The moral collapse and the mercenary culture

Dr. Firoz Mahboob Kamal

 The infrastructure of enemy occupation                

In 2003, when the US Army took over Baghdad, hundreds of Iraqis came to the street to celebrate the American victory. Prior to that, many of the Iraqi leaders invited and co-operated with the murderous US Army. The same happened with the US’s invasion of Afghanistan and Syria. So the occupation of people’s minds took place prior to the geographical occupation. In the last 70 years, most of the Muslim countries have received independence from the direct rule of their colonial masters. But, the so-called independence doesn’t give Muslims the basic human rights to fully practice their political and ideological independence. Nor do they enjoy the religious rights to practice even the most crucial and defining Islamic obligations like sharia, hudud, shura, khilafa, trans-ethnic Muslim unity, and jihad in any of these so-called independent Muslim countries. Whereas, prior to the colonial occupation, the Muslims fully enjoyed such rights. The geographical occupation has ended but the mental occupation still continues.

The so-called independence has turned so fake that it doesn’t give the basic rights to dismantle the divisive and de-empowering walls of the Muslim World –especially in the Middle East. These divisive borders in the Muslim World were created not to serve Muslims. These are made only to keep Muslims devided, weak and to serve the imperialists’ interest. Any attempt to draw the political map on the basis of the obligatory pan-Islamic brotherhood –as was the norm in most part of Muslim history, is considered a threat to their interest and hence get reversed even by fully-fledged wars. The enemy-imposed disintegration of the Muslim World into 57 states is now labelled as an integral part of international stability and security; hence, not allowed to break these walls. This is indeed the infrastructure of long occupation.

The western imperialists fully understand that their dominance in the Muslim World can’t survive only with military victory. It needs ideological, social, cultural, and geopolitical engineering. The geographical disintegration, de-Islamisation, secularisation, cultural conversion, and delegitimization of jihad are indispensable parts of such engineering. And in its execution, the western imperialists have shown remarkable brilliance. They could take Muslims far away from Islam. So, in the First World War, the British and French imperialists could recruit more than a million Arab Muslims as mercenaries to occupy Muslim lands. The enemies’ success in ideological and cultural engineering is so huge that the Arabs celebrate the division of their land into 22 parts. And jihad –the most important ibada in Islam looks alien to them. Even jihad against the foreign occupation of Muslim land is labelled as a terrorist act. The project of de-Islamisation has been so successful that Prophet (peace be upon him)’s Islam with the core elements like sharia, hudud, shura-based rule, pan-Islamic unity doesn’t survive anywhere in the Muslim World. The profound success of enemies’ cultural engineering can be seen in clubs, pubs, casinos, brothels’ enclaves and the coastal beaches of the so-called Muslim countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Indonesia, and many others. Such practices are seldom different from those of kuffar countries. In fact, the Muslims have been ideologically and culturally moulded to live without Islam.

About 1.3 billion Indians of different religions, languages, casts, and ethnicities live in one state. But about 400 million Arab Muslims of the same language, religion, and ethnicity are forced to live inside the walls of 22 states –like the condemned detainees in prison cells. Such divisive prison cells –called states, are built to serve the exploitative interest of the imperialists, the security interest of Israel, and the survival interest of the autocratic despots. These walls are erected by the imperialists to stop the spillage of oil revenues to the neighboring poor people. The wealth is reserved only for their own exploitation. A collection of a few oilfields is given statehood. Separate flags of statehood are hoisted on oilfields like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Brunai only to feed the imperialists. The colonial kufr laws, the western evil ideologies, the corruptive politics, and the economics of multinational exploitation still maintain their unfettered occupation in these so-called independent states. But the worst irony is that Muslims celebrate such enemy occupation as liberation! The anti-Islamic secularist elites -trained and tamed in the old colonial institutions, play the servile role to sustain such occupation. In most of the Muslim countries, the civil and military enclaves of these ruling elites are indeed the ideological cum cultural islands of the western imperialists. These enclaves show little dissimilarities from the western mainlands.

