'Letter to an Arab Muslim', by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

First edition: Madinah Press 2002 All rights reserved Madinah Press is an imprint of Madinah Media ISBN: XXX XXX XXX Printed by Formeset Printers, Cape Town, South Africa www.madinahmedia.com [email protected] Madinah Media is part of the Murabitun World Movement www.murabitun.org

LETTER TO AN ARAB MUSLIM

SHAYKH DR. ‘ABDALQADIR AS-SUFI

with a Postscript by RA’IS ‘UMAR IBRAHIM VADILLO

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Oh Arab people! The Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and may his name be honoured and may love of him be preserved among the muminun, said that people would love the Arabs by love of him and people would hate the Arabs by hatred of him. It is because of our intense and constant love of him that I am moved to send this message to you, however painful it may be for you to receive. He also said, Allah bless him and grant him peace, that the Deen was nothing but good counsel and it is in obedience to this reminder that this message is sent to you. It is well known in medicine that in great sickness the patient may reject the medicine because of the bitterness of its taste. This is the station of the child. The station of the man is that he takes the bitter medicine because he knows that the pain and the damage of the illness would be greater. So it is that I trust that what is said here will be taken by the Arab men and women who must surely know how extreme and almost terminal their sickness is.

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What is the sickness? This is the question of the intelligent patient who wants to know, because part of recovery is to understand the sickness in order to be able to dominate it. Well, it started as an inner sickness until it spread to the outer limbs. At this advanced stage of the illness, for a complete cure it is too late to treat the inward and treatment of the outward would be most difficult because of the spread of the disease. However, with the light of reason applied to the condition of the outward and by an inward desire for health, that is by a complete and integral treatment of the total condition and the diseased environment of the patient, health can be recovered, insha’Allah. The sickness itself is kufr. It began as inward kufr and it edged slowly throughout the whole body politic of the disastrously fragmented Arab community until it spread in all the parts. A cure of the parts would be useless. Cure the hand? The foot is diseased. Cure the skin? The organs are diseased. There is no cure for Egypt. There is no cure for Arabia. There is no cure for Syria. The doctor says to the patient — when did this malaise begin? What are the symptoms? Can we observe the development of the disease? To cure alcoholism it is not enough to remove the toxicity in the body, but also the metabolistic craving. Rehabilitation would also demand that you no longer sit among the other alcoholics or frequent the bars to join in the conviviality of the addicts. Know, oh Arab people, that Islam was sent down by Allah subhanahu wa t’ala on the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, giving us the exalted Qur’an, his blessed Sunna, and the triumphant social model of Madinah.

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“We have only sent you as a mercy to all the worlds.” (Al-Anbiya’ 106)

After the Khulafa Rashidun and the great Fitna the Muslims continued united and in expansion. Under the Abbasid Khalifate a great, extensive and triumphant civilisation was founded in the east. Balkh, Samarkand and Bokhara became centres of tremendous learning and halal trade. When the Muslims there turned in on themselves to use their wealth they became weak and decadent and so Allah sent the irresistible force of Genghis Khan and the great Hordes. At that time Ibn Taymiyya, himself a Qadiri Sufi who gave primacy to the Ahl-alMadinah as the Umm-al-Madhahib, warned that the internal survival of the Muslim polity demanded an unrelenting, strict and comprehensive adherence to the imposition of the Shari‘at concerning the Dhimmis. On the west the Islamic presence established itself across North Africa into the Maghrib. From there the Andalusian triumph of the Murabitun secured an ongoing Islamic presence inside Europe giving to the world great scholars and philosophers like Al-Qurtubi and Ibn Rushd Al-Jidd and his renowned grandson. The Andalusian, European Muslim community survived just as long as there was strong adherence to the school of Madinah and this included the implacable obedience to Allah’s commands, and the Messenger’s, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to both protect and dominate the Dhimmis. Ironically the jews and christians were able to flourish only because they paid the tax and were kept in check and in 7

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humility by this strict application of a law which guaranteed the power, majesty and generosity of the Islamic way. When Genghis Khan mounted the mimbar and made his famous declaration, ‘I am the scourge of Allah!’ it must be understood that he did not say that he was a scourge against Allah. In the depths of his being this extraordinary man somehow knew that he was cleansing and purifying the ruins of the great and betrayed Deen of Islam. Our beloved Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, has said that the child is the hidden secret of the father. So it was that one by one the sons of the great Khan in their turn became Muslim leaders. To their west the Turkic tribes had already taken on Islam, at first under the authority of the Seljuk armies. In his early days, further to the west, the followers of Osman Ghazi expanded their territory and their influence while naming the Seljuk ruler in the Friday Khutba. The Osmanli rule began on the day that Osman Ghazi ordered his name to be said throughout the land in the Khutba. When the great Wali’ullah Yavuz Selim Khan took his armies south through Damascus until he reached Baghdad, the Khilafa of the Abbasids was secured and the great Ummah of Islam was unified. On the periphery lay the Sultanates of the Malay, the realms of Mughal India, and the western kingdom of the Maghrib. All of these maintained the deepest spiritual and intellectual relations with the Sultan and his authority as Khalif. These were ties that did not waver through all the upheavals of history. The civic intercourse of ‘ulama, architects and scholars between the Osmanli and the Mughals could not have been more profound, deeply affecting both the great Osmanli language and the Punjabi and Urdu of the Subcontinent. Right up until the time of Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan, may Allah be pleased with this 8

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great Khalif, battleships were sent to the Indonesian archipelago to escort the hajjis safely through pirate waters. During all this time, Islam was a triumphant, expanding and successful domain and the centre of its governance was Istanbul as before that it had been Baghdad and before that Madinah. The Islamic world of the Malay peoples, the Islamic world of the Mughal Subcontinent, and Anatolia, the central power base of Osmanli governance, manned by Turks, Albanians, Arabs, Kurds — all these were centres of tremendous wealth and all these lands were obsessively desired by the kafir hordes of Europe. One thing alone held back the astonishing greed of the European kuffar, and that was the majestic power and effectiveness of the Islamic armies of Jihad which were the terror of the earth. The Osmanli army was never defeated in any major confrontation during all its history, although in its final stages it received serious peripheral defeats in Russia and the Balkans. The Osmanli world Islamic community was not defeated militarily, it was defeated by the subversive influence of the kuffar in persuading them that the means to technical modernity was dependent on a financial procedure which in itself had nothing to do with technology but appeared to be the magical process which, if indulged in, led to the appearance of the technological event. All the inroads into the Osmanli power base consisted of the friendly persuasion of the kafir society calling on the abandonment of the Islamic Deen piece by piece. It is not an accident that the day of the disbanding of the Yeniceri, which had been the multi-national war-sustaining force of Jihad throughout the centuries, was to find its anniversary celebrated across Turkey annually by a rash of 9

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advertisements in Turkish magazines declaring that this event led to the presence of kafir banking inside Turkey. It could be said that at the point of history which saw the presence of the great spiritual and political genius of Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan, the first forces of treachery and betrayal by Muslims began to appear. Those forces which eventually triumphed based their success on the abolition of Khalifate, the denial of Madhhabs, and as we shall see, an active war of hatred against the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and restore him to the highest place which he claimed as being the first of the sons of Adam, Allah bless him. I am not going to go into the arrogant and superficial claims made by these self-styled modernists. All the claims they make on the fiqh reveal themselves to be nothing more than slanders on the great Muslims of the past. Their resentment at love of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is something that merits only the deepest contempt. The next most shocking element of all has been the astonishingly anti-intellectual attack on the Sufis and the teaching of Tasawwuf. What we must look at is the end result of their disastrous and appalling and savage attack on the Muslim peoples. It must be understood that they did not attack the kafirun, they attacked the Muslims. They did not attack the kafir leaders, they courted them, sought their approval and accepted their rewards. They openly and shamelessly entered masonic lodges. They counted as friends the English and French governors of the Middle-East. The most loathsome and scandalous of them were on a barge in the Nile in the company of the great kafir Winston Churchill, at a dinner in which he exclaimed, ‘Your religion forbids pork and wine, my religion permits it, so I will have my pork and wine, and you can go without, bon appetit!’ Having humiliated them 10

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he spread the map onto the table, stained with his slopping brandy, and said, ‘You will be the king of Iraq, he will be the king of Jordan and you will be the king of Arabia,’ to which the newly kafir-anointed king declared, ‘Saudi Arabia!’ What Islamic fiqh can come from such a meeting? Under his sons an absolute financial and technological kafir presence was established in the land of Arabia. From the first day, Ibn Taymiyya, master of their Madhhab, was raised to the highest shelf of honour, but safely out of reach. The law of the Dhimmis was abolished. Under their disastrous control the whole realm of Palestine, itself previously a waqf declared by Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan, caved in before the jewish invasion, and their only response was to ignore their military obligation by transforming Al-Aqsa into a sacred shrine of Islam and thus a spiritual matter. How easy to ignore Ibn Taymiyya’s insistence on the Hadith of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, which had declared that no mosque was over any other mosque except the Haramayn. Since the rebel Sauds could not acknowledge the legality of the Islamic Osmanli polity, they were unable to refute the absurdity of the jewish claim to Jerusalem which had no foundation in anything understood as international law. One of the conglomerates involved in the oil extraction and expropriation, ARAMCO, issued a glamorous brochure to explain Islam to its clients (jewish bankers and christian traders?) with the requisite and expected colour photos of Islamic artefacts. There were maps and outlines of history. In this document it claimed that Islam had been an Arab phenomenon and that there had never been either an Osmanli or a Mughal governance. What was being designed was an Islam that was the private property of the Najdi tribe to the exclusion of the great 11

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world community of Muslims who had sustained its presence and triumph over centuries. All this had been wiped out. The map did not show Turkey, nor the Subcontinent, nor indeed the Maghrib. The heart of the doctrine was an overt Arabism which denied the hundreds of millions of Turkic Muslims, Indian Muslims, Malay Muslims and Berber Muslims. The truth of the matter is that the new revised religion they have created and persist in calling Islam was and remains something utterly unacceptable to the great mass of the world’s Muslims and their ‘ulama. We will later look at these truncated, twisted and perverted doctrines which they have set up in the name of Islam, a religion which finds itself utterly content with kafir military dominance, kafir political practice, kafir financial systems, and kafir foundational usage of usury, something which is endemic to all the banking system including ‘Islamic banking’. Claiming they wish the Islamic Shari’ah, they have, as we have noted, abolished the law of the Dhimmis. They have abolished the Islamic household permitting four legal wives, in open denial of the Book of Allah. They have abolished Awqaf, the welfare system of Islam. They are harsh with the Muslims and gentle with the kafirun, exactly the opposite of what Divine Guidance has ordained. Returning to our metaphor of the sick man and his doctor, perhaps the sick man will recall one of the first episodes which manifested the terrible disease. Muhammad Abduh had been raised to high office by Lord Cromer, governor of Egypt and scion of the Baring bankers’ family which traced itself back through christian conversions to the ghettos of Lithuania. Already rejected by the greatest ‘alim of the time, Shaykh ‘Illiysh, who had struck his head and drawn blood because of 12

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his insults to the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace — thus rejected by the greatest faqih of Islamic Shari‘at he found acceptance in the masonic lodges of Cairo and in the company of the cynical deceiver, the Iranian Shi’a adventurer Jamaluddin Al-Afghani. Raised by his kafir boss to the Muftiat, he declared permissible the practice of the Post Office in the role of banking. Here was the first symptom. The rash spread. Soon afterwards the Rothschilds were to establish their zionist base in Palestine in the office of a bank. Oh Arabs! Look closely at the historical reality if you want to see the acting-out of a false ‘aqida. Who was the enemy of the Khalif of all the Muslims? It was the kuffar. Who raised their hands against Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan? The Young Turks, spawned in the secular clubs and masonic lodges of Salonika, among them Mustafa Kemal, of dubious parentage, almost certainly a Dönme, the heretical jewish cult dedicated to the overthrow of the Khalifate. The kafir bankers. The kafir politicians. The sons of Saud. Saud had been led captive to Istanbul and charged with treason against Sultan Mahmud II. The Muslim army led by the Egyptians in 1813 had defeated the wild, primitive horde of wahhabites who had desecrated Makkah and Madinah. On the orders of the Sultan he was not to be tried for treason, but to be tried by the ‘ulama to test his Islam. He was declared an extreme zindiq and so ordered to be executed without the right of two rakats before death which would be the due of a simple traitor. Thus Saud’s head was placed on the walls of Istanbul. If this was the unanimous view of all the Hanafi ‘ulama, accepted by the legal Khalif of all the Muslims, either the universal judgment was true or everybody was kafir except the bedouin ruler! Here was the view of history that was to be adopted by a regime which was to end up 13

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in a global act of destroying Islam in the name of this new Khawarij heresy. It is no longer possible for this new ‘aqida which represents the antithesis of Islam to continue its intimidation of us. The constant attacks on Tasawwuf and on the Sufis are clearly a deception when it can be seen that over the last century the socalled purifiers of the religion have utterly placed their wealth and their energies in the hands of the kuffar and become their servile followers. What we can now see of their true nature has been revealed to all the Muslims directly by the power of Allah. By that I mean that the unfolding of the destined events in the history of the last hundred years has shown the true nature of the wahhabite ‘purifiers’ and what they intended for the Muslim masses. Up until now they have accused the Sufis of bid’a, and this word bid’a has been an instrument of attack against not only the devout lovers of Allah and his Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, but against the Awliya of Allah, may Allah be pleased with all of them. The destruction of the zawiyyas and tekkes of the Sufis was the shared programme of the evil and destructive kafir dictator of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, and the hypocritical betrayer of his Khalif and the usurper of his power, the loathsome and shameful Abdalaziz Ibn Saud. There is no need for a defence of Tasawwuf, and the accusation that the strong Muslims who follow their Shaykhs in the great universal brotherhoods of the mighty Naqshbandi and Qadiri paths are in bid’a is beneath contempt. Before the closing of the zawiyyas by the wahhabite anti-Islamic forces, and Mustafa Kemal’s secular forces, which at least openly declared themselves kafir, the Muslims were strong and their great Middle Kingdom was dynamic, expanding and triumphant. When the anti-Islamic forces were finished their 14

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satanic work, the Muslims were broken into pathetic mini-states ruled by dictators, some servile, some psychotic. All the wealth and resources of the Muslim lands which once were distributed to its people through the Islamic Awqaf system were simply channelled out to the kafir lands, assuring their absolute hegemony over the lands of Islam. Once a messenger came to ‘Umar Ibn Al-Khattab with news of a Muslim victory and ‘Umar asked him, ‘At what time did you engage the enemy?’ He replied, ‘In the early morning.’ Then he was asked, ‘At what time were they defeated?’ He replied, ‘Shortly after noon.’ ‘Umar exclaimed, ‘We belong to Allah and to him we shall return! Did kufr stand up to Iman from early morning until midday? You have made a bid’a behind my back!’ This is their great bid’a and they dare not call it a bid’a hassana. This is their shame. For half a century they have let the Palestinians fight under the secular slogans of ‘just rights’ and ‘self-determination’. With their millions they backed the disgraceful kafir Arafat who, when he was not attending jewish funerals or the christian mass, was to be found turning the guns on his own followers. Never once was the Banner of Islam raised high, the necessary condition of true Jihad. The Rasul, blessings and peace be upon him, had declared the land of Hebron a waqf in the ownership of an Arab family still alive to this day. Such an order by the last of the Prophets abrogates any biblical claim the jewish tribes have to the area. But the anti‘ulama of the wahhabites had abolished abrogation on the instruction of their kafir rulers. If they had abolished it in the Qur’an how could the Sunna survive? And why have they abolished it? It is time to face up to these matters. Why has the 15

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teaching of the Nasikh-wal-Mansukh been removed by these people? Because the new religion they are founding, I refer to the collaborative activity of the Arab heads of state and regimes, is based on the claim that the jews, christians and Muslims are ‘people of the Book’, that all the religions derive from Ibrahim — in other words superiority devolves from the jews — and that there is ‘no compulsion in the Deen’. In the Ahkam of Qadi Abu Bakr ibn ‘Arabi, the judgment is decisive: ‘ “La ikraha fi’d-Deen” is abrogated by the ayat of fighting. This is the position of Ibn Zayd. The second position is that it is particular to the People of the Book who are excepted when they pay Jizya. According to this it applies to every category from whom Jizya is accepted.’ In the wahhabite programme of the kuffar the destined end of Islam is as follows: a personalised religion, a pseudo-Islam with a pseudo-Tasawwuf offering not M‘arifat-ullah but tranquillised niceness, a triadic relationship with an equally reformed judaism, ironically stripped of its land claims and inwardlooking, only concerned with the building of the Temple of Jerusalem and the world distribution of kosher meat from its sanctuary, and a bankrupted papal christianity given to harmless mass rallies in football stadiums. In order to prevent the rise and restoration of true Islam a radical, fundamentalist movement, itself completely orchestrated from Madinah University, is already up and working, siphoning off the young Muslim repelled by everything he sees in the Arab lands, monitoring him in acts of terrorism and the killing of innocents which can only shock and repel the discontented masses who might otherwise turn to Islam as a means of rescue. 16

