching-post. Abu Amir al-Rahib had standing in Yathrib before the hijra, left for Byzantium to fetch foreign power against Madinah, and instructed his men to build him a station he could observe from when he returned. The fourth charge is, in the most literal sense available, a charge of surveillance.
The Emirates normalised with the Zionist entity in 2020 and has deepened the relationship through the destruction of Gaza. It has also made itself the region’s watching-post, using Israeli instruments. The Pegasus Project found roughly ten thousand numbers selected for targeting by the Emirates through the Israeli firm NSO Group, among them Ahmed Mansoor, imprisoned in isolation since 2017, and Alaa al-Siddiq, who died in exile in London; the New York Times reported Emirati attempts on the phones of the Emir of Qatar and the Lebanese prime minister.
Every transfer of that spyware required an export licence from the Israeli Defence Ministry, and when Amnesty International petitioned to have NSO’s revoked, the ministry declined. Each sale was approved by the government that licensed it.
The violence is contracted out on the same principle. Abraham Golan, who ran the private security firm Spear Operations Group, has acknowledged running a programme of targeted assassinations in Yemen sanctioned by the Emirates within the Saudi-led coalition.
In August 2026, ITV News reported that the same man, paid by the Emirates, ran a covert surveillance operation in London in December 2016 against Anas Altikriti, a British citizen and chief executive of the Cordoba Foundation, and that his associate asked what would happen to Altikriti and drew a finger across his throat. ITV stated that the evidence does not establish an order to kill from the Emirati government. The surveillance file, holding his home, his office and his likely approach routes, is established.
Abu Amir fetched from Byzantium.
The Emirates hired a Hungarian-Israeli contractor and a former American operator, and pointed them at a Muslim in a London suburb.
The prohibition from Allah
لَا تَقُمْ فِيهِ أَبَدًۭا ۚ لَّمَسْجِدٌ أُسِّسَ عَلَى ٱلتَّقْوَىٰ مِنْ أَوَّلِ يَوْمٍ أَحَقُّ أَن تَقُومَ فِيهِ ۚ فِيهِ رِجَالٌۭ يُحِبُّونَ أَن يَتَطَهَّرُوا۟ ۚ وَٱللَّهُ يُحِبُّ ٱلْمُطَّهِّرِينَ
Do not stand in it, ever. A mosque founded upon taqwa from the first day is worthier that you stand in it. Within it are men who love to purify themselves, and Allah loves those who purify themselves. (9:108)
Ibn Ishaq records that the hypocrites had installed as their imam a young man who had memorised the Quran and knew nothing of what the mosque was for. There was a genuine Muslim leading a prayer inside it. The ruling did not turn on that – it turned on what the building had been founded for.
Malik ibn al-Dukhshum and Ma’n ibn Adi were sent ahead from Dhu Awan, an hour short of Madinah, to burn and demolish the hypocrites mosque. The Prophet ﷺ entered the city after it was gone.
The UAE and other Gulf states were never founded on taqwa either: the Emirates are just a collection of manufactured entities of British colonialism in the Gulf, which now serves as an outpost to divide, monitor and oppress Muslims in the region and beyond
The Emirates has built, a structure of Islamic authority where scholars are convened and Muslims are invited to gather in good conscience. Its demonstrated functions are the hollowing out of the ummah’s own institutions, a religion emptied of obligation, division among the believers in every conflict it touches, and a watching-post for those who war against them. It swears, continuously and expensively, that it intended nothing but good, just as their intellectual predecessors among the hypocrites claimed.
ٱتَّخَذُوٓا۟ أَيْمَـٰنَهُمْ جُنَّةًۭ فَصَدُّوا۟ عَن سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّهُمْ سَآءَ مَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ
They have taken their oaths as a shield, and turned others from the way of Allah. Evil indeed is what they do. (al-Munafiqun 63:2)
Legitimacy is the one commodity the UAE cannot manufacture for itself. It has to be supplied: by scholars who accept its platforms, by institutions that take its money, by brothers who encourage hijra there, by audiences who repeat its vocabulary and admire its towers, by families who holiday there casually and so on. We boycott Starbucks while leaving in place those with much greater culpability.
None of this is unique to Abu Dhabi. The Emirates is simply the least subtle version of it, with an almost cartoonish villian in MBZ,and a social media operation so clumsy one wonders which sycophant signed off on it, which is why it serves so well as the illustration. Riyadh runs the same operation through Madkhalism, a quietism founded on the identical principle that obedience to the ruler is the whole of politics and that those who question him are deviants the Prophet ﷺ warned of. This is a state that sent a team to its consulate in Istanbul in 2018 to assassinate in the most vile way Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who had written critically of it, as well the regimd as being known for the jailing of several of its scholars for the mildest of criticisms.
Cairo, Amman, Doha: each builds its own version, ultimately serving to protect their seats and the interests of their international patrons.
The instruction that was given at Quba is analogous. Do not ever pray in it; in fact, destroy it, eliminate the hypocrisy and treachery it was built for. The instruction to the believers concerns what a Muslim lends his presence, his name and his credibility to. What does this say about anyone who still defends, supports, or even remains silent about the Emirates and their ilk, the modern day masjid al-dirar?