As a result of such occupation, trillions of dollars of oil, gas, and other natural assets of the Muslim World are adding affluence and military strength to the imperialists to sustain the occupation. All the bombs and missiles that are dropped on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and other countries are indeed made by oil and gas money of the Muslim countries. As if, they are frying fish in the oil of the fish. It is a pity that despite trillions of dollars of unearned petrodollars, 1.5 billion Muslims continue to remain the most powerless and the most defenseless people on the earth. The brutal rulers of these client states receive the non-stop supply of bomber jets, heavy artillery, tanks, cluster bombs, chemical bombs, and missiles to subjugate their own people. While visiting Saudi Arabia, the former US President Donald Trump made a deal to sell 110 billion US dollars of weapons to enhance the kingdom’s killing power against its own people and neighbors. The USA also sold 12 billion dollars of weapons to a tiny country of Qatar with a native population of less than four hundred thousand.  

The collective failure

For the ongoing occupation of the Muslim countries, not a single person, group, generation, or tribe is to be blamed. It owes to the collective failure of the whole ummah. The rebellion against the decree of Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala and pursuance of their own opportunistic agenda indeed lie at the heart of all failures. They ignored the Islamic principle that complete submission to the Qur’anic prescription is an obligation on every Muslim and no one is exempted from that. Awfully, most of the Muslims pay little heed to such Qur’anic command. Islam is no more practiced in the way as was practiced in the early days of Islam. When the Muslim countries remain occupied by the colonialists for about two hundred years, most of the Muslims showed total inaction or abstention. A very few took part in obligatory jihad against the occupying kuffar. Their action thus stands exactly opposite to that of the early Muslims. When the first Islamic state was attacked by the Arab, Persian, or Roman kuffar, the Muslim participation in jihad was more than 90 cent percent. Only the sick, the blind, and the lame stayed behind. In the war against the invading Roman Army in Tabuk, only three Muslims didn’t take part. In response, they faced a social boycott.

Iman of a believer never stays hidden. It is visibly expressed through participation in war in the way of Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala. The physical, financial, and intellectual engagement in jihad against the enemies of Islam indeed works as the most reliable marker of iman. Even a hypocrite can dress like a Muslim. He can join five times a day in religious rituals and can also spend money on charities. But, he doesn’t possess the moral strength or appetite to join a war against Islam’s enemies. The enemies of Islam now appear everywhere; almost all of the Muslim countries stand under one or other forms of occupation. These forces of falsehood have dismantled sharia, hudud, shura, Muslim unity, Islamic education, and other basics of Islam all over the Muslim World. But, where is jihad against these warring forces of falsehood? Instead, they accept them as the leader and celebrate their rule. Whereas, because of jihad, a few thousand people of Medina could raise the most powerful Islamic state in history. They could defeat two contemporary World Powers like the Roman and the Persian Empires. Within a very short period of time, they emerged as the most powerful state on the earth. They could release millions of people from centuries-old falsehood, slavery and tyranny. Because of an Islamic state, the Muslims could also practice the full Islam with its sharia, hudud, shura, khelafa, and trans-ethnic Muslim brotherhood without an iota of comprise on the core agenda. This is why they got labelled as the best people on the earth of all ages.

The betrayal and the deviation

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is recognized as the best prophet and the best man in the whole span of human history. Such credit doesn’t owe solely to his role as the great preacher of Islam. Rather, it is due to his model and decisive role as a political leader who could successfully defeat the forces of evil and raise an Islamic civilizational state which could become the most powerful World Power in the contemporary world. He worked as the head of the Islamic state for ten years and left an invaluable legacy vis-a-vis running a state.  If he had limited his works only to teaching, preaching, and doing rituals, the Muslims had to live under the kuffar occupation –as is the case with the Palestinian, Kashmiri, and Uighur Muslims today. Then, raising as a dominant civilization force would have remained only as a dream.