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Are you aware of what has been done with the Qur’an itself? Do you realise that never once has the wahhabite regime produced one edition of the Qur’an printed and bound to a high standard for mass usage? While the kafir jews and christians honour their altered, fragmented and invented texts in series after series of excellent editions, not once has the Khalifrejecting house of Saud seen fit to honour the Qur’an, even in the one version whose recital they are prepared to permit. The Seven Recitations have been banned and only one recitation tolerated. At different times the wahhabite regime of Arabia has confiscated whole shiploads of the Warsh Qur’an. A shipload of Warsh Qur’ans, the personal gift of King Hassan II of Morocco, was unceremoniously dumped into the Red Sea and never reached its destination at the Haramayn. The impeccable Warsh edition produced by the Algerian state in an unexpected moment of nobility was forbidden distribution in Makkah and Madinah. The universally accepted Shattibiyya which delineates the Seven Recitations had been rejected by the anti-‘ulama from the dark palace corridors of Riyadh, and the wholesale confiscation of the Readings used by Tunisia, Morocco and so on continued. Finally, under pressure from King Hassan of Morocco and some influential Indian ‘ulama, a typically hypocritical compromise was found: they would insist on the uniform Hafs edition of the Qur’an throughout Arabia but would institute a ‘Royal’ Qur’an recitation competition where the Seven Recitations could be employed, a kind of Qur’anic Olympics. Another Arab ruler ordered the omission of the Divine Command ‘Qul’ from Qur’anic recitation, a final modernist attempt to remove the presence of the Messenger, may Allah 17

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bless him and grant him peace, throughout the whole Qur’an. This was not successful because the people still had the resonance of a great Sufic tradition and knew that such an act was abhorrent. We have spoken already of the importance of the Nasikh-wal-Mansukh. From various quarters, in harmony with the directives of world organisations like Unesco, the socalled inter-faith dialogue movements are spreading and more deeply affecting the diseased Arab polity. You cannot underestimate the implications of the deliberate attempts to dismantle that intellectual defence system which the great Muslim ‘ulama through the centuries have perfected in accordance with Allah’s own naming of the Qur’an as a Protected Book. Look carefully at what I am about to tell you. This is more serious and more tragic than any cataclysmic event caused by the hand of man in this dark age. After completing the Visit in Madinah I fulfilled my intention to visit a most distinguished Mauritanian ‘alim who at that time, as far as I knew, was a professor at the University of Madinah. It should be noted that Madinah University is not inside Madinah but is outside its precincts, for the Rasul has declared, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that Shaytan cannot enter the city of Madinah. Rather it is built in a valley overlooking the Jabal-al-Jinn where the Churchillappointed king of Arabia appropriately has built his palace. I arrived at the ‘alim’s house only to be told by a servant that he was not receiving anybody. I insisted I had come a long way on an important matter. The message came back that he was in a distressed state and asked to be excused. I insisted that the matter was of great importance and if at all possible I begged him to see me. The servant showed me into his library, four walls floor to ceiling, lined with books. Tea was served. After a 18

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time the ‘alim came in and was clearly in a troubled state. I tried to bring the matter to the subject that concerned me but he could no longer contain his anguish. At last he blurted out his shocking story. He had been brought from the deserts of Mauritania where he taught in a humble madrasa to students who came from far and near because of his high learning. The wahhabite agent who turned up in his madrasa informed him that he was required to serve Islam by coming to Madinah to teach in that prestigious University. He insisted that he had absolutely no academic qualifications that would be acceptable in a university while he was completely versed in the fiqh by his own traditional madrasa training. He was told that that was why he was needed. In order to make Muslims with doctorates in Islamic Studies it was necessary that their papers were studied and accredited by a qualified expert. They would appoint him a Doctor of Law in order to permit him to activate production, as it were, in their factory of ‘ulama. Already unsure of this transaction, and not fully grasping its implication at that time, he set out for Madinah where he was ensconced in his pleasant villa. After a time, which had been spent sitting with his students instructing them and correcting them, he was visited by officials of the University. They explained the nature of the PhD system, that is the secular rationalist methodology by which the kafir intellectual leadership is formed. They explained — the student would take up a thesis, quoting prior experts in the field, following their concepts and in some cases making critical analysis of their conclusions, submitting the subject of their studies to their own opinion and critical analysis to arrive at a new and modern 19

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viewpoint of the object under examination. The ‘alim could no longer hide from the terrible implications of the trap into which he had been led. He looked across the room at me, his face a mask of rage, with tears in his eyes. ‘Do you realise what they were asking me to do? They were asking me to licence students as Islamic teachers, on the basis of their approaching the Qur’an as an object which could be analysed, dissected, confirmed and rejected in its details. In the process they would be giving equal weight to the view of classical Muslim scholars as well as the jewish, the christian and the orientalist writers. They were asking me to participate in the process of making ‘Dhalikal-Kitab’ into just another of those man-made books.’ He realised immediately that there was no personal dimension to his teaching that could get round or subvert the methodology and system of critical deconstruction which was the foundation of kafir belief. He realised he had walked into the valley of the jackals. Do you know that there is now a faculty called Advanced Islamic Studies? Now what do you think that might be? Would Sayyidina ‘Umar Ibn Al-Khattab think it meant a body of men setting out on Jihad fisabilillah? For what could be Advanced Islamic Studies to the Sahaba if it was not fearlessly advancing on the enemy to witness the Angelic support from the Unseen and strive fearlessly to achieve the maqam of Shahid? The wahhabite anti-‘ulama, in the first heady days of their massive financial and technological collaboration with the kafir forces of the oil Titans, began a programme of mosque-building across the world. They launched a propaganda project called the Mosque Message. It was openly clear that Islam was to be reduced to a puritanical piety of scrupulous prayer and fasting practice, but it was in no way, in absolutely no way to impinge 20

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on the social nexus through the trying business of having to fulfil the Sunna and the ‘Amal of the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the Ahl-al-Madinah. Once they had removed the practice of Islamic ‘ulama in their respectful approach to Qur’an, even the mosque itself posed no threat. The Nasikh-wal-Mansukh gone! The distinction between the Muttashabihat and the Muhakamat ayats also gone. Then the Shahadatayn itself was shattered. Once the Madhhabs had been abolished, the fiqh was abolished. What need for distinguishing the Muhakamat ayats when there was no Islamic Hukm? Do you not see what they were doing? Now you cannot fail to see. Abolish the Madhhabs. Thus, abolish the fiqh. Thus, destroy Sunna, wa’l ‘Amal wa’l ‘Ijma. The Divine Hukm set alongside the metaphoric ayats. What did it add up to? The end of Islam, the establishment of kafir rule. And what did all that add up to? The assurance to the kafir world system that there would never again be an Islamic Khilafa with ‘Amr ordering the Hukm to be applied to the legal case, to be judged by the Qadis, and to be executed by the Amir’s forces. And all this in a land which had categorically denied the existence of the practice of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, in collecting the Jizya and in thus guaranteeing the safety and submission of the Dhimmis. In Arabia today the taxed and submitted people are the Muslims, and the American occupying forces are above the so-called law of the land and may not be brought to trial before a judge in the country for any crime. In short, once our foot was on their necks, and now their foot is on our necks. In Muslim lands vast amounts of money have been spent covering up the utterly shameful record of the treacherous Saud 21

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family and its servile collaboration with the European and American kafir rulers. From its sordid beginnings in the modern age with Abdalaziz ibn Saud the historical record of their perfidy is available to those who take the trouble to research it, yet it is hidden behind a veil of cheap propaganda, in particular exalting the myth of King Faisal as an Islamic hero, a hero who could not enter the Haram of the Ka’aba until a brigade of armed guards had preceded him. I recall standing at the Bab Ar-Rahman and watching men with automatic weapons stream over the Haram. Recalling the Divine Ayats forbidding weaponry during the sacred months I asked what their purpose was. I was informed that it was to guard King Faisal. ‘Against the Muslims?’ I enquired, adding, ‘You will see, one day he will be killed, but not by the Muslim people. He will be killed by one of his own family, standing right next to him!’ A few years later I was to see that spiritual insight confirmed. Muslims are not enemies to each other, but the kuffar and the munafiqun are enemies to themselves. The devious and hypocritical character of Ibn Saud was not only due to the low and dismal character genetically encoded in their destiny, but also to the powerful motive of greed which bubbled up in them with the same intensity as the black gold gushed out of the desert sands. Documentation shows that Ibn Saud was simultaneously sending dutiful and loyal messages to the Khalif in Istanbul — to whom he had made an oath of allegiance, let it not be forgotten — while at the same time following the dictates and counsel of high-ranking British agents and spies like Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell. When the British offered to prop him up as Khalif he cynically said to Sir Percy Cox, ‘No-one cares in the least who calls himself Khalif.’ He insisted that the wahhabites did not recognise any 22

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Khalif after the first four. This means that the wahhabites consider the Muslims without legitimate rulership and without Islam for over a thousand years. What this indicates is the rejection of historic Islam, the Muslim Ummah, the content of the Qur’an and the great body of Hadith which encodes the Sunna of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. Since he could even have been Khalif under British tutelage it showed that he was already ideologically committed to the disappearance of Islam as a world religion. All matters concerning correct ‘aqida revolve around and return to the confirmation of effective and governing ‘Amr. ‘Amr authorises the collection of Zakat, and to permit this the minting of the Islamic Dinar and Dirham with its weights assured by the ruler. Al-Qurtubi in his monumental Tafsir defines this as one of the essential obligations of the Khalif. Just as the rebel Saud family betrayed their Khalif, so too over the last century they can be seen to involve themselves more and more with all those forces working for a revision of Islam into a new anti-Islam which would prove totally acceptable to the kafir system. In the second half of the last century it always seemed strange to me that the so-called conservative Islamic monarchy should finance and support Maududi’s pseudo-reformism in India as well as the Ikhwan in Egypt. Later the puzzle became greater as they brought the false sufi kafir Titus Burckhardt and the other European Guénonians who followed their masonic leader Frithjof Schuon into significant academic recognition in collaboration with anti-Islamic UNESCO. The extremities met, and the kafirisation of Islam was reaching its final formulation. Once you have removed Tasawwuf which is Ihsan, and once you have removed love and recognition of the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, then you have shattered 23

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Tawhid, which is Iman, and once you have negated the Madhhabs and thus rejected the total Islamic procedure of legal practice then, the ‘Amr abolished, the whole body politic of Islam becomes medically dead. There is nothing left. Oh Arabs! I cannot but believe that you experience, looking at these matters, the shock of recognition. This is the beginning of your cure. Perhaps the most offensive element of this must now be confronted. I refer to the wahhabite hatred of — Allah forgive me for having to write these words, and you for having to read them — and denigration of, our most beloved master and guide, Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. With the victory of wahhabism this rage of hatred cooled into solid stone which became the foundations of the modernist anti-Islam, so that you can trace a line from the ferocious passions of the wahhabite tribes to the insidious and trivial re-assessments of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, like that of the Nasserite modernist, Muhammad Heykal, who saw in the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, only the prototype of a modern statesman. Rumi explains the nature of the kufr of Abu Lahab as follows: when the Sahaba looked on him they saw the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, but when Abu Lahab looked he saw only the son of Ibn Abd al-Mu’ttalib. A resident of Madinah told me that his father was witness to an incident so appalling that it had haunted him for the rest of his life. In their old mud palace Abdalaziz Ibn Saud was impatiently and uncomfortably trying to bring to an end the visit of a delegation of ‘ulama from the Subcontinent of India. Before he could bring the meeting to an end one of the ‘ulama confronted Saud and asked openly, ‘I still do not understand. 24

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What is the cause of your hatred of the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace?’ Fixing his gimlet eyes on the ‘alim he replied, ‘He started it!’ Stunned, the ‘ulama took their leave. He was of course referring to the renowned Hadith which recent Arabian editions have removed from the Sahih. The Hadith recounts that during a visit in the Year of the Delegations the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, made du’as on the different lands whose representatives were present. ‘And Najd!’ said the visitor from Najd. May Allah bless him and grant him peace remained silent. He repeated his statement, which was again greeted with silence. The third time the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, declared that from there would come Shaytan! As the ‘ulama returned to their residence the almost unthinkable truth dawned upon them. The primitive tribes of Najd saw themselves locked in an ancient tribal rejection which set them forever against the Quraish. Here in fact lies the root of the implacable enmity to the Hijazi families which resulted in the mass slaughter of the ‘Utayba after the uprising that tried to seize the Haram of Makkah, the ‘Utayba being the purest of the Quraishi Arabs. In every aspect of the record of this dreadful family their primary passionate evils can be seen planing out into a rigid and total post-Islamic set of doctrines in the service of the kafir system and authoring a terrorism to ensure the marginalisation and rejection of resistance by young intellectual Muslims. The event of the uprising against the house of Saud in Makkah revealed every aspect of the perfidious nature of their rule. When warned of the possibility of an uprising in public majlis, the kafir-appointed king swept the matter away cynically, saying, ‘What will they fight us with — their siwaks?’ When the uprising 25

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did in fact take place the abject cowardice of the Saud military quickly became apparent. In a panic of hysteria the now terrified monarch called in the French elite commando unit to the immense delight and amusement of the kafir President of France. Swiftly and efficiently they carried out the necessary slaughter with their expected tactical brilliance and unbridled use of automatic firepower. Not content with the depths to which he had sunk, the wahhabite ruler then declared himself the Guardian of the Haramayn. This, at the very point when he had so disastrously failed to be just that. More significantly, that had been a Khalifal title, so he thus formally declared the abolition of Islam in his kafir-protected Kingdom by separating the religion from the state. As often happens in history an apparent defeat is in fact a turning point in the fortunes of the victor, since this brought out into the open what had long been the kafir-dictated doctrine of the wahhabite sect. It was because they had apparently got away with both the desecration of the House of Allah and its Haram that they were to find the confidence to plunge their regime into a greater disaster. In neighbouring Iraq another form of the kafir virus had been festering and spreading from its brutal leadership throughout the whole people. Two dangerous symptoms of kufr, as they became more marked, presaged a crisis to the illness. On the one hand the Baath Socialist Party which united the military elite had grown arrogant and ambitious for more wealth, that is more oil, and more territory. With the stupidity that is a characteristic of thuggishness they indulged in an orgy of purchasing an arsenal of military technology. They were the most honoured guests at the arms fairs of Britain and America. When later arms inspectors from the U.N.O. opened up the 26

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suspected sites which held weapons of mass destruction they were shocked to find that the weapons were there, but that they bore U.S. markings. Allied to the belligerence of this kafir dictatorship was the inevitable corruption and degradation of the civic population, who from the day that this regime had taken over from the miserable puppet monarchy appointed by the British had lived in a world where Islamic courtesy and adab slowly and inexorably disappeared. The mass of the people became grossly materialistic, vulgar and amoral. It must be understood that all this was only possible because the ethos of Islamic teaching lay in the hands of those same reformers, the so-called modernists who were the bonded allies of wahhabism. Here was a historic demonstration of the intimacy and even identity between the modernist post-Abduh and Ikhwan religion, and that of the anti-Islamic and anti-Khalifal, because anti-Rasul, doctrines of the wahhabite sect. While we from the outside all reacted in a normal Islamic manner feeling outraged at ‘Muslims attacking Muslims’, the reality was that two rebel Khawarij peoples had turned on each other in a battle over material wealth. The stupid brutality of the cunning dictator met in headlong conflict with the decadent and cowardly puppet of the oil Titans. It must not be forgotten that only some months before, the two protagonists had been locked together, united in purpose, to destroy the Iranian regime. A high official of the Iraqi Ministry of Islamic Affairs (to them, births, marriages and deaths) told me in Abu Dhabi, ‘This is not a battle between Sunni and Shi’a, but an ancient battle between Arabs and Iranians.’ So it is that if you remove the Islamic ethos of brotherhood which divides people neither by race nor by class but uniquely by Islam and kufr, the matter at issue descends to the materialist conflicts that are the 27