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) turned politics into a life-long ibada –called jihad to eradicate the forces of evils and implement the truth and justice. The obligatory prayers are the obligation unto Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala. But the life-long political war to Islamise states and societies is an obligation to fulfil His agenda for mankind. The deeds like donating money, building a house, giving education, and curing illness are good works. But the greatest service to mankind is to establish a safe and welfare state free from falsehood, oppression, and injustices. For lecturing on morality and preaching good words, one doesn’t need to be a saint. Anyone can do that. But the real merit lies in the practice. Good words do not bring any benefit if they fail to get implemented.  Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) not only preached morality, humanity, equality, and people’s rights, but he could also fully implement that. That makes him distinctly different from others. He is indeed unique in the whole history of mankind. So he emerges as the greatest man in the whole history of mankind. Politics of eradicating the evils and enjoying justice is his greatest legacy. But Muslims are now known for their dismal betrayal against such prophetic legacy.      

The enemies of Islam are not afraid of Muslims’ huge number. Nor are they worried about millions of mosques and the increasing number of attendants. They are only worried about the Prophet (peace be upon)’s political legacy that can quickly turn Muslims into a powerful revolutionary force. The enemies are deadly against such Islam of the Prophet (peace be upon him). They have given it a new name called political Islam. How ridiculous that these enemies even claim that such political Islam has no place in Prophet’s Islam. What a shameful deviation! The ruling despots of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, and many other countries are at the forefront against the Prophet (peace be upon)’s political legacy. In fact, their Islam has no similarity with Prophet (peace be upon)’s Islam. In Prophet’s Islam, there is no place for autocrats and monachism. Therefore, the rulers like Abu Bakar (RA), Omar (RA), Osman (RA), and Ali (RA) didn’t need to be a son of a king. These enemies of Islam hide the historical fact that Prophet (peace be upon him) ruled as the head of the state for ten years. It is a huge disgrace for the whole Muslim ummah that the seat which has the honor to have the Prophet (peace be upon him) seated on it has been usurped by autocratic tyrants. They were not elected by the people but selected by the colonial occupiers. As per their master’s wish, they drive the Ummah each day only to a new low.

The moral collapse

In comparison to the achievement of the early Muslims, the failure of today’s 1.5 billion Muslims is very awful and humiliating. They could raise large armies and could also build a huge number of shops, roads, schools, universities, and industries. But, they could add moral value to the people. They can’t even think of any Islamic state in any part of the world, let alone establishing it. They have made history only in inaction, submission, and surrender to enemies. Millions of them have even taken the path of collaboration and coalition with the invading enemies only to appease their greed. The moral depletion of today’s Muslims has been so profound that it has caused serious moral inability to hate, condemn or protest against the most brutal enemy aggression in any part of the Muslim world. This is why the largest anti-war demonstration against the USA invasion in Iraq in 2003 didn’t take place in any of the big Muslim capital cities like Jakarta, Islamabad Cairo, Dhaka, or Ankara rather in London, Paris, or Rome. The moral failure of the Muslim thus gets displayed worldwide.

The symptoms of the collective failure of Muslims are huge. These are expressed robustly through moral, cultural, spiritual, educational, ideological, and political failures. Of the ten top most corrupt countries of the world, most are Muslim countries. Similarly, the most brutal autocrats who deny basic human rights to their own people also happen to be Muslim. These despots are so cruel and genocidal that they roll tanks and heavy artillery on the streets to kill unarmed protestors –as seen in recent years in Cairo, Islamabad, Dhaka, and Damascus. The government of Syria dropped chemical bombs, barrel bombs, and cluster bombs on the civilians to kill or evict them from their homes. When the people of Gaza got the shower of Israeli bombs, the Egyptian government didn’t bother to open the border to receive even the wounded children and women. When the traumatized Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar tried to take shelter in neighboring Bangladesh, initially their boats were not allowed to get nearer to the shore. They were forced to sail for far distant Malaysia, Thailand, or Indonesia. Later on, the Bangladesh government was obliged to give them access to avoid global condemnation.