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political destiny of the kuffar. Arab peoples can no longer categorise themselves as Muslim simply by the act of a genetic inheritance that places them with a Muslim name in a land that was once ruled under Khalifal authority under Muslim law. In the same way the Sufic Tariqas cannot claim shaykhdom by the simple factor of the son inheriting a title from a father who was an ‘Arif bi’llah, although in this matter the exception may prove the rule. The time has come to face up to the fact that as we are so we have people set over us. False leadership cannot be blamed, and the usurping of false leaders in the land of the Arabs has in every case resulted in a more dismal regime. So it was, that when the Iraqi dictator was tricked into attacking Kuwait in a simple game plan which he was too stupid to decode, the trap was sprung and a brilliant and terrible double victory was achieved by the Oil Titans of the kuffar. One, Iraqi oil was taken out of the market and placed under sanction. Two, a massive occupying force then took over the Arabian Peninsula. This final, and for this regime insoluble dilemma could not have happened simply through the foolish judgment of a decadent ruler. If Shaykh Bin Baz, the doyen of the wahhabite leadership had not given his official Fatwa their evil doctrines might still have remained hidden and survived. The pathetic judgment of Bin Baz, which gains him a name in history under the flag of Abu Lahab, revealed that the leader of this sect, who for decades had droned on about the importance of ‘Kitab wa Sunna’ while they opposed the noble millions of Muslims who followed the fiqh of the Great Imams, was either totally ignorant of the Sunna of our beloved Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, or hypocritically turned his head away from it. It is recorded in a perfectly well known Hadith in the Sahih that despite the pleadings of his Sahaba, 28

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Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, turned away a renowned fighter from fighting under the flag of Islam because he was not a Muslim. Only after his Shahada was he allowed to participate in the Jihad. This inescapable Sunna wedded to the strict order of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that there should be no two Deens in the land of the Arabs, marked the end of the historical right of the wahhabite sect to lay any claim to an Islamic ‘aqida. How abysmal the collapse of the wahhabite regime. Within a few years of the war they saw in astonishment that their massive wealth had almost miraculously become massive debt. They saw their country swarming with literally thousands of American intelligence officers, an occupying force that they were not permitted to bring before their own courts in cases of criminal activity. They had not heeded the Qur’an. They had mocked the Sunna. They had not even educated themselves in the culture of their masters, for the great medieval moralist La Fontaine could have told them what happened when a rich and weak princeling invited a mighty ruler to flush out a local enemy. In one of his fables he tells the tale of how a small landowner calls in a mighty Lord of the Manor to flush out a hare that is troubling his fields. The Lord arrives with his servants and friends and dogs, feasts on their land, takes the women, and then in hunting the hare rides roughshod over his fields, destroying his crops and leaving a wasteland behind. The poet ends with his famous moral: Petits Princes, videz vos débats entre vous: De recourir aux rois vous seriez de grands fous. Il ne les faut jamais engager dans vos guerres, Ni les faire entrer sur vos terres. 29

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(Little Princes, give up fighting among yourselves: you will be great fools to have recourse to kings. Never let them take part in your wars, nor let them enter your land.) The wahhabite-Saud alliance which had begun in infamy ended in total disgrace. In the early days Ibn Saud courted the wahhabites for his own ends, honoured them. The Ikhwan as they were called, a title to be taken up later by the naive Egyptian reformer Hassan Al-Banna, were allowed to distinguish themselves by wearing a twisted strip of white material around their head-covering instead of the twisted black wool iqal worn by other Arabs. In 1929 two important Ikhwan leaders, Faisal ad-Dawwish and Sultan Ibn Bijad, rose in rebellion against the forces of Ibn Saud. They were defeated and Faisal ad-Dawwish was taken prisoner and brought before Ibn Saud, apparently mortally wounded. Pardoned, he then recovered his strength and fought all over again. In the end he fled for refuge to Iraq. Sultan Ibn Bijad was captured and thrown into prison at Riyadh to die a lingering death. The Ikhwan main colony of Ghut-Ghut was razed to the ground. After these battles the Ikhwan were disbanded and their two settlements Ghut-Ghut and Artawiyya ceased to exist. From the very beginning therefore, it was clear that the wahhabite deviation from Islam could not survive and could only be a seeding-ground for dissension and conflict among the Muslims. Properly speaking they had no doctrines. In place of Tawhid which is a vibrant, profound and rich teaching containing many aspects, they had placed a cheap rationalist monotheism, made inexorable and ugly by its denial of the nature of the Revelation and thus a failure to understand the distinction always made by Muslim ‘ulama between the Muhakamat and the Muttashabihat ayats. A primitive phenomenon commanded by 30

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primitive men, they found themselves taken up by the sophisticated, highly cultured and scheming kafir elite of the British Empire. Their servile and sentimental attachment to Britain remains to this day. The so-called King of ‘Saudi’ Arabia, as they insist on calling it, has been photographed with the Queen of England while wearing round his neck the large enamelled cross of an English chivalric Order. Our Shaykh and teacher, Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Al-Habib in his great Diwan lists in his song of the ‘Doctrines of Unification’ sixty six attributes which make up the differing elements of a pure Tawhid.

THE DOCTRINES OF UNIFICATION The slave of his Lord, Muhammad ibn al-Habib, says, declaring the absolute oneness of his Lord: We begin all things with the ‘Bismillah’ — to Him belong their beginning as well as their returning. The meaning of ‘god’ is That which has no need of other-than-Him, while anything other has need of Him. This ‘That’ which has no need of other-than-Him possesses thirteen Attributes, do not forget it! Existence, then pre-existence (qidam), then going-on, absolute difference from the creation, and absolute independence.

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Hearing, sight, speech and inherent being — these all have their own judgments — Acts devoid of desire, and similarly in judgments, lack of self-interest. Total freedom of action and of non-action — persevere with what we have told you and realise it! Then the poverty of all that is other-than-Him has twelve attributes in the end: Knowledge, power, and will, then life — grasp the lesson intended here! Also capability, transformation, knowledge and life — but do not be content with the inherent attributes! Unity of action and attribute and Essence with rejection of number — seek it then, you trustworthy ones! The time-nature of the universe and the negation of effect either by nature or by force — so take note. These are twenty-five attributes. Their opposites are the same in number — count them! Iman in the Messenger also has sixteen attributes which are: Sidq, tabligh and Iman, letting ordinary events teach wisdom. 32

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Iman in the Books and the Prophets, and the Messengers, and the Angels, O man of intellect! And Iman that the Last Day must come. Be aware of their opposites and struggle to reject them. These are sixty-six Attributes which are contained in the noble Kalimat. So busy yourself with them in the Awqat of the Presence, and joyfully you will rise to their meaning. Their proof lies in contemplation of the Qur’an and in reflecting on created beings with the intellect. O our Lord, bless Muhammad, and his family and every slave of Allah who copies him, And, O Lord, let the educated and the unlettered, whoever reads or hears this, benefit from these attributes, Help our amir with miracles and preserve his offspring and all of his family. Make him one of the founts of Allah, a source of benefit in all the lands of Allah, Support all who support him with the best as well as those who help him, without disappointment. Assign to him from the scholars of the Community those who are sincere in their advice and intention. 33

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Grant success to the leaders who help everything in which there is right action. And grant us a seal, O Lord, of serenity — and be kind to us when the Hour arrives. It is clear from this that it is not possible to have a correct Tawhid which does not significantly feature faith in the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. As the Shaykh of our Shaykhs, Moulay Abdas’Salam Ibn al-Mashish said, ‘Were it not for the means the end would have escaped us.’ It is therefore neither an aberration from some primal doctrine of Islamic renewal, which is what the wahhabites claim themselves to be, nor is it a ‘pure doctrine’ held by the elite yet betrayed by the masses that we confront in Arabia. It is an antiIslam, devoid as we have indicated, of all those political elements which permit of a living and dynamic Islam that had, therefore, inevitably to turn towards the kuffar for support since it had already turned its back on the great Muslim Ummah. We are facing an anti-Islam born in the Arabian desert under the shadow of British guns and the darker shadows of their agents, T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, then grown to maturity under the still darker forces of the oil Titans and the unified kafir order dedicated to the abolition of all religion. Do not for a moment imagine that the policies, pseudo-doctrines and practices that have stemmed from Arabia and been disseminated all over the world have done so simply under a misguided Arabian policy. No, every move that has been made from there has been under the command of the collaborative American-Israeli system whose elite are the leaders of the banking and commodities corporations. Ibn Taymiyya 34

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said that if you wish to find what had gone wrong in the Islamic polity it was necessary to look at Islam’s beginning, for you would simply find now, repeated, what had once stood there in opposition to the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. The regime of Najd, it can therefore truly be said, is a Khawarij phenomenon.

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Oh Arabs! I sat with a group of ‘ulama from different Arab countries. First the Syrian told us of the iniquities of their dictator and why we had to lend ourselves to the urgent task of overthrowing this murderer of his people. The Egyptian ‘alim intervened to tell us that the source of the trouble lay in Egypt and the disastrous nature of its kafir leadership and the helpless obedience of the state to the powers of banking and American policy. The Tunisian intervened to say that little was known of the dreadful tyranny of their dictator who had overthrown what had seemed the worst possible leader by declaring him insane, even although the man had been appointed by the former president, presumably therefore in a state of insanity. The Jordanian ‘alim rushed to tell us of the terrible plight of Jordan under its masonic English puppet king. The Algerian scholar insisted that the ghastly slaughter of the innocents in his country was without equal. They vied with each other in claiming that their national situation was the greater tragedy. In

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a sense, each had a right to that claim. None of them seemed to grasp that you could not liberate one of these countries without increasing the misery and suffering of all the others on whom repression would fall to prevent them following suit. The former colonial masters had long ago packed their bags and left. They were French, English, and Italian, but they were not divided, they were kuffar, and kufr is one millat. They withdrew their armies and left behind their Trojan Horse, the kafir banking system. To show their generosity and distract from this vital ploy they gifted to the Arabs their much-vaunted educational system. Now every Arab, if he wanted, could become a ‘Doktur’. With their methodology the reformist work of Abduh and Reda could be completed. In every case these countries can trace their disastrous modern history to their unreasoned and desperate treachery and their rush to betray the Khalifate, and by that token their own honour, as all their leadership had solemnly given bayat to the Islamic ruler. These low Hollywood gangster-like presidents of Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq and Syria did not come to power by any inner talent or capacity. Rather, after a century of betrayals, capitulations and abandonment of Islamic teaching the Arab world set about obediently and enthusiastically erecting socialistic kafir models for their new mini-states. They left their Deen. Some rushed to christianity to be accepted by the new system and to be well placed in its administration. They changed their names. They shaved their beards. They turned away at the sound of the adhans of Ramadan. They sipped their cognac in cafés from Tangier to Damascus. The Great Mosque of Zaitouna in Tunis was turned into a third-rate secular university. Its respected director, Shaykh Shalabi, brokenhearted, resigned his post at this destruction of a great historical 38

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centre of Islamic learning. In many North African countries the beard was banned in the state administration, unless, ironically, you claimed you were a marxist imitating Lenin. One by one the great Islamic colleges which had produced ‘ulama for hundreds of years were stripped of their educational role. They were told it was modernisation. It was the modernisation that had been called for by the Islamic reformists, and now they were getting it. The Islam was stripped of its social and political content, and certainly that of its financial and welfare obligations. The new modern reformed Islam, glowing with the purity of abolishing and abandoning the Sufic zawiyyas, began to teach its new peripheral Islam. This was an Islam devoid of all that Islam had been as we have shown in the case of Saudi Arabia, only here in the rest of the Arab world the effects were more disastrous. Given the wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of interest, usurious institutions, paper money and the banking system held by the founders of the modernist movement it was axiomatic that once the political regimes were established in all their kafir glory they then set about protecting an Islam, of course this means an anti-Islam, firmly founded on the kafir usury system. It was an unmitigated triumph. Within the shortest time each of these little kafir nations had appointed a Minister of Awqaf, and his purpose was to dismantle the Awqaf properties and hand them over to the voracious bankers, as was most dramatically demonstrated in Sadat’s Egypt, or more arrogantly to name the ministry by the grandiose title of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. Do you not see what this means? Under the Islamic Khalifs up until the arrival of that great ally of the reformers, Mustafa Kemal, every affair was an Islamic affair. Now it had been reduced to the same status as the religion of the mushrikun, 39

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births, marriages and deaths. Islam was a matter for the mosques. Trade, commerce, finance, welfare, and warfare had been placed in the hands of the ill-formed kafir machine state. In all of this the role of the Islamic so-called Reformers is quite extraordinary. Having actively and passionately worked for the destruction of the Islamic Khalifate, having maintained a face-toface relationship with the Young Turks from the masonic circles of Salonika, they not only witnessed but participated in the handing-over of the Muslim lands to the expanding kafir colonists. They expressed their desire for independence by imagining that the differential had been reduced to their sovereignty for themselves from the colonists. An Islamic polity over and against a kafir one became a kafir polity over and against an Arab national kafir one. Thus, you can perceive the narrowing social expectation of people who had abandoned the Deen. Al-Afghani, who was in fact Iranian, had taught his student Abduh to drink the heady wine of modern social revolution with its inevitable and implied outcome, the collapse of the unified Islamic Khalifate. They were dismantling the Deen, hence their attraction to Renan in Paris who was busily employed doing the same thing with what was left of christianity. In turn, Reda’s role plunged the new generation of Muslims over the abyss. By the time you arrive at the Ikhwan AlMuslimun, the modernist version of their wahhabite counterparts, you find them still headily convinced that they could make a concordance with power, like the wahhabites had done with the Saud family. To fully grasp the abject failure of the Ikhwan movements it is necessary to face the inescapable reality of the social nexus that their futile policies brought about. 40

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Let us briefly summarise all that lay prior to that series of tragic and bloody incidents which ended up with the defeat of the Egyptian armies and the Camp David surrender to the Israeli occupation of that former waqf that once flourished under authority from Istanbul. Napoleon’s Alexandrine fantasy of ruling Egypt and the road to India ended with his ignominious departure on 23rd August 1799. While he slaughtered many Muslims, more of his own troops died either in battle or from disease. The mercy of Allah permitted Général de Menou to remain in the country, embrace Islam and take the name of Abdullah. Following the teaching of Rumi one would say that these thousands of men were displaced in boats to invade Egypt, and thousands were to die in the ensuing conflicts in order that this one man should meet his destiny, become a Muslim and enter the Jannah, this triumph dazzlingly more important than those defeats. The great Albanian, Pasha Mehmet Ali, was placed in command of Egypt on 9th July 1805. Here was another key element in this continuing collapse of Muslim society before the upheavals caused by the utterly new and unknown type of invasion, that of the jewish bankers in every place setting up a national bank and by their cunning manipulations acquiring all the assets of that country through the issuing of series of bonds in a system which the local populace simply did not understand. It is not an accident that one of the key moments in the collapse of the Khalifate was the decision to abolish the Yeniceri, which had been the army of Jihad. Instead of cleansing it of its corrupt Bektashi element, European counsels prevailed and it was crushed and disbanded. A Napoleonic western style army without spiritual allegiance replaced it. In the same way Mehmet ‘Ali eliminated the Mamuluks in Egypt. 41

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It then followed that he took on the role of a puppet Bonaparte. He was to put in place precisely all these social reconstructions that the bankers needed to take over virtual ownership of the massive wealth of Egypt. He was surrounded by European advisers and financiers. ‘Independence’ was in fact in every case to be what would now be called in commercial terms a leveraged buyout. The building of the Suez Canal is the classic example of an apparent technological triumph being in fact a transfer of power from the political zone to that of financial institutions, financial institutions run and controlled by the great jewish banking houses of Europe. The first manifestation of this quite un-Islamic concept of territorial integrity and selfdetermination, the miserable thesis which has ruined the Palestinian people, was to be seen when the Egyptian Minister of War, Colonel Orabi Pasha rose up to overthrow the British. He was savagely defeated at Tel Al-Kabir. This event gave the English full powers to govern Egypt, placing a new Khedive on the throne with the title of Sultan, making a definitive break with the Osmanli Dawlat. The ferment for this new type of secular state did not stop from that moment on. In the 1920s Saad Zaghloul emerged as the hero of the independence movement. Already, the Islamic element was merely a unifying rhetoric rather than a political imperative. With Saad Zaghloul exiled to the Seychelles, the ineffective British administration had to yield to the triumph of the Wafd Party in the legislative elections. King Fouad was obliged to bring Saad Zaghloul back as Prime Minister from 27th January 1924. In 1934 the young Gamal Abdelnasser was at school writing an essay on Voltaire. At this time remember, Turkey was in the grips of the Kemalist dictatorship and great ‘ulama were hanging from trees in the 42

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cities of Konya and Istanbul. Syria and Lebanon were under French mandate. Iraq had become independent. Eritrea was under Italian control while the Sudan and Egypt remained under British mandate. On 22nd April 1936 the terrorist Ben-Gurion met with Georges Antonius, a Greek orthodox Palestinian nationalist, to plan the creation of a jewish region inside a Greater Syria which would include Palestine. At the same time the famous Amin AlHussaini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, struggled against the odds to have the issue of zionism measured by Islamic Law. In the same year Faruq became king of Egypt at the age of 16 and under Regency. On 26th August 1938 in Jaffa, Ben-Gurion’s terrorists exploded a bomb in the Souk killing 24 people, a practice which fifty years later the Arabs would in turn direct against the Israelis. So it was that on the eve of the Second World War two profound turmoils were shattering the life of the Middle Eastern Arabs. On the one hand, the ferment of resistance against the jewish invasion, and on the other hand the growing public passion for national sovereignty, which internationalist institutions like the Olympic Games did not fail to confirm, resulted in an increasingly dramatic situation, whose inevitable outcome had to be revolution. Another step in the degradation of Arab self-esteem came when the European powers decided to use the Egyptian and North African littoral as a war ground for their own conflict. By 1940 Italians, Germans and English tanks were moving across the desert. On 19th December 1940 in Jerusalem, Yossef Weitz, a director of the Jewish National Fund, declared that in order to create the jewish state, ‘No other means existed except to displace the Arabs into the neighbouring countries — all the Arabs.’ 43

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By 1943 Nasser had abandoned the fez and adopted the military cap of the European soldiery. With 1945 and the ending of the War the condition of the Arabs became more critical and more vulnerable. The cost of living had risen 195 percent, while in the same period annual salaries had only risen 61 percent. The French, having promised to leave Syria, bombed Damascus killing over 500 people. On 22nd March 1945 in Cairo, Egypt, Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen drew up the constitution of the Arab League. At that point it can definitely be said that the Arabs of the Middle East utterly lost any concept of their Islamic identity at a social and political level. The work of the modernist self-styled ‘reformers’ of Islam had in effect marginalised any idea of an Islamic polity governed by the Shari’at. Since their intellectual inspiration from the beginning, and that at the behest of their Islamic teachers, had been motored by the ideas of socialism, nationalism and selfdetermination, the result was that they had submitted to the kafir concept of the state as a machine with its subsequent doctrine of the enslavement of its own masses, as in both sides of the false kafir dialectic of totalitarianism and democracy. The Nasserite version of King Faruq as a decadent playboy king, while tragically true after his abdication, covered up his very significant activity while ruling Egypt. The main opposition to Faruq, apart from the simple fact of his being the ruler, was that he embodied in himself a basic principle of the Osmanli Dawlat which was that any Muslim with the right capacity could hold power by virtue of being Muslim without reference to his racial background. In the atmosphere of fervent nationalism which had been created in Egypt there was bitter resentment at being ruled by a young Albanian prince. This grew to a more serious issue when it became clear not only to the nationalists, 44

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but the British and the jews, that King Faruq had determined to take upon himself the responsibility of Khalif of all the Muslims. Turkey having been enslaved by Kemalism, Egypt was the logical place for the re-establishment of Khalifate. Make no mistake. It was this and not the political errors he subsequently made that assured that he would be treated to the same fate by Nasser and Sadat that had been meted out to the last legal Khalif of Islam. The silhouette of King Faruq boarding his boat to go into exile mirrors exactly the photo of the last Khalif departing Istanbul, taking with him the mantle of Khalifate, fully preserved and untouched, in full readiness for its inheritor to place it on his shoulders. On 7th April 1947 an even darker day dawned for the unfortunate Arab people as their last understanding of Islam slipped away and their reformist ‘ulama stood helpless before the more powerful and indeed more glamorous forces of kufr took over. In the Café Rashid of Damascus a young christian orthodox professor of history, newly returned from Paris, his head buzzing with a pottage of Sorel, Bergson, Nietzsche, Marx and Lenin, declared the official creation of the Baath Party. His name was Michel Aflaq. He called for the unification of the Arab world from the Gulf to the Atlantic into an Arab nation that was to be based on socialism. He rejected communism on the one hand and the Islamic movement on the other, placing Islam in the role of fascism in his dialectic. He likened the Islam he was prepared to tolerate to the allegiance people hold towards a leading football team. Every year until the Gulf War the Pope sent an annual message of congratulations to the leaders of Syria and Iraq for following the path of Michel Aflaq. In the same year in Palestine on 17th September, Golda Meir met with King Abdullah of Jordan who was sympathetic to the 45

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creation of a jewish state. In that fateful year the U.N.O. declared Israel to be a state. Five months later the jews massacred 254 men, women and children at point-blank range in the village of Deir Yasin, in order to terrorise the Palestinians into a massive flight from the new territory of Israel. What Hitler had done in Lidice, the jewish state, which claimed its right to sovereignty because of the persecution it had suffered, had copied at Deir Yasin. They had become their own Nazis. On 14th March 1948 a Baathist revolution was bloodily crushed in Yemen. On 16th May 1948 King Faruq sent his army against the new state. Israel with its now famous world support through the banking system was more than a match for the illtrained army of the King. By September the King sought to negotiate a peace with the Israelis. Through February to July of 1949 an armistice was signed separately with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. On 8th December 1948 the Egyptian government dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood. On 12th February 1949 its founder, Hassan Al-Banna, was assassinated. On 28th December the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Nokrashy Pasha, holding him responsible. In May of the same year Nasser met with Ibrahim Abdelhadi the Prime Minister, and the Chief of the Secret Police. He was able to convince these high officials that he had no links with the Muslim Brotherhood, while at the same time he was able to hide his other secret activities. By the end of the year he was putting out propaganda from a group calling themselves Dhabat al-Ahrar, the Free Officers. In 1951 Palestinians assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan. During the next two years the role of the English became increasingly savage and increasingly unacceptable. To the 46

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horror of the jews and the Americans, King Faruq had appointed a German general to modernise the Egyptian army. By 1951 the kafir secret services succeeded in getting him dismissed. In Ismailia the British had massacred over eighty members of the Bouluk Nizam, the auxiliary police. Two days later Cairo was in flames. As a result of the chaos let loose on Cairo thanks to the dreadful policies of the English occupying forces, on 23rd July 1952 the inevitable happened, a coup d’État by the Free Officers led by General Nagib. Behind him in the shadows, the brains of the operation, Gamal Abdelnasser, waited his moment to take power. Three days later King Faruq abdicated and set sail towards that limbo reserved for kings without kingdoms.

By 1953 Nasser was putting into practice his youthful studies of the life of Napoleon. He drew the new leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan el-Hodeiba, close to him, all the better to keep him under his eye. It is at this point that the disaster of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in their long years have caused the deaths of thousands of excellent young men who naively followed their inaccurate and deviant version of Islam, must be faced up to and acknowledged. The absolute pragmatism of the materialist, Nasser, met head on the absolute idealist and tactical pragmatist el-Hodeiba. The Brotherhood had chosen the Shi’a role of perpetual rebellion against an unjust leadership and they were to pay a terrible price. Hodeiba’s attempt to snuggle up to the ruthless Nasser was as misguided as Al-Banna’s clandestine meetings with the British in the forlorn hope that the Brotherhood had a role to play. Nasser’s book, Philosophy of the Revolution, which he wrote with the journalist Muhammad Heykal laid out his political theories. 47

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This type of book has proved popular with the upstart dictators who have climbed to power on the ruined Islamic social structures of the Osmanli Dawlat. It is no better, nor no worse than Gadaffi’s comical Jacobin tract, the Green Book. Nasser, like his Libyan disciple, was convinced that he had come up with an original idea, but of course in both cases they were the textbook philosophy of the masonic lodges. So it was that in place of the majestic revealed Book of Allah, Nasser offered the Egyptian masses his Theory of the Three Circles: the Arab World, the African Continent and the Spirit of Islam! In the first circle Nasser declared that the factor of the progress of the Arab people was dependent on the importance of petrol. Of the second circle he declared that Egypt had to take the leadership in the continuing struggle of the Africans to be free of white colonial power, because, in a generous extension of Egyptian nationalism he declared, ‘We are all Africans!’ Finally the third circle was defined as a space, that of the spiritual community whose centre was Makkah, the solidarity of which was to provide ‘the gigantic scaffolding of our power.’ This was the new religion, and Islam in it had effectively vanished. In its place there was a kind of sentimental mist, a space for a spirit which somehow was supposed to make Uzbek, Indonesian and Indian feel a strange vibrating sympathy with his Arab brother. Since the Muslim Brotherhood had itself been founded on somewhat similar principles, Egypt did not need Mr Hodeiba on the palace balcony when it already had the materialist Colonel Nasser. About ten years ago I met with the leader, at least the intellectual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the light of the terrible situation of the Muslims I turned to him and said, ‘We need a 48

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leader who will speak on behalf of all the Muslims. You have an organisation. You have people placed in every country. Call your leadership together. Appoint from among you one man and let him declare Khalifate. The whole Muslim world will follow you.’ A look of genuine fear crossed his face. He looked over his shoulder as if there was someone behind him. ‘We cannot do that,’ he said. ‘We are having a meeting in six months. I will put your proposal to them and they will appoint a committee to decide.’ He became even more uncomfortable as he added, ‘This is not the moment.’ Indeed, it will never be the moment. It has not been the moment since the last Khalif boarded his boat and folded the robe of Khalifate. As for this great socialism into which the Arab world plunged with such blindness, enthusiasm and often greed, it has vanished without a trace. Well, not altogether, for they still have the state apparatus acceptable to the capitalist world, and they have excellent secret police organisations with the latest torture technology imported by them from the state of Israel. It must be understood, and this is not a subtle matter but a painfully clear one, that Nasser believed in Allah. He was in the language of our fiqh a Muwahid, believing in the oneness of Allah, but in harmony with the wahhabite background of all the reformers he saw the second Shahada as merely the confirmation that it was through him, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that the Qur’an had been revealed. That Islam was a social system and indeed a welfare system, vastly superior to socialism because it functioned under Divine and Prophetic instruction, was a fact of which he was completely ignorant. In an interview with De Gaulle’s biographer Jean Lacouture he declared that you could not govern by the Qur’an because ‘it is 49

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susceptible to so many interpretations,’ and being ‘a very open book’ the Qur’an did not seem to him ‘to have the capacity to serve a political doctrine.’ Now, the fragment of Islam that Nasser had learned had come from the same sources that guided the Muslim Brotherhood, and they had done away with the fiqh and that framework of social justice which was based on the ‘Amal of Madinah and which was nothing other than the civic embodiment of the Deen. So it was that on the 14th January 1954, the same month in which the fateful interview was given to France-Soir, el-Hodeiba and hundreds of the Muslim Brotherhood were put behind bars. The rebels had rebelled against the dictator who was a rebel who had rebelled against the king who was the inheritor of a rebellion against the Khalif. An attempt was indeed made to assassinate Nasser. Arms caches were found and the leadership identified in the plot. This time the Brotherhood was declared illegal and 18,000 members of the quasi-secret society were arrested on 31st October. By 1955 Nasser’s complete and absolute commitment to materialist socialism became openly declared by him, confirming it in an important discourse that he gave to the Military Academy. He flung himself into Third-Worldism and met one by one all the great socialist leaders in those days when socialism did appear to be making its impact on the world. He became the friend of the Soviets, of Tito, Che Guavara and Sekou Touré. He was the darling of the Third World and yet could still give a warm embrace in Madrid to General Franco. By 1956 he was urging the abolition of the Islamic Laws on marriage and divorce. Do not forget, oh Arabs! Your abandoning of the Islamic Law of marriage, far from being an advance in moral values, is simply nothing other than embracing the kafir view that the 50

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family should be abolished and that man, who is not by nature monogamous, should at best set up mistresses in secret or simply have intercourse wherever he desires without sanction, which is the kafir norm. The Islamic Shari’at decrees that there should be no sexual pleasure that is not accompanied by the guarantee of social responsibility. Instead of driving the woman out uniquely for extra-marital pleasure, other women partners are integrated into an extended and economically unified family system, thus giving emotional and human security to the children of such unions. The two great events of Nasser’s life from a geopolitical point of view are the nationalising of the Suez Canal, which was a brilliant and deserved success, and the Six-Day War, which was a disaster from which Egypt never recovered. In the aftermath of the Suez crisis Nasser pursued his fantasy of Arab unity. In 1957 he held important talks with the Syrian kafir Michel Aflaq, and over the following years Egypt was to unite with Syria and separate with Syria and repeat the experiment with Iraq, each event inspired by the materialist and socialist dream. In Baghdad on 15th July 1958 Nuri Said, disguised as a woman, fled through the streets of the city until he was caught by the crowd who in the exaltation of their revolutionary fervour tore his body to pieces. The British-invented monarchy of Iraq was finished and General Abdalkarim Kassem, to the chanting of the Marseillaise, celebrated their revolution. It was the 14th of July! Nasser’s dream of the U.A.R., the United Arab Republics, from an ideological point of view was simply a U.S.A., a Union of Socialist Arabs. In 1961 the Cairo Tower, an ultra-modern construction which gave views as far as the pyramids, was financed with a gift of three million dollars from the C.I.A..

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On 9th February 1963 General Kassem was shot dead following another coup d’État in Baghdad which brought to power General Arif, a convinced Nasserite and Baathist. In Damascus Salah Al-Bitar took power and declared himself ready yet again to try to unify the Arab nations. Yet within a few months the Nasserites had lost control of Damascus leaving five hundred dead in its streets. By the end of the year the effect in Iraq was felt and the president had to step aside for his brother AbdarRahman Arif. The following year Nasser could definitely claim he was the leader of the Arab world. With Ben Bella in Algeria and the notorious kafir Bourguiba in Tunisia, Sallal in Yemen, Abboud in Sudan, Amin Al-Hafiz in Syria and Arif in Iraq, Nasser could count on varying forms of socialist support. On the other hand the legitimate monarch of Morocco stood apart, observant, while the illegitimate monarchs of Arabia and Jordan sat grimly in opposition. With the sole exception of Hassan II of Morocco, not one of these leaders could be seen as upholding the Deen of Islam inside his country. In this year of Nasser’s triumphs Khrushchev awarded him the Order of Lenin. He received this Order proudly while millions of Muslims inside the Soviet Union were persecuted, thousands were still in the Gulags, and only a handful were permitted to attend the Hajj. Not one voice was raised to plead their right to fulfil their fifth Islamic obligation. Despite the world acclaim for Nasser, every year revealed how impossible it was going to be for the new religion, with its twin pillars of nationalism and Arabism, to succeed. By 1965 Bourguiba was howling insults across the desert on Egypt. ‘Never,’ he declared, ‘have the Arabs been so divided, that is from the day that Egypt took on its sacred mission to unify us.’

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At the beginning of 1966 the trial of the Muslim Brotherhood members accused of attempting assassination opened. Over 356 separate judicial cases were filed in the courts. Disturbingly, military officers were among the accused and even a member of the presidential guard. Put in evidence during the trials was the complicity of Arabia and its Saudi rulers. The trials were to last into the following spring. On 1st May at an industrial centre in Mehallah Al-Kubra, Nasser delighted the workers by attacking those who in the name of the defence of Islam wished to restore a feudal economy in Egypt. He denounced King Faisal, calling him the Bearded One, and accused his proposed plan to set up a permanent Conference of Islamic States of being an American plan intended to isolate the progressive and socialist Arab nations. The growing confidence and financial expansion of the new state of Israel was backed by its conviction that the capitalist system would triumph over the socialism that still staggered on, having emerged from the ruins of World War II in what was clearly only a temporary revival of energy. In 1967 Israel launched its Blitzkrieg, devastating the entire army of Nasser. The disaster was overwhelming. 20,000 Egyptians dead, 700 tanks destroyed, and the Air Force virtually wiped out. In the wake of the disaster, to ease the interior tensions in the country, he announced his intention to liberate the Muslim Brotherhood prisoners, partly in recognition of their undoubtedly heroic performance during the brief and overwhelming conflict with the enemy. In 1968, when you might imagine things could not get worse for the post-Islamic Arab world, the sinister figure of Michel Aflaq turned up in Baghdad to join the leader of the new 53

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Baathist coup d’État, this time bringing to power the even more menacing figure of Saddam Hussein. In 1969 Sudan Radio announced that a democratic republic had been created, and that its sovereignty belonged to the people who were now represented by the Council of the Revolution. Colonel Numeiri, a passionate admirer of Nasser, had been plotting the coup for six years. Years later I met with him in the Sudanese Embassy of London, having been invited by some Sudanese Sufis, much to the distaste of the ‘reformists’ who had been assembled to greet the Sudanese ruler. They were all in fact those very people who upheld the post-Islamic doctrines of the first Egyptian reformers and their Indian counterpart Maududi. It must be emphasised that their view of Islam was based on a total acceptance of the banking system and the mythical idea that socialism could dialectically dominate the injustices of capitalism at some future date, and that within that framework an Islamic political governance could function, in other words a Shari’at which put in place a consultative assembly, but one which was prepared to slot in alongside the kafir world system of democracy, international institutions, and the bankism which already dictated the limits of their actions. As I sat opposite Numeiri it came to me that he was not among friends, and the more they spoke the more I knew that their ambition was to remove him from office and replace him with their man, one who was backed by the Arabian wahhabite regime. In other words there only existed the dialectic that Nasser himself had defined in his talk to the workers of the textile factory. When I spoke with Numeiri I said, ‘I congratulate you on your announcement that you are going to 54