The enemy crimes and the complicity of the cowards

Cowardice causes incurable moral incompetence to be a true Muslim. To be a Muslim, it needs minimum courage for telling the truth and to stand against crimes and injustices. Nor does it help qualify for enjoying basic human rights. Such rights have never been a gift, rather earned by bloody combat against the oppressive tyrants. It is a tragedy that a long period of imprisonment by the enemy occupiers could deconstruct souls, beliefs, behavior, and culture of the occupied Muslims. It has proved highly catastrophic during the long slavery under the European colonial tyrants. It has worked as a strong dehumanizing factor to culminate cowardice among the Muslims. If a lion is kept in captivity for decades, it detests coming out of the cage even if the door is left open. Because of long colonial taming, Muslims could be easy prey in the hands of the home-grown autocrats. Therefore, the criminal rulers are not the only party to commit crimes in the Muslim World, the complicity of the cowardly people who accept such native or foreign killers as the ruler and work as their obedient servants also bear the blame. Such submission to the criminal despots brings disgrace, failure, and punishment both here and in the hereafter. Indeed, such submission to the criminal despots is incompatible with true submission to Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala. This is why fighting against kuffar occupation is regarded as the highest ibada (jihad) in Islam. Those who are killed in the encounter enter paradise without any trial.  

The tyrants always make it impossible to follow the Qur’anic roadmap. It is indeed the greatest crime of the tyrants. Because they prescribe their own roadmap to be pursued by the subjects. This is why autocracy and Islam are incompatible. Hence, standing against tyrant rulers is not a political agenda, it is a prophetic job. To add more importance to that, Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him), Prophet Musa (peace be upon him), and many prophets were commanded by Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala to stand face to face against the tyrants like Nimrod and Pharaoh. Such a prophetic legacy stands as the most distinguished model of protest in all ages against evil rulers. For freeing people from submission to the evil rulers, jihad becomes the highest form of ibadah. It is a Qur’anic obligation. To disseminate such a message, Allah Sub’hana Ta’ala commands His great Prophet (peace be upon him) to announce the following Qur’anic advice to the people in public: “O prophet! Say (to the people): I advise you only on one thing, rise up for Allah (against the criminals who oppose Islam) in two (if possible) or singly (on your own).” -(Surah Saba, verse 46). So the Muslims are not given an option to wait for a big leader, a big party, or Imam Mehdi to start the assigned jihad against the agents of falsehood.

The common kuffar agenda

Falsehood and its awful calamities never die. Instead, it keeps on challenging the Divine Truth all the time and in all places. In all ages, it gets new preachers, new leaders, and new armies. Hence, the enmity to Islam that could attain the cataclysmic hype at the time of Nimrod, Pharaoh, and Abu Jahl still survives under the US-led imperialists. Corrupting the Qur’anic ideology of Islam -as well as the physical, ideological, and cultural occupation of the Muslim ummah, receive the highest priority in enemies’ politics, economics, and warfare. For carrying out such an anti-Islamic agenda, they have recruited a huge number of fake ulama, fraudulent Muslim intellectuals, and mercenary soldiers from the Muslim lands. They consider the rise of Islam as a great threat to western civilization. In his meeting on July 6, 2017, with the Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, the former USA President Donald Trump very candidly expressed such fear. To encounter the Islamic challenge, he sought very earnestly Russian collaboration. Such a request for Russian help exposes his deep fear that the USA alone can’t win its war against Islam. Such Islamophobia dominates not only in the psyche of President Donald Trump, the leaders of the EU, Russia, India, China, and other non-Muslim countries are no exception. These kuffar countries have a lot of differences on a lot of issues; but while they deal with Islam and the Muslims, show their full consensus. Because of such consensus, these imperialist countries could easily give the full legality to the illegal creation of Israel on an entirely occupied Muslim land of Palestine. They also show a similar consensus on the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Now, they show the full consensus too in condemning any resistance against such illegal occupation as terrorism. Because of the same anti-Islamic venom, fighting against the US-led occupying force in a Muslim land gets condemned as terrorism.