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introduce the Islamic Shari’at into Sudan. I urge you that you begin by the closing of the banks and the abolition of paper money.’ He smiled a benign presidential smile at what he considered my unreal naivety, and so I added what was in my heart. ‘Remember, if one day you are in need of help, you can call on the Muslims to come to your aid.’ He hesitated, gave a nervous laugh, and excused himself. Two weeks later there was a coup d’État in Sudan and he was forced into exile. Within the shortest time the coup leader was in turn expelled and the country fell into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only a few decades before, Sudan fed all its people from its rich soil and exported food to the desert lands of the east. The new regime continued in its disastrous path of Third World debt, the destruction of its agricultural base, the flight of intellectuals, and all of this established firmly on a kafir financial system. Personality politics and the coup d’État not only were proving to be useless but with each new change of personality governance the Arab countries plunged deeper and deeper into social degradation. Not to be outdone, on 1st September Colonel Gadaffi abolished the Sanussi monarchy and joined the Lobster Quadrille of Arab nationalist socialist dictators. By 1970 the war of attrition in the Sinai came to an end and a cease-fire was formed. To add darkness to darkness General Hafiz Al-Assad took power in Damascus and a democratic republic was declared in South Yemen. One of Nasser’s last acts was to mediate between the puppet king of Jordan and the former Ikhwan al-Muslimun member, now leader of the Palestinians, Arafat, who from the point of view of Islamic Law was legally a dead man, having shockingly insulted the blessed ‘Aisha, wife of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. 55

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Over the years Arafat had been showered with millions of petrol dollars to buy arms, as much to assuage the guilt for the inactivity of the house of Saud as in the hope that the Palestinians could ever put right their humiliating situation. Arafat, in case you have forgotten, had stock-piled masses of arms in southern Lebanon, hidden in tunnels under the ground. He had never used them in any frontal confrontation with the Israeli enemy. In what came to be known as Black September this dreadful man turned these guns on the Jordanian Palestinians. They were killing each other. This was Arab brotherhood. Exhausted from the mediation which he succeeded in bringing about through his undoubted personal charisma and prestige, on the 28th September Nasser had to accompany the Emir of Kuwait to say his farewells at the airport. It was the kiss of death. At six fifteen that evening he collapsed with a massive heart attack. On the subject of Arab unity General de Gaulle gave eloquent summary. ‘Nasser would really like Algeria to be the fourth star of the United Arab Republic. But that cannot happen. Neither Bourguiba nor the King of Morocco are willing to disappear. Algerian domination would not profit the Maghrib, nor would a United Arab Republic under the direction of Nasser. And what could Nasser bring to Algeria? Nothing! Money? Technicians? He needs them himself. How would he be able to give them to others? ‘And then, Nasser has begun a project which is against the nature of things. Reason is against it. Egypt has always had its unity. In every age the valley of the Nile has unified Egypt. On 56

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the contrary, countries like Lebanon, Iraq or Syria have always been divided. The Druse have always fought the Maronites, who have never got on with the Alawites. Nor in Iraq have the Sunnis got on with the Shi’a or with the Kurds. These are countries condemned to division because they carry groupings of people who are completely different, do not have the same language, the same religion, the same past, and they cannot tolerate each other. To try to unify them under a single sceptre is a super-human pretension. These people never want to be governed by anyone but one of their own. To try it is to speak and to say nothing. Nasser makes as if to unify, but the unity has no profound reality. It is just a wind which blows.’ That was the great kafir statesman analysing the actions of Nasser who, when he abandoned Islam, decided to rule by the kafir system, and by that submit to what de Gaulle, echoing his great predecessor Napoleon, called the nature of things. For without belief in the absolute and destining power of Allah, glory be to Him, you must submit in Napoleon’s phrase, to ‘La Force des Choses’. For the mass of Arabs who have followed this dreadful and tragic path, every year has brought greater disaster than the preceding one. However, it is time for those who have mistakenly believed that they still had Islam to face the reality. All that was left of the Five Pillars was the Prayer and the Fast, and all that remained of ‘Dhikr Katheeran’ was the muttered du’a of the smallest sura in the Qur’an, the Surat Al‘Asr. It was as if they recognised in these sublime ayats, with a bitter realisation, that they would require enormous patience as all their political activity dragged them further and further from what they declared was their goal. Had they taken Islam from its source in the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and from the ‘Amal of the Ahl-al-Madinah, they would 57

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have raised high the Banner of Islam and taken the people with them, and turned them away from socialist kufr and called for Khalifate which automatically implies the establishment of the Gold Islamic Dinar of blessed Sunna and Madinan practice, in one blow freeing the Muslims from the perpetual downward spiral of economical degradation in the magical system of world banking which at this moment has total control over the Muslim lands. This cannot be the end of the story because the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, has declared, ‘My people cannot go entirely wrong.’

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If the wahhabite mode of operation is to licence its authority through an attack on other Muslims, then it follows that it has allied itself by the very nature of its doctrines to the enemies of Islam. The notorious allegiance of the reformist movement in India to the British crown is well documented, as is the active and intricate connection between the Ismailis and the British government, and between the Qadiyyanis and the British government. On 16th April 2000 the Independent on Sunday gave a detailed account of how Denis Healey, then Britain’s Defence Secretary, had headed an organised and effective campaign to destabilise President Sukarno of Indonesia. One specialist at the Foreign Office told that his brief from London was, ‘To do whatever I could do to get rid of Sukarno.’ The report states: ‘Newly discovered cabinet papers show that British agencies, including MI6, had supported Islamic guerrillas and other dissident groups in an effort to destabilise Sukarno. The disorder fostered by the British led to General Suharto’s takeover and dictatorship and a wave of violence unseen since the

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Second World War.’ The cabinet documents and the confessions of the Foreign Office specialist were put together by a historian who has published his evidence in the journal ‘Intelligence and National Security’. His research shows that the head of MI6 was asked to draw up plans for covert operations in 1964 and these included supplying arms to separatists in Aceh and Sulawesi. Lord Healey stated, ‘I think that, to my horror on one occasion, they put forged documents on the bodies of Indonesian soldiers.’ His excuse for these policies was that they feared a coup against the Sultan of Brunei. Evidence such as this forces us to ask whether it is possible to imagine that the kafir forces would not have infiltrated the Arabian world to constantly destabilise and destroy any manifestation of an emergent Islam. What has to be grasped — and this is the very heart of this message — is that given the enormous importance of this issue and the high stakes in the oil commodities market, that the kuffar would never be naive enough simply to employ physical acts of subversion and not undertake profound spiritual and intellectual subversion in making war against true religion. Historically, this confrontation of kafir society with Islam begins with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. It was accompanied by ruthless campaigns which involved the slaughter of whole populations, and alongside that a sophisticated, and, for its day, quite investigative examination of the Deen of Islam. Napoleon adopted the masonic doctrine, ‘play at being believers’, and so he claimed that he was a Muslim among the Muslims. Just over a century later Mussolini was to make the same insulting claim during his invasion of Libya. With the western kafir nations’ struggle to get their hands on the oil supply it must be noted that from the beginning of these imperialist operations not only 60

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military agents were employed, like Shakespeare and Lawrence, but there grew up the Orientalists’ activity with the precise task of briefing the political activists in how best to control and deactivate the Muslims. However unpleasant this may be, the matter has to be confronted because only then will you grasp how profoundly you have been tricked. You have to realise that to recover your honour and your self-respect you must return to that ongoing and vibrant historical Islam which was dealt these almost lethal blows by the so-called ‘reformers and purifiers’ of the Deen. *

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Mention must now be made in greater detail of the Subcontinent of India. To understand the corrupting influence of the modernists, and the subsequent breaking-up into conflicting schools of Islamic teaching, one must not lose sight of that key element which is paramount in correct Islamic understanding. From the kafir point of view the destruction of the glorious Mughal Islamic rule was necessary. Once ‘Amr had been removed from the Indian polity, then from that moment Islam as a total phenomenon ceased to exist. However, a gifted and vibrant Muslim nation remained, but leaderless and devoid of those imposed elements of the Shari’at which grant not only nobility but security to the Muslim community. The British moved their capital from Calcutta and set up their rule from Delhi. Calcutta-based, the British still saw India as a commercial enterprise, but once the great Mughal had been defeated, imprisoned, and his family murdered, the jewish Prime Minister back in London, d’Israeli, convinced his adoring monarch to declare herself Empress of India. The 61

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creation of the Raj was to result in the establishment of a new group among the country’s elite alongside the landowners. Bankers, merchants and money-lenders came to make up ten percent of the landlord class, drawn largely from hindu bania castes. In Bareilly, the largest town in Rohilkhand, the British imposed a house tax. Mufti Muhammad Ewaz declared that where once the Muslims imposed Jizya on the kuffar, now the roles had been reversed. This meant, he said, that India was no longer dar al-Islam but had become dar al-Harb, opening the door to Jihad. This was in 1837. Thus, for the first half of the nineteenth century a ferment of debate and urgent examination of the condition of the Muslims resulted in contradictory Fatwas and dramatic personal ijtihad leading to a variety of responses, from open collaboration with the British, through positions which attempted to rescue something of the Deen, to outright conflict and the raising of the Green Flag of Jihad. For example the son of the great Shah Wali Ullah, Shah Abdalaziz Dehlawi gave an ambiguous judgment on the matter of naming India dar al-Harb, yet one which inspired a Jihad movement in the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab. The Maharajah of Mahmudabad, having seen at close quarters the terrible events of Lucknow, became Shi’a, in the conviction that their path was more militant. Dudhu Miyan Ibn Shariat Ullah tried to set up a series of local Khalifates to replace the imperial Mughal. Other ‘ulama, in despair, made hijra to the Hijaz, among them Hajji Imdad Ullah who was Pir to both Mawlana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Mawlana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, founders of the Dar al-‘Ulum at Deoband. In the face of the British government setting its administration in Delhi, the great Muslim capital of India, the ‘ulama retreated to small towns where the ruling presence of the British seemed 62

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to interfere less with the life of the people. So it was that some settled in Deoband, some in Gangoh, and some in Bereilly. The result of this was that the ‘ulama in the coming generations who lived under the Raj, that is under kafir rule and law, were taught an Islam that before anything was acceptable to the now well-briefed kafir government and would pose no threat. Significantly, the modernist and Ahl al-Hadith movement represented no challenge to the British. There never had been a social entity that could call themselves Ahl al-Hadith in the historic record of Islam. It was a satisfactorily non-political movement, which in the end could only produce academics and an educated minority following. The great madrasas of Deoband and Bereilly still contained within them the threat of revolt and the call for independence. The reason for this was that both these schools correctly held that their ‘ijtihad should be based on a committed taqlid to the fiqh of Imam Abu Hanif. The proof that the path of taqlid did not result in apathy, as the anti-Islamic dialectic claimed, was that men of both these schools made varied, relevant and significant ‘ijtihad in confronting the terrible implications of British kafir dominance and persecution. As we can now observe on a world-wide basis, alas, the shock to a Muslim people of losing the authority of Khalif, Sultan or Amir is the greatest of shocks. Correctly, a Fatwa is something produced by protected ‘ulama on the orders of an effective Amir. The legal and political implications of this mean that the legal judgment will then be ratified by the Amir and carried out under his command. A Qadi giving judgment under these circumstances is a very different thing from an ‘alim simply voicing his opinions on a matter as a personal response or when requested by other disenfranchised Muslims. Most importantly, this tensile energy produced by fear 63

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of Allah through giving judgments that will be acted upon produces a very special and high calibre of human being. Imam Malik, may Allah be pleased with him, would sit always where Khalif ‘Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, sat in the Haram of Madinah, maintaining a grave and intense expression. After hearing the evidence he gave judgment. The moment the judgment was given, the accused was taken out and the relevant punishment, if such was the case, was administered. Malik sat, silent and unmoving, until news was brought that the sentence had been accomplished. He then raised his eyes upwards and said in a strong voice, ‘Oh Allah! The judgment has been effected. Justice has been done. The innocent are protected and Madinah is safe.’ This is a different social phenomenon from the ‘alim giving his opinion from a mimbar or a minzah. The active Qadi is a man whose character increases in profundity and awe of Allah. The ‘alim who talks into the wind without seeing the imposition of his judgment retreats from the vital issues facing his people and turns more and more to elements that do not impinge on the social nexus, until he ends up completely trivialised. The ‘ulama of Deoband and Bereilly, standing firm as they did on all the essential elements of the Deen, yet avoiding the uncomfortable and humiliating reality that stared them in the face, could not do other than turn to secondary matters to give them a local authority, a limited power, and a politically impotent constituency. The question they avoided embodied the profoundest element in the Deen of Islam as it had been laid down through the Revelation and the Sunna. ‘How can we defend Islam without ‘Amr and not become a Shi’a, viewing the community of Truth as an exiled, persecuted and powerless 64

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remnant?’ Or viewed differently they could say, ‘What are the means that will restore Delhi to us, that is effective governance, an Islamic coinage, and a dar al-Islam?’ Avoiding the issue of ‘Amr they were unable to respond correctly to all the questions posed to them. The loss of the Amir means, legally speaking — unless you abandon Islamic fiqh — that the Dinar and the Dirham, and the weights and the measures will not be valid and guaranteed. If there is not the Madinan ‘Amal of Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham, then Zakat cannot be paid. If there is no Amir the Zakat collectors cannot be appointed nor can it be distributed according to the rules. In one blow vital Fara’id are abolished. The direct consequence of this is that the banner of Jihad will not be raised high and kafir rule remains assured. You cannot fail now to see the pattern. Remove the Muslim Sultan. Disband the army of Jihad. Close the Sufic tekkes and khanaqas. A twofold attack on the Sufis. Accuse them of primitivism from the modernist point of view, or accuse them of bid’a with the myth of ‘purification’ from a wahhabite point of view. Look at the historical record. An Islamic Sultan ruled. Zakat was collected. The Shari’at was imposed. The Tariqas unified the people, imbued them with love of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, gave the people pride in Islam, and engendered loyalty to the Sultan, an ever-ready army for Jihad. After the kafir incursion into Muslim lands an identical social de-construction can be identified. Deposition of the Sultan. Dismantling of Awqaf. The secularisation of education once the tekkes and madrasas were closed down. The transfer of Islamic studies to universities, awarding secular doctorates with masonic ritual. The abolition of Zakat. The introduction of worthless paper money to replace the real-money system of Islam. The introduction of usury banking 65

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— call it Islamic Banking, what does it matter, the institutions and the instruments are themselves usurious. Abolish Jihad — do the new Islamic Doctors not tell you that Islam means peace and tolerance? Under the ‘Amr of the Mughals there was no Deobandi school. There was no Bereilly school. There were no wahhabites. Both the Deobandi and Bereilly leadership belonged to Tariqas and were united in their holding to obedience to the Sultan, following their Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Chisti Shaykhs in upholding the Deen. They fought Jihad against the hindus and the sikhs. The British Raj, the Kemalists and the wahhabites held an identical agenda, and ruthlessly carried it out under the approving eye and rewarding hand of their kafir masters.

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Oh Arab people! It follows from this that it would be most unjust to suggest that it is only you who have grossly betrayed their Deen, and quite incorrect to suggest that only the Arabs were infiltrated and then betrayed by their kafir overlords. If we examine other parts of the Muslim world we find the same story repeated. Inescapably it must be admitted that the same methods, procedures and evaluations of the kuffar are applied to the Muslims. The destiny of the Arab peoples is however of special importance to all the Muslim Ummah. It is significant when one surveys the world scene of the Muslim community that only two regimes can claim a social identity that is based on legitimacy. The United Arab Emirates, although bearing a modern political morphology designed to guarantee that oil production remains in the hands of a controllable because small political and military entity, is nevertheless governed by the natural leadership of its own people. The rulers of each Emirate are the legitimate rulers and

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inheritors of their local territory and for this reason can boast a harmony and internal social integrity compromised only by the exigencies of the kafir financial system under which we all at present function, and which do not leave them free of the icy controlling hand of the world’s bankers. This qualification also applies to a historically more ancient and culturally more distinctive society, that of the Kingdom of the Maghrib. There, the legitimacy of the king stretches over centuries. Not only is the ruler a Sharif, but his grandfather’s restoration to power marked a devastating blow to French kafir colonial rule. The characterisation of King Hassan II as a tyrant may, indeed, be proven, yet with the passage of time the Moroccans become increasingly aware of his achievement in preserving both the nation and significant portions of its Deen and its Islamic scholarship. The King bore a relationship to Shakespeare’s Henry V, that is to say that the model of young Prince Hal as the playboy who is slowly transformed through the duties and struggles of kingship into the heroic leader Henry V, can be seen patterned in the life of King Hassan II. His father, after a great conflict, had won back Morocco for the Muslim people. The young King was the secure inheritor of these battles. The first picture we have of him is the Playboy King surrounding himself with courtiers who, while fulfilling his desires, begin to build for themselves a wealthy power base. As the years progressed and the natural authority of the King developed, the ambitions of his courtiers increased also. The historically inevitable happened when the very men closest to him tried to overthrow him. Stunned by the violence of the attempted coup d’État, the King took an undoubtedly ferocious revenge on those closest to him, although he wisely amnestied the junior officers concerned. 68

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The King came to realise that the only protection Morocco had was its Islamic heritage. The last years of his life proved quite remarkable. He began to strengthen the role of the ‘ulama and gave them a voice in a way that has not happened in any other country. Ramadan was celebrated with Morocco’s ruler every night on television in his palace, having lined up before him the leading ‘ulama of the country face to face with all his military high command, his government, his provincial governors and representatives of the people. The palace became a Zawiyya. The King led the dhikr, and every night a different ‘alim would give a discourse on the fiqh of Madinah. A young Turkish Muslim watching this observed with tears in his eyes, ‘Imagine this happening in Turkey!’ During the last Ramadan Gathering of the King’s life the Sufi leader of the indigenous Spanish Muslim community presented to the King their newly minted Gold Islamic Dinar and Silver Dirham and Five-Dirham pieces, minted according to the command of ‘Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, and thus having the correct weight for the legal calculation of Zakat payment. The King examined the coins carefully and expressed his heartfelt joy at receiving this significant gift. At the following day’s Ramadan Gathering before all his court and all the people of the Kingdom of Morocco, the King declared that the time had come to restore the fallen pillar of Zakat to the Deen of Islam in Morocco. He informed his people that instructions would be given to the ‘ulama and his government to examine the way to apply its legal obligations. There is no Muslim society without its errors, conflicts and betrayals. What must be recognised is that whatever King Hassan may be accused of, the achievement of his reign has been, despite massive financial attempts by the bankers to 69

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topple him and permit the purchase of the nation’s assets in a post-revolutionary Fire-Sale, as is their world-wide practice, that he warded off the modernist Islamic threat. That threat and its policy are that same slippery slope which we have identified in this review of Muslim affairs throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The King saved Morocco from being Algeria. The republic is the kafir mode of government preferred by the world banking hegemony, and the abolition of religion, or its anaesthetising, is its preferred mode of social evolution. In the Emirates the modernists and wahhabites who attack and most shamelessly slander Sufis are even more outspoken in their attacks on the ruling families, yet all that is done in private, while at every public occasion they rush forward to kiss the hands of the rulers in the hope of the preferments they may receive. They also maintain a disturbing relationship with the significant American intelligence presence in the area. So in Cairo. So in Islamabad. What King Hassan II undoubtedly saved Morocco from was the descent into hellish slaughter and civil war that became the destiny of Algeria, when it plunged into a spiral of events, one of the motor forces of which was reformist and wahhabite Islam. The present consensus of opinion on the beginning of the National Algerian Movement is that it was the work of a few men — in particular, a revolutionary, an Islamic leader, and a bourgeois. Without them it would not have been possible although the character and the thesis of each one was very different, forming a triad of opposing positions. The first, Messali Hadj (1898-1974) was a native of Tlemcen and a militant Third-Worldist who, like Ho Chi Minh and the notorious Michel Aflaq, received his political education in 70

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Paris. In his head fizzed that intoxicating cocktail which together spelled disaster: authoritarian centralism, the application of the term Jihad to a national struggle, a communistic view of the state, and a rhetoric of the Ummah. He was a believer in Pan-Arab nationalism. His party, the P.P.A. (Parti du peuple algérien) became the M.T.L.D. (Movement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques). During the war with France he formed the autonomous Organisation Spéciale, O.S., which prepared the armed insurrection. By 1954 the F.L.N. had separated from the M.T.L.D.. Messali Hadj then formed the M.N.A. (Mouvement national algérien) which fell into bloody rivalry with the F.L.N. The bourgeois was Ferhat Abbas (1899-1985). Married to a Frenchwoman, he was that modern phenomenon, a secularised Muslim who longed for assimilation into French society. In order to taste of these delights he first had to win the emancipation of the indigenous people. Do not forget that so complete was the social humiliation of the Algerians in their own country that they were unable to sit on the terraces of the cafés, and so one of the small but sweet fruits of their emancipation was to be able to sit at a café watching the crowd go by. On 10th February 1943 he launched the famous ‘Manifeste du peuple algérien’, which in 1946 became the charter of the U.D.M.A., ‘Union démocratique du Manifeste algérien’. This group still sought a negotiated settlement, but on 21st April 1956 he joined with the F.L.N. in Cairo. The Islamic leader was Shaykh Abdelhamid Ben Badis (18891940). He led the reformist movement and was a direct inheritor of that dismal philosophy which had spread like a virus from Cairo throughout the Muslim world. His bitter 71

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opposition was to the Maliki madhhab. Nowhere is it more clear that the reformists represent an anti-Islamic movement than when it manifests in a country which follows the madhhab of Imam Malik. Imam Malik’s Muwatta represents a detailed record of the practices of the people of Madinah under the tutelage of Khalif ‘Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, and the judgments of Sayyedetna ‘Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her. Properly speaking, the so-called madhhab of Imam Malik is by and large an extension of and extrapolation from the Umm al-Madhahib, defined by Ibn Taymiyya in respectful confirmation of its superiority over all legal judgments, as the Madhhab of the Ahl al-Madinah. Badis bitterly opposed the Muftis, the Imams of the mosques of Algeria, and the Sufi Zawiyyas. In 1936 the much respected Mufti of Algiers, a renowned Maliki scholar, was assassinated. Shaykh Taieb el-Okbi was arrested. He was one of the reformers. The French colonial writer Albert Camus rose to his defence in a series of articles. Camus was an atheist and nihilist who believed in an independent and secularised Algeria. What must be seen is that these three men worked together to a common end for an Islamic movement whose motto is Kitab wa Sunna, yet whose capacity to ignore the Sunna would be remarkable were it not matched by their capacity to disobey the Qur’an. The refusal of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to have the best of Arab fighters fight alongside him because he was not Muslim remains an inescapable limit to alliances. A significant part of the tragedy of modern Algerian history has been that the Muslims who had taken on the whole Deen of Islam allowed themselves to enter the independence movement 72

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which, although it used a rhetoric of Jihad, never could and never did raise high the Banner of Islam. The war was directed by its communist core, but the war could not have been won without the active and heroic participation as well as enormous suffering of the practising Muslim population, of whom only some of the city elite had deviated towards the modernist thesis. When the war was over the victorious F.L.N. set up its government under their communist leader, Ben Bella. The result of this was that a situation similar to Nasser’s Egypt emerged, that is a socialist leadership with a so-called Islamic system that was bonded to two doctrines which are anti-Islamic: Nationalism and Arabism. Under the communists the leading ‘ulama who were the inheritors and followers of Ben Badis were given the responsibility of ‘running Islam’ under the new centralised leninist state. The true Deen of Islam did continue to be taught in Saharan madrasas and in some mosques, but it was now renamed as if it were a strange sect — the Malikis! In the very centre of Algiers there is a small mosque which came to be known as the Maliki mosque, and this in a country which had maintained a vigorous Islam for centuries following the Madhhab of the Ahl al-Madinah. In all of this you must understand that with this transition from historical Islam to revised modernism there came a change in the power base of the society. Under the rule of Islam Algeria was basically self-governing, but with the Khalifate based in Istanbul both as its protector and its Court of Last Appeal in judicial matters. As the great jewish banking houses of Europe began their brilliant, original and magical method of expropriation of whole countries, the Islamic identity and capacities of the Osmanli Dawlat began to fall apart. The 73

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French acquisition of both Algeria and Morocco, while accompanied by military activities, as we have said is best described in modern bankist language as being leveraged buyouts. Before examining the issue of that wealth and its transference to the kuffar we must remain for the moment with the issue of governance and power. The truth is that the reformist ‘ulama who suddenly found themselves with their own country in their hands, and the colonial tyrants defeated and gone, made not the slightest effort to establish an Islamic polity. The false Ben Badis doctrines left them in the same helpless position as the one in which the Egyptian Ikhwan found themselves in the socialist Egypt of Nasser. In both cases the masses overwhelmingly embraced the new regime because the doctrines of national pride and Arab identity filled them with effulgence and took from them fear of Allah and love of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, since those two inextricably bound teachings had been swept aside in their ‘Islamic reformation’. As in everywhere that this insidious anti-Islam was established, the organic system of social welfare that was Awqaf was swept aside and its properties and wealth expropriated by the centralised state. So it was that the Ben Badis educated ‘ulama underwrote the atheist materialist system of the communist F.L.N. dictatorship and happily participated in submitting to its education of a whole generation who, but for the remaining Sufic enclaves and independent madrasas, frankly had no idea of Islamic teaching of Tawhid, or love of the Messenger and following him, let alone the proper Muslim adab. The question that must be asked is why, in the euphoria of victory over the French and in the first flush of independence, did these ‘ulama not raise high the Banner of Islam and establish a powerful 74

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Islamic state securely founded on the Shari’at? In other words, why did they not appoint a Sultan, set up empowered Qadis, mint the Islamic Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham of the correct Madinan weight, and restore the Zakat that they had blamed their French masters for denying them? Now, certainly, they could sit on the terrace of the café and drink their cooling drinks, but that was the only kind of freedom they had gained for all that bloodshed. In fact, the whole Badisi gang of ‘ulama submitted to Ben Bella’s order commanding them to attend courses in marxist-leninism. If the reformist Muslims had in fact possessed the formula of Islam in its Madinan splendour, Algeria would have been the model of the Islamic world. More importantly, the ghastly massacre of the innocents that has taken place in our time would have been prevented. The cause of the massacres has to be understood firstly, before an accusing hand is pointed at the perpetrators of them. If the wahhabite Islamic movement had not degraded the Deen of Islam by putting it forward as a political programme, with the Muslim leadership seen as standing on a political platform, thereby suggesting that the Islamic model could be arrived at as a matter of majority choice, and thus accepting that they would submit to its being rejected as a minority choice — if they had not participated in the sorry circus of democracy they would not have initiated with the materialist state the terrible cycle of violence. For this reason the primal responsibility falls on the head of this profound deviation by the wahhabites and modernists. As for the perpetrators of these terrible crimes, committed not against kuffar remember but against innocent Muslim men, women and children, their identity is a cause for bitter appraisal. Since I have fuqara in various cities and deserts throughout Algeria, I have been able to get as close to the truth 75

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as anyone can until this tragic affair has come to an end and it can be more fully investigated. The reports I have, and these sometimes from victims’ relatives, state that there is no doubt that the atheist regime’s military did commit some of the massacres. However it seems that in large part they were committed by wahhabite forces, some of whom had served and been trained in the war of Afghan national resistance. In this whole period of guerrilla warfare and set-piece massacres, one very disturbing fact emerges. The declared end of the rebels was to take command of the state, so why is it that in all this time not one single oil installation or pipeline has been targetted? This brings us to that recurrent theme that has haunted the Arab peoples throughout the last century and still does today. I mean, the protocols and passions that surround the wealth of the oil industry.

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Allah, glory be to Him, in His Book asks us: ‘Do you think that because you are muminun you will not be tested?’ There is no doubt that the great test of the Arab people, and indeed the whole Muslim world community, has been the presence and the role of petrol in our territories. Allah in His wisdom placed a significant majority of the world’s oil reserves under the feet of the Muslims. This was His test. Had the Muslims held to the path of historical Islam they would have recovered their senses and realised the astonishing trick that the kuffar were playing on them. Khalifate, Khums, Jizya, Zakat, Islamic Dinar and Dirham, and Jihad on the frontier — these would have unified the Muslims and transformed their enormous wealth through Halal instruments of exchange, commodities and real-value currency. Once the Muslims had turned their backs on their noble Imams, Imam Malik, Imam Abu Hanif and Imam Shafi’i, then by that token they had accepted an ‘ulama without fiqh and without a political leader. The Muslim world was put in

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chains and the Sword of Jihad was taken from them, and then the kuffar bound them in slavery, yet the chains were made of paper, and they called it money. The issue of oil ownership was originally considered a political matter, but even that illusion was firmly removed as the kafir system evolved to the point that they could declare it uniquely a commercial matter. Once the kuffar had designed the democratic political system for nations, power became vacuum-packed and unmenacing. So it was that that set of miserable little nations with its dictatorships which held out the evolutionary promise of being ‘raised up’ to be democracies became so preoccupied with this process, that they failed to realise that the wealth system was no longer in the hands of the political class. Socialism was finished and dictatorship was no longer needed, so the kafir power could turn over each little nation state when it was ready to impose the curse of democracy on it. What is the curse of democracy? It is that the currency and commodity markets are no longer in the hands of the elected government which is now simply in charge of policing and national shopping. The kafir elite live by absolute control of the paper currency system, itself a commodity, and all the other commodities like oil, diamonds, and heavy metals. These govern the world today, but only for the moment. Once you have grasped this essential matter and returned to acknowledging in dynamic existential terms that Allah has power over everything, and that for Allah bringing down their rule is easy, for while it seems total it is in reality more fragile than any tyranny before it, then with His help you can change everything. The manipulation of the oil market, which is entirely in the hands of the great oil corporations, has to script political 78

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scenarios in accordance with the needs and crises of that market. When Kuwait had the temerity to try to join the kafir club by opening a stock exchange it was cruelly punished, and in the shortest time, so that by simple manipulation it was brought to ruin. Unsure of market control, the Titans, as Jünger defined the new non-national power elite of banks and corporations, determined to take a more powerful grip on the petrol flow from the desert nations. It was a simple and overt gamble, far less complicated than many an imperialist war, and it was totally successful. Firstly, get Kuwait oil to practice lateral drilling across the frontier into Iraq. Allow an increasing dialogue of friction between the two countries, fuelled by Intelligence activity. At the point that the predictable ruler of Iraq threatens war, give diplomatic assurance at the highest level that he could get away with it. The moment he makes his move — strike! Desert Storm! In one highly successful kafir operation new weaponry was tested, Israel was released from the threat of Iraqi aggression, and Kuwait oil, in flames, was out of action for several years. Iraqi oil sales were blocked, first in punishment and then with the invention of the myth that the ruined nation was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. The kingdom of the rebel Saud family was bankrupted by the cost of the war, which they were forced to bear, and a massive military presence there was permanently established. Take out your map of the world. Sanctions against Iraq. Sanctions against Libya. Algeria paralysed by civil war. Nigeria blocked from commercial activity by power struggles. Indonesia mercilessly beaten into paralysis by agents provocateurs. A wahhabite infiltration plunging Afghanistan into an endless cycle of bloodshed and thus blocking a crucial pipeline. Last, but not least, the true story of Chechnya. 79

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Chechnya, more clearly than anywhere, exposes the twin strands that make up the enslaving rope that binds Muslim peoples, imperatives of oil in the kafir evaluation, and the abandonment of the imperatives of Islam in the face of an imposed wahhabism. Why was it, you must first ask, that the Russian kuffar were so desperately concerned to guard the remote mountain stronghold of a small people who had done nothing but cause them trouble for two hundred years? The maps reveal what the kafir political discourse tries to hide. Grozny was a vital stopping place on the great Caucasian pipeline. In the first Chechen War its heroes and its leadership were derived from families with a strong Sufic background, proudly boasting the Shaykhs in their ancestry. It was the sight of a villageful of women standing in a circle performing the Qadiri Hadra with profound intensity that made the Russian soldiers’ blood turn to vinegar. They had reason to be afraid. In 1985 Alexandre Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush, in a well-researched study entitled ‘Mystics and Commissars’, laid bare the kafir communist state’s battle against Islam as manifested by the Sufic Tariqas. Stalin’s regime, with the enthusiastic approval of the christian orthodox church, had tried to scatter communities bound by the Sufic Tariqas, and had sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulags, until in despair at the failure of his persecution, he simply moved a significant portion of the Chechen population to Siberia. In the Eighties the communists reckoned there were half a million Sufis in the Caucasus. The communist scholar Bazarbaev, in a detailed survey of the Muslim population, defined the Sufis as intolerant, militant and missionary. They refused any dialogue with atheists, and somehow evaded the ‘soviet psychological environment’. It should be remembered that the ‘official 80

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Islam’, that is the one accepted by the kafir dictatorship, sent a small hand-picked delegation every year to Hajj. This scandalous refusal to allow the Muslims of the whole of then southern Russia to fulfil their religious obligations was accepted in absolute silence by the wahhabite rulers of the Haramayn. Not only did they fail to use their enormous wealth and influence to allow the enormous numbers who would have made Hajj to do so, but they fêted and honoured the communist apparatchiks who presented themselves as the official Mullahs. With the end of the Khanate linking the Caucasus to Istanbul, the Sufic Shaykhs would set up a court of Shari’at and give rulings which were scrupulously obeyed by their people. The Jadidis, or wahhabite ‘ulama, as in every place, were happy collaborators with the kafir regime, and in some cases were K.G.B. agents. Bennigsen and Wimbush reported: ‘Soviet anti-religious propaganda is targeted particularly on the dhikr, which is thought by the propagandists to be one of Sufism’s more odious aspects. It is frequently attacked as being anti-Soviet and anti-Russian, unhealthy, and anti-social.’ The family of Saud would, of course, agree. The authors tell a charming tale of a Chechen village, Kurchaloy, holding five dhikrs simultaneously, one Naqshbandi and four Qadiri. On the same evening, three soviet dancing parties were held and one socialist realist movie, attended by ten to fifteen people. Perhaps even more encouraging was the report of another Russian social scientist investigating the Sufis of the northern Caucasus when he noted: ‘After the dhikr ceremony an adept is unfit for normal working activity. The Sufic rituals are the most nefarious of all social evils, and it is necessary to fight the Sufi organisations until their final extermination.’ This was the viewpoint of a society based on an 81