Each of the imperialist countries has its old anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic war in its own domain. Such wars take these countries naturally and understandably to the anti-Muslim camp. The USA is heavily entangled in its never-ending imperialistic war against the Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, and many African countries. The US Army has killed more than a million people in those countries and turned hundreds of cities and villages into rubles. Thus the USA has already raised a huge flame of hatred in the Muslim souls; every day they are adding more fuel to the flame by killing more people. Russia has a similar genocidal war in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Syria. In 1999, the Russian Army flattened the whole city of Grozny –the capital of Chechnya and killed thousands of Muslims there. The Russian warplanes also flattened the historic Syrian city of Aleppo and many others in Syria too. India’s war in Kashmir and China’s war in Xinjiang are no less genocidal either. More than a hundred thousand Muslims have already been killed in Kashmir. The Indian Army’s killing mission still continues with more lethal weapons. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel definitely added more strategic killing skills and added more sophisticated weapons to the Indian Army. Anyone who stands against such killing of Muslims is labelled as a terrorist. But those who occupy foreign countries, flatten cities and kill millions ironically claim to be the torchbearer of democratic values. Like many western leaders, President Donald Trump used to claim that the USA is at war to defend democratic values! Nornedra Modi of India claims the same.

Therefore the question arises if the USA wars of occupation, genocide, and destruction are applauded as the defense of democratic values then what else is barbarity? On such a perverted conceptual premise, evicting people from homes, total destruction of cities, and bombing people to death is declared as a victory. Therefore, almost total destruction of Aleppo, Ramadi, Fallujah, Tikrit, Kobani, Raqqa, and Mosul is celebrated as a great victory both by the occupying power and their cronies in the Muslim land. The occupied Muslim lands have indeed proven to be the fertile breeding ground for such servile cronies. The physical, intellectual and political occupation has proven to be so morally toxic that the Muslims of the occupied land even join the kuffar enemies to celebrate their victories –as seen in Jerusalem and Damascus in 1917, Dhaka in 1971, in Kabul in 2001, and in Baghdad in 2003. And now, they celebrate the occupation of their countries’ native tyrants.

The test and the failure

Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala has a strategy. From the very beginning of human civilization, the world has been ideologically, politically, and culturally bi-polar. One pole is for Divine Truth, morality, good deeds, and justice. This is the pole of Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala. The other pole is for falsehood, immorality, crimes, and injustice. In this pole, all the deviations and perversions in the name of religions, ideologies, traditions, and cultures are lumped together. Shaitan is allowed to play a leading role here; he invites people to the pole of falsehood, crimes, and immorality. There is no third or neutral pole. Even today, the world stays highly polarised. Such a state of bipolarity tests people’s ability to select the right one.  

Everyone has been given the free choice to side with any one of the two poles. The needed fitness for a place in paradise is tested here in this world. It is indeed the most crucial and decisive test in life. But it is not a difficult test. Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’a has created humans as His best creation and everyone is instilled with adequate intelligence to pass the past. Humans could land on the moon with that imbued intelligence. People fail the test only because of the wrong focus and inattention. For passing the test, it needs to be correctly polarised with the right faith and ideology. In the past, even a huge number of illiterate people could amply pass it. Moreover, thousands of prophets and many Divine books are sent to help people pass the test. Whoever fails the test indeed betrays all invaluable Divine endowments. For such a betrayal, one has to pay a heavy price. Thus, he or she qualifies for the hellfire.

Most of the people will burn in the hellfire not for killing, stealing or raping someone, but for failing this simple test of common sense. It never needs any college or university education to pass it. The wrong and the right, the truth and the falsehood, the morality and immorality are not difficult to differentiate. As the mid-day sun, these are distinctly visible. Fourteen hundred years ago even the illiterate men or women of Arabia could rightly identify the truth from the falsehood; hence could be rightly polarised. And they could readily pass the test.

Shaitan has his strategy and a huge army to take people to his pole. It is a pity that Shaitan could get immense success to polarise people to his side even in Muslim countries. Thus Shaitan has exposed the ideological as well as the moral collapse of the Muslims. They have awfully failed to stand around Allah Sub’hana Ta’ala’s pole. Even religious scholars, university professors, imams, intellectuals, and political leaders have failed to be rightly polarised to the right pole. This is why very few of them are found in the camp of Islam. As a result, Prophet (peace be upon him)’s Islam with the Islamic state, sharia, hudud, rule of shura, jihad, and Muslim unity is non-existent in the Muslim World. It indeed owes to the individual as well as the institutional failure of the Muslims. The educational, political, cultural, and religious institutions have badly failed to generate the necessary insight among Muslims to pass the test. All other failures of the Muslim ummah are indeed the outcome of this fundamental failure. 24.07.2021