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atheist doctrine which has produced, according to the careful and conservative demographic study entitled ‘The Black Book of Communism’ by the distinguished historians Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek and Jean-Louis Margolin, a death-toll of 25 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and so on. Kufr is one system. Another Russian social scientist, Aliaskerov, in analysing the Sufis said that they were anarchic and petit-bourgeois and proclaimed the primacy of individual freedom. ‘According to this theory, a believer is responsible to God alone, and because the government — the Soviet government, not a bourgeois power — does not come from God, because it limits God’s will, it must not be obeyed.’ Bennigsen and Wimbush end their important monograph quoting a Russian scholar, E. Mallitski, who wrote from Tashkent in 1898: ‘Given the immobility of official Islamic dogmas, all intellectual movements in the Muslim world must cover themselves with the flag of Sufism. The renaissance of Islam can take place only under its influence.... Every new idea, any movement, political or religious, reactionary or revolutionary, will cover itself with the flag of Sufism.’ The authors then note: ‘These observations, although written in the last century, should command our attention today.’ The puppet regime which governs the Arabian Peninsula today is completely subservient to the Titans who make up that small multi-national community which wields supra-national power. That leadership is in turn obedient to a now well-defined and widely practised philosophy which derives from the atheist ethos of the last two centuries and whose main achievements were the French and Russian Revolutions. Wahhabism is one of its strategies. 82

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What happened in Chechnya? That Sufic army and people fought against the second greatest military power in the world, and won. As the victory came nearer, the kafir forces became seriously concerned and ordered the wahhabites to move in to de-fuse the implications and effect of a Sufic-Islamic victory. Within the shortest time after the accords were signed with the Russians ending hostilities, in meetings held in Paris with the then Vice-Premier Hodjakhmed Noukhaev, during which we had gained the generous support of the great French advocate Maître Jacques Vergès in order to lay down in international law those elements which could produce a final document of complete independence, I was shown a very disturbing document which had been prepared for the Chechen government. It contained many clauses which were to appear later in the humiliating Dayton Agreement that wiped out the Bosnian Muslims’ chance of self-government after their heroic victory. The document had been drawn up by one of France’s most famous jewish bankers. It laid out a Constitution and a series of political obligations which, when listed, totally secured the abolition of any political and financial Islamic identity to the Chechen people. The very first elements in the document included the anti-Islamic doctrine of Human Rights, a national bank, parity of all religious groups, the establishment of secular education at a state level, with the built-in assurance that if these principles were established, there would be an automatic and immediate request for a massive loan from the World Bank or the I.M.F., which most certainly would be granted. It was the Chechen’s ‘Dayton Agreement’. As can be directly verified from the Beniggsen-Wimbush references above, kafir society knew this could not be achieved without the destruction of the Sufis. A swift and increasing 83

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influx of wahhabites entered the Caucasus, setting up conflict among the excellent Chechen leadership, and at the same time recruiting young men to be taken to Madinah University for indoctrination. The result was that the Chechen people and its fighters were tricked into a second Chechen War. The Second Chechen War was in itself a concerted plan by the wahhabites to eliminate the power base of Shamil Basayev and the Sufic units loyal to him. It must be remembered that while Basayev was a dedicated Sufi, at the same time he saw himself as the defender of his own persecuted people. A so-called Jihad Group was formed to activate the conflict and also to entrap Basayev, who could be counted on not to abandon his men, the aimed intention being to wipe them out completely. So it was that in the command group, Basayev was not only outnumbered but obliged to carry out wahhabite strategies. Riyadh had infiltrated into the command structure the wahhabite Shaykh ‘Umar, from Riyadh and in its pay. The Dagestani based wahhabite, Shaykh Bahauddin, was one of the key authors of the Second War along with another spokesman, operating out of Istanbul. In three separate operations the wahhabite leadership entrapped Shamil Basayev and betrayed him. No member of the Arabian regime, that is neither minister nor diplomat, has been challenged by the media to explain the overt role of their government in a continuing series of tragic incidents involving the deaths of innocent people from Mindanao to Grozny. The result of wahhabite practice is clearly genocidal. The world knows the result, but it prefers to look away uncomfortably at what that result exposes. It exposes the unity of the kafir system. The European Union let the Russians see that they could complete the genocidal destruction of the brave 84

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Chechen people. The American president openly flirted with Yeltsin at an international conference, indicating thereby that he had a free hand in the continued slaughter. The Organisation of Islamic Conference, as ever, remained supremely irrelevant. The Titans insisted that the Russian president be replaced by a man that they could quickly brief to fulfil their complete financial and commodities programme for the Russian Federation. This new president gave orders for the total destruction of the city of Grozny, and only some days later was received with honour by the British Prime Minister. Almost the first act of the new Russian president was to order the destruction of the oil installation outside Grozny. The War was over, yet this was his first policy statement. Again, for a moment, the curtain was lifted on the new realities of power. The destruction of Grozny was a serious blow if you still held to the illusion that there was something called a Russian national economy. If what was at issue was the carving up and sharing among the Oil Titans their part in the revenues, research and development of the Asian pipeline system, then the Titans had won, and Riyadh could be congratulated on a further strengthening of their contribution to the Titans’ programme, and the success of their doctrinal commitment to the wiping out of Sufism, and therefore prevention of the continuance and revival of the true Islam that had survived since the foundation of Madinah al-Munawwara. It follows from this that the Islam that maintained a historic world reality from the time of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, until the fall of the Khalifate with its full splendour of Shari’at and Tariqat, sustained by Sultans who governed according to the Book of Allah and the ‘Amal of the Messenger’s Madinah, may Allah bless him and grant him 85

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peace, and may Allah soon set Madinah free, it follows that the true Islam remains the greatest fear of the kafir hegemony. It is also clear that the scenario of the wahhabites’ and the reformers’ pseudo-Islam presents absolutely no threat to them. It assures the splitting of Islamic activity into two separate and controllable phenomena. At the one extreme a limited ‘purist’ rebellion characterised by savagery and terrorism which can only attract a desperate and socially rejected minority. At the other extreme there is the castrated version of a ‘sweet’ Islam which on close examination is nothing other than a kind of theistic humanism, able to embrace ‘Rights of Man’ and a tolerance of every form of shirk and kufr, obediently confirming that jews, christians and Muslims are really all one. The significance of these two ‘kafir-licensed Islams’, and by that I clearly mean anti-Islams, is that neither one posits the intention and obligation to found a new society, and eventually civilisation, in obedience to the Divine and Prophetic commands, such as existed in the Eastern Khalifate, the Osmanli Dawlat, the Mughal Dawlat, the Sultanates of the Malay Archipelago, the Maghribi Kingdom, and the European Islamic civilisation of Andalusia.

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It is now possible, as has been demonstrated by this review of Arab affairs and their impact on the total Islamic world, to confirm that the wahhabites and reformers, whether by their false ‘aqida or their outright negation of the double shahada, had plunged Islam into defeat and achieved the abolition of the historical ‘Amal of its people. As a ‘pure’ minority in Egypt they were utterly rejected by the masses in favour of a socialistic materialism, only to see the people end up the slaves of kafir bankism. In Sudan they took power and managed to reduce this once wealthy country to helpless dependency on the kafir debt system, by which it acquired power over political government. The Arab illusion that government is power has been one of the results of their false ‘aqida. During a recent uprising in Fiji an American State Department official openly admitted the new doctrinal basis of the kafir

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hegemony. He said, ‘We do not recognise governments. We only recognise states.’ This brings to an end a historical method and practice that had been the foundation of all kafir civic discourse up until now. In real terms he was quite correct in confirming that now governments do not govern. However, the second part of the kafir shahada may at first appear metaphysical until one remembers that they are atheist materialists. What then, to them, is the state? It is neither a culture nor an amorphous polity. It must represent those boundaried institutions which control the wealth of that territory and its interface with the world outside. This means that the state is, de facto, its legal currency, and the utilisation of it by financial institutions. Since the webbing and networking of such institutions does not retain a national zoned characteristic, it follows that the state’s power is a twofaced reality. To the people, it presents a face which tells them that these institutions are national and their property, but its other face, which looks out on the world, assures that world of the wealth’s location inside the archives and storage vaults of the world banking hegemony. Against this utterly new historical situation a coup d’État put power in Sudan into the hands of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun faction. As I have indicated with detailed analysis in ‘Technique of the Coup de Banque’, taking the seat of political power and then sitting on it does not empower the one who is enthroned. Sudan remains an emaciated, starving, and debt-ridden society totally at the mercy of the bankers. When we proffered the path of true application of Islamic Law, and that does not entail either the shrouding of women in black bags or the sinister surgical activity of the modernists’ version of the cutting of hands, but rather putting into practice the Divinely and 88

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Prophetically ordained obligations of Zakat and Halal trade with the gold and silver Madinan currency, the Sudanese modernist leaders simply preferred to deal with the bankers. This meant that they preferred the Sudanese people to have their barren ideology rather than a chicken in the pot. In surveying the disaster of the Second Chechen War and the debacle achieved by the wahhabite insurgents who wrecked the Islamic society which was being formed by the victorious Sufic Muslims, and then condemned their people to a still undocumented horror that saw the total destruction of their capital, one disturbing factor of the equation remains to be assessed. Chechnya boasted a world-famous history of Islamic resistance against the kuffar over centuries through the power of the Sufic Tariqas which maintained the dynamic activism of the Deen through both kafir monarchy and dictatorship. Yet within a few months of wahhabism rearing its face actively in the Caucasus, a nation was plunged into its worst tragedy. Strictly speaking, it should be remembered that a form of wahhabism had in fact been actively supported by the kafir communists which found their Jadidi Movement absolutely no threat to the socialist programme. The question therefore remains, where did the wahhabites come from and who paid the bill? It is not difficult to understand what has happened, indeed much of the evidence comes from the corpses on the ground, which in every place where the wahhabites activity can be identified, are Muslim. Let us define the kafir version of events as overtly taught by the state media of the kuffar and the superbank spokesman. Foremost there is, to them, the mass of two billion disempowered Muslims for whom they hold out the promise of investment programmes, emergency relief, and the 89

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occasional dam project. They also recognise those states built on that false ‘aqida which has been laid bare in this text. The Organisation of Islamic Conference is their cynical solution to deal with unforeseen crises, that is to say an inter-governmental, ambassadorial arena for long speeches. Its members prefer to ignore the kafir shahada, ‘We do not deal with governments. We only deal with states.’ The kuffar gained access to the Muslims’ wealth by the abolition of Awqaf and Zakat and the introduction of the meaningless term ‘Islamic Banking and Investment’. This kafir model, if we politically apply the current theories of kafir cosmology, recognises the reality of disruption. By the application of ‘Chaos Theory’ they can in real terms preempt any uprising of an Islamic group of people by the activation of a counter-disruption which is both designed and controlled. In the same way that a dangerous volcanic eruption is prevented through a nearby underground explosion which opens up a vent for the lava to escape, so political scenarios can be set up to short-circuit any possibility of the empowerment of the Muslims in a specific place. Not for a moment should you imagine that this is ‘conspiracy theory’. On the contrary it is exactly as I have indicated, a response to a major explosion through a minor disruption. It is both pragmatic and posterior to a political event. The event can be an independence movement. The event can be an insurgent group. The response in every instance situates that event in the realm of extremism, fanaticism and terrorism. Because these policies of the kuffar often involve underground channels across nations and the recruitment of dubious personnel, the whole affair of what was once the broad social activity in which Muslims participated by founding the highest civilisations known has become reduced to the sordid intrigues 90

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and acted-out fantasies both of the radical groups and the secret services involved. In this matter it would be naive to fail to recognise the sameness between the Intelligence agents and the terrorists which is completely analogous to the relationship between the warders and the penitentiary prisoners. It follows from this that there has to be organised production of those active agents which can wipe out the possibility of the reappearance of Islam in all its glory. There has to be a source which manufactures both the theoretical system, the dynamic application, and the agents of the insurgency. It must now be faced that that centre of both theoretical and practical activity is the University of Madinah. The face these so-called ‘radicals’ present to the Muslims is simplistic but remarkably effective. They say, ‘The regime in Arabia is corrupt, they are agents of the Americans, but we are struggling to establish the true Deen, and in due course they will be dealt with, meanwhile this military operation or this civic outrage must be implemented.’ The full nature of this effective Nifaq is that their programmes can be carried out all over the world and yet never are applied inside Arabia. To grasp this simple duplicity a useful historical metaphor may be applied. In the nineteenth century, in order for the British to take out the wealth of China while leaving its populace bereft, it was necessary to find a social method to guarantee there would be no powerful uprising of the masses. The imperialist solution was twofold, one which would prevent rebellion and at the same time bring further wealth to the colonists. The British created a trade in opium, planted and harvested the poppies, extracted the opium gum, and sold it in the great cities of coastal China. As a result the urban communities were infested with opium dens, and addiction 91

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became a social reality. Politically this meant that the British were giving opium to the Chinese to drug them into passivity, yet it was a poison which they did not permit their own elite community to take. In exactly this way the wahhabite, kafirappointed ruler permits the export of wahhabite subversion and military adventure. It should be remembered that this same ruler, prior to the second Presidential elections to reinstate Reagan, sent a message begging the President to grant him American citizenship in order that he could cast a vote for him in the coming election. I know of one Chechen leader who went to Madinah University thinking he would acquire the Deen, but who left disgusted when he found out the true nature of their programme. Recall the Mauritanian ‘alim who resigned from the University in anguish. What he had foreseen was now in full operation: the indoctrination and guidance in the dismantling of historical Islam in a place, and the introduction in that place of some form of violent insurrection which would end in the destruction of that place, the slaughter of many of its people, and finally the successful and pacifying intervention of a world banking institution which would generously grant them a loan for reconstruction at generous interest rates. *

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In the Sahih Muslim, in the Kitab az-Zakat, we find the following Hadith coming through various chains of transmitters: ‘Abu Said Khudri reported that ‘Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, sent some gold alloyed with 92

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dust to the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, distributed that among four men, al-Aqra bin Habis Hanzali and ‘Uyaina bin Badr al-Fazari and ‘Alqama bin ‘Ulatha al-‘Amiri, then to one person of the tribe of Kilab, to Zaid al-Khair atTa’i, and then to one person of the tribe of Nabhan. Upon this the people of Quraish felt angry and said: ‘He gave to the chiefs of Najd and ignored us.’ Upon this the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: ‘I have done it with a view to conciliating them.’ Then there came a person with a thick beard, prominent cheeks, deep, sunken eyes, a protruding forehead and a shaven head. He said: ‘Muhammad, fear Allah.’ Upon this the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: ‘If I disobey Allah, who would then obey Him? Have I not been sent as the most trustworthy among the people of the world? Yet you do not repose trust in me.’ That person then went back. Someone among the people then sought permission for his murder. According to some it was Khalid bin Walid who sought the permission. Upon this the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: ‘From this very person’s posterity there will arise people who would recite the Qur’an but it would not go beyond their throats. They would kill the followers of Islam and would spare the mushrikun. They would pass through 93

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the teachings of Islam as hurriedly as the arrow passes through the prey. If I were ever to find them I would kill them like ‘Ad.’ Abu Sa’id al-Khudri said that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, made mention of a sect that would be among his Ummah which would emerge out of the dissension of the people. Their distinctive mark would be shaven heads. They would be the worst creatures or the worst of the creatures. The group who would be nearer to the truth out of the two would kill them.’ The shaven head is the well-known mark of the wahhabites and the ‘reformers’, something which up until then was abhorrent to the Muslims because of this well known rescension.

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Oh Arab people! It is time for renewal and beginning afresh. The cure lies in ‘Amal. And the best ‘Amal is the ‘Amal of Madinah. Now we know. Now we know that the Salafi Movement was a deception because it was not the way of the Salaf. The way of the Salaf was the way of the people of Madinah. Khalifate. Amirs in every land governing under the Shari’ah. Awqaf, the functioning social welfare system of the Islamic society. Zakat, taken in obedience to the Qur’anic command by its Collectors, and immediately distributed to the poor and the designated categories. The Islamic golden Dinar and the silver Dirham — the only Salafi currency history records — and Halal trade from unrented premises, and only the limited taxations of Kharaj and Jizya as existed in the days when Allah gave us power to govern, rule, and conquer. There is no power but from Allah, the Mighty, the Great. All these necessities are based on the Muslim people learning and knowing their individual worth and importance before Allah, glory be to Him.

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The Islamic society is not founded on an imposition of rules to create justice which is unaccompanied by guidance and rules to teach men to be just and behave in a way pleasing to Allah, glory be to Him. Shaykh al-‘Alawi, the Shaykh of my second Shaykh, Shakyh al-Fayturi, may Allah be pleased with both of them, said: ‘Sufism comes from cleaning the inward. The end is not realised except by correcting the beginning.’ Ibn al-‘Ashir, in his noble summary of Islam, Imam, and Ihsan, defined Sufism thus: ‘Immediate and open turning from every wrong action that has been committed is obligatory, and it is regret with the condition that he leaves it and does not persevere in it, and he must hurry to seek forgiveness. The summary of Taqwa is avoidance, and obedience in the outward and in the inward. So the categories come in four, truly it is the path of benefit for the traveller. He lowers his eyes from what is forbidden, he stops his ears against wrong speech, like slander, backbiting, false testimony, and lies. His tongue is under more pressure to leave what has been mentioned, he protects his stomach from the forbidden and leaves what is doubtful conscientiously, he protects his private parts, and he fears the Recorders when it comes to the grasp of, or movement toward, something forbidden which he might want. He stops matters until he 96

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knows what Allah has decreed to be done in them. He purifies his heart of showing off, jealousy, vanity, and every sickness. Know that the root of these disasters is love of leadership and avoidance of responsibility for what comes. The fountainhead of faults is love of this world. There is no cure except to be in need of Him. He keeps company with a Shaykh who knows the paths, who will protect him from perils on his road. He reminds him of Allah when he sees him and he takes the slave to his Lord. He takes the self to account for its breaths and he weighs the inclinations in the scale. He guards the obligatory, which are the capital, and extra acts of worship are his profit, by it he befriends. He increases invocation by his pure core, and has help in all this by his Lord. He fights the self for the Lord of the Worlds, and he delights in the stations of certainty. Fear, and hope, and thanks, patience, turning from wrong actions, doingwithout, reliance, contentment, and love. He is sincere with the witnessing angel in his dealings, and he is content with whatever Allah has decreed for him. He then becomes a free Gnostic, and other-than-Him has left his heart, so the Lord has loved him and chosen him for the presence of the perfectly pure, and has attracted him. My Shaykh, and the Shaykh of my suluk, the renowned Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, gives proof of this obligation referred 97

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to by Ibn al-‘Ashir, in His word, may He be exalted: ‘Oh you who have Iman, fear Allah and be with the Sadiqun.’ He also referred to His saying, may He be exalted, ‘Follow the path of whoever turns away from self to Me.’ In the Introduction to his blessed Diwan he declared: ‘By Allah and by Allah we have not passed through a city, a village, or a desert, but that the people testified that love had come to them and life flowed in their hearts. Such is the secret of Allah’s Idhn. Praise be to Allah, no faqir has sat with us without gaining a knowledge that was not his before, and getting from it humility and a contrite heart. No murid of the Tariqa has sat with us without a strengthening of his innate condition and the heightening of his himma in the quest for gnosis of Allah. There has been no Shaykh of the Shaykhs of the age who has not increased in his immediate tasting and gained something of benefit which he did not have before. All that is from the secret of the Idhn and its baraka.’ It is known to all of you that the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, told his Companions that there was a piece of flesh in man’s body which, if it could be guaranteed, would assure a man his place in the Jannah. He referred of course to the heart. It is by assuring that the hearts are sound that the great victory is achieved, and Allah, the Mighty, the Great, has told us that it is by Dhikr that the heart is made tranquil. The heart in tranquillity can reflect on the splendour of the creation which glorifies the Creator and can recognise 98

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that all the actions, despite their multiplicity, belong to the Actor, that all the attributes, both the outward and the inward, unify in His Attributes. Then the one who desires knowledge is filled with yearning and with longing to realise his secret and to enter the Presence of Lordship, until he comes to the unveiling of the oneness of the Essence which cannot be contemplated but which depends on the disappearance of the lover. All this affair is a matter of tasting and recognition by experience, and not by text and information and memory. Shaykh Moulay Abdalqadir al-Jilani declared, ‘He who does not have a Shaykh as a master will have Shaytan as a master.’ Thus, first in the struggle against the nafs, the appetites and Shaytan, the seeker needs a Shaykh to remind him of Allah and guide him to his own knowledge that awaits him. Later he guides him, in his inward journey to the King, to prevent him staying in any station of unveilings and secrets which might lure him from arriving at the true Tawhid which leads him to the knowledge of his nonexistence in the Light of His Existence, the Ever-Continuing. We have seen a century of rulership in the Muslim lands, and unthinkable though it is, also the Arab lands, in which the ruler has had Shaytan as a master. We call on the Arab people to begin the path to recovery of Islam, and that is only possible by the recovery of their own individual hearts. That in turn is dependent on recognising that Islam is not just a series of rules and personal discipline, but something much greater and glorious because of the generosity of Allah, glory be to Him, and the compassion and concern of our Master, Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. He has given us the capacity to have knowledge of Him, directly from Him, and He is the One with nothing associated with Him, neither you nor 99

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I, for He is One without partner. It is this one who has grasped the true Tawhid, immersed in the love of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, fearing Allah, and loving with His love and hating with His hate, it is this one and his brothers and sisters who can build a great Islamic civilisation in this world, of justice and honour, which in itself is the evidence of the great gain awaiting in the Unseen, and the Certainty which is the victory of the meeting with our Lord, glory be to Him. To begin the path of recovery, we pray the du’a of Shaykh Muhammad ibn Nasir, the renowned Nasiri Du’a.

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THE NASIRI DU’A

In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, Compassionate May Allah bless our Master Muhammad and his family.

O You to Whose mercy one flees! You in Whom the one in need and distress seeks refuge! O Master, You Whose pardon is near! O You Who help all who call on Him! We seek Your help, O You who help the weak! You are enough for us, O Lord! There is nothing more majestic than Your immense power and nothing mightier than the might of Your force. Kings are humbled to the might of Your domain and You lower or elevate whomever You wish.

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The entire affair returns to You, and the release or conclusion of all matters is in Your hand. We have presented our affair before You, and we complain to You of our weakness. Have mercy on us, O You Who know our weakness and continue to be merciful. Look at what we have experienced from people! Our state among them is as You see. Our troops are few and our wealth is little. Our power has declined among groups. They have weakened our solidarity and strength and diminished our numbers and our preparation. O You Whose kingdom cannot be pillaged, give us shelter by Your rank which is never overcome! O Succour of the poor, we trust in You! O Cave of the weak, we rely on You! You are the One on Whom we call to remove our adversities, and You are the One we hope will dispel our sorrows. You have such concern for us that we cannot hope for protection which comes through any other door. We rush to the door of Your bounty and You honour the one You enrich by Your gift. 102

–The Nasiri Du‘a–

You are the One Who guides when we are misguided. You are the One Who pardons when we slip. You have full knowledge of all You have created and encompassing compassion, mercy and forbearance. There is no one in existence more lowly than we are nor poorer and more in need of what You have than us. O You of vast kindness! O You Whose good encompasses all mankind, and no other is called on! O Saviour of the drowning! O Compassionate! O Rescuer of the lost! O Gracious Bestower! Words are lacking, O Hearing, O Answerer! The cure is difficult, O Swift! O Near! To you, our Lord, we have stretched out our hands and from You, our Lord, we hope for kindness. Be kind to us in what You decree and let us be pleased with what pleases You. O Allah, change the state of hardship for ease and help us with the wind of victory. Give us victory over the aggressors and contain the evil among those who asked for it. Overpower our enemy, O Mighty, with a force which disorders them and crushes them. 103

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Overturn what they desire and make their efforts fail, defeat their armies and unsettle their resolve. O Allah, hasten Your revenge among them. They cannot stand before Your power. O Lord, O Lord, our protection is by Your love, and by the might of Your help. Be for us and do not be against us. Do not leave us to ourselves for a single instant. We have no power of defence nor have we any device to bring about our benefit. We do not aim for other than Your noble door, and we do not hope for other than Your encompassing bounty. Minds only hope for Your blessing by the simple fact that you say ‘Be’ and it is. O Lord, O Lord, arrival is by You to what You have and seeking the means is by You! O Lord, You are our high pillar of support! O Lord, You are our impregnable fortress. O Lord, O Lord, give us security when we travel and when we remain. O Lord, preserve our crops and herds, and preserve our trade and make our numbers more! 104

–The Nasiri Du‘a–

Make our land a land of the Deen and repose for the needy and the poor. Give us force among the lands as well as respect, impregnability and a polity. Appoint it its might from the protected secret, and grant it protection by the beautiful veiling. By sad, qaf and nun, place a thousand veils in front of it. By the rank of the light of Your noble Face and the rank of the secret of Your immense kingdom, And the rank of ‘la ilaha illa’llah’ and the rank of the Best of Creation, O our Lord, And the rank of that by which the Prophets prayed to You and the rank of that by which the Awliya’ pray to You, And the rank of the power of the Qutb and the Awtad and the rank of the Jaras and Afrad, And the rank of the Akhyar and the rank of the Nujaba’ and the rank of the Abdal and the rank of the Nuqaba’, And the rank of every one worshipping and doing dhikr and the rank of everyone praising and giving thanks, And the rank of everyone whose worth You elevated, both those who are concealed and those whose renown has spread, 105

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And the ranks of the firm ayats of the Book and the rank of the Greatest Supreme Name, O Lord, O Lord, we stand as fuqara’ before You, weak and lowly. We call to You with the supplication of the one who calls on a noble Lord who does not turn aside those who call. Accept our supplication with Your pure grace, with the acceptance of someone who sets aside the fair reckoning. Bestow on us the favour of the Generous, and show us the kindness of the Forbearing. O Merciful, extend Your mercy over us and spread Your blessing over us, O Generous. Choose for us in all our words and select for us in all our actions. O Lord, make it our habit to cling and devote ourselves to the resplendent Sunna. Confine our manifold desires to You and grant us full and complete gnosis. Combine both knowledge and action for us, and direct our hopes to the Abiding Abode. O Lord, make us follow the road of the fortunate and make our seal the Seal of the Martyrs, O Lord! 106

–The Nasiri Du‘a–

Make our sons virtuous and righteous, scholars with action and people of good counsel. O Allah, remedy the situation of the people and, O Allah, make the reunification easy. O Lord, grant Your clear victory to the one who takes charge and empowers the Deen, And help him, O You Who are forbearing, and help his party and fill his heart with what will make him pleasing to You. O Lord, help our Muhammadan Deen, and make it end mighty as it began. Preserve it, O Lord, through the preservation of the scholars, and raise the minaret of its light to heaven. Pardon, grant well-being, make up for our deficiency and forgive our sins and the sins of every Muslim, O our Lord. O Lord, bless the Chosen One with your perfect prayer of blessing. Your prayer is that which grants success in his business as befits his lofty worth. Then bless his noble family and glorious Companions and those who have followed them. Praise belongs to Allah by Whose praise those with an aim completely fulfil that aim. 107

POSTSCRIPT

INTRODUCING THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM

by Ra’is ‘Umar Ibrahim Vadillo

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From the beginning of Islam until the fall of the Khalifate the Dinar and the Dirham were the Shari’ah currency of the Ummah.

THE HISTORY OF THE ISLAMIC DINAR AND DIRHAM In the beginning the Muslims used gold and silver by weight and the Dinar and Dirhams that they used were made by the Persians. The first dated coins that can be assigned to the Muslims are copies of silver Dirhams of the Sasanian Yezdigird III, struck during the Khalifate of ‘Uthman, radiallahu ‘anhu. These coins differ from the original ones in that an Arabic inscription is found in the obverse margins, normally reading ‘In the Name of Allah’. From then on the writing in Arabic of the Name of Allah and parts of Qur’an on the coins became a custom in all mintings made by Muslims. Under what was known as the coin standard of the Khalif ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the weight of 10 Dirhams was equivalent to 7 Dinars (mithqals). In the year 75 (695 CE) the Khalif Abdalmalik ordered AlHaddjadj to mint the first Dirhams, thus he established officially the standard of ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab. In the next year he ordered the Dirhams to be minted in all the regions of the Dar al-Islam. He ordered that the coins be stamped with the sentence: ‘Allah is Unique, Allah is Eternal’. He ordered the removal of human figures and animals from the coins and that these be replaced with letters. This command was then carried on throughout all the history 110

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of Islam. The Dinar and the Dirham were both round, and the writing was stamped in concentric circles. Typically on one side was written the ‘tahlil’ and the ‘tahmid’, that is, ‘la ilaha illallah’ and ‘alhamdulillah’, and on the other side was written the name of the Amir and the date. Later on it became common to introduce the blessings on the Prophet, salallahu ‘alayhi wa salem, and sometimes ayats of the Qur’an. Gold and silver coins remained official currency until the fall of the Khalifate. Since then, dozens of different paper currencies have been made in each of the new post-colonial national states created from the dismemberment of Dar al-Islam.

THE QUESTION OF PAPER MONEY Allah says in Surat Al’Imran: Among the People of the Book there are some who, if you trust them with a pile of gold, will return it to you. But there are others among them who, if you trust them with a single Dinar, will not return it to you, unless you stay standing over them.

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Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-‘Arabi, the greatest authority on Qur’anic Law, wrote in his famous ‘Ahkam al-Qur’an’ about this ayat: ‘The benefit that can be taken from this is the prohibition of entrusting the People of the Book with goods.’ Qadi Abu Bakr said: ‘The question concerning entrusting property is legislated by the text of Qur’an.’ This means that the ayat is a legal judgment of absolute validity and of the greatest importance to the Deen. Entrusting wealth to non-Muslims is not allowed, but furthermore, taking a non-Muslim as a partner outside Dar alIslam (where we stand over them) is extremely restricted, because they might cheat or might use our wealth in forbidden transactions. Since paper-money is a promise of payment, can it be permitted to trust the issuers while they hold the payment (our property) outside our jurisdiction? History has also demonstrated repeatedly that paper money has been a permanent instrument of default and cheating the Muslims. In addition, Islamic Law does not permit the use of a promise of payment as a medium of exchange.

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WHAT ARE THE ISLAMIC DINAR AND DIRHAM? According to Islamic Law... The Islamic Dinar is a specific weight of gold equal to 4.25 grams. The Islamic Dirham is a specific weight of silver equal to 3.0 grams. ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab established the known standard relationship between them based on their weights: ‘7 Dinars must be equivalent to 10 Dirhams.’ How can I use them? 1. I can save them because they are wealth in themselves. 2. I can pay Zakat and dowry as they are requisite within Islamic Law. 3. I can buy and sell with them since they are a legitimate medium of exchange.

IBN KHALDUN ON THE SHARI’AH CURRENCY ‘The Revelation undertook to mention them and attached many judgments to them, for example Zakat, marriage and hudud, etc., therefore within the Revelation they have to have a reality and

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specific measure for assessment [of Zakat, etc.] upon which its judgments may be based rather than on the non-Shari’i [other coins]. ‘Know that there is consensus [ijma] since the beginning of Islam and the age of the Companions and the Followers that the Dirham of the Shari’ah is that of which ten weigh seven mithqals [weight of the Dinar] of gold. ... The weight of a mithqal of gold is seventy-two grains of barley, so that the Dirham which is seven-tenths of it is fifty and two-fifths grains. All these measurements are firmly established by consensus.’ Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah

HOW TO USE THE ISLAMIC GOLD DINAR TO SAVE Gold and silver are the most stable currency the world has ever seen. From the beginning of Islam until today, the value of the Islamic bimetallic currency has remained surprisingly stable in relation to basic consumable goods: A chicken at the time of the Prophet, may Allah bless him

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and grant him peace, cost one Dirham. Today, 1,400 years later, a chicken costs approximately one Dirham. In 1,400 years inflation is zero. Could we say the same about the dollar or any other paper currency over the last 25 years? In the long term the bimetallic currency has proved to be the most stable currency the world has ever seen. It has survived, despite all the attempts by governments to transform it into a symbolic currency by imposing a nominal value different from its weight.

TO PAY ZAKAT Zakat cannot be paid with a promise of payment Zakat can only be paid with tangible merchandise, called in Arabic ‘ayn. It cannot be paid with a promise to pay or a debt, called in Arabic dayn. From the beginning the Zakat was paid with Dinars and Dirhams. Most significant is that the payment of Zakat was never allowed in paper money during all the Osmanli period right up until the fall of the Khalifate. Shaykh Muhammad ‘Illish (1802-1881), the great Maliki Qadi, said that if you were to pay Zakat with paper-money, only its value as merchandise (dayn), that is, its value as paper would be

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accepted. Therefore, its nominal value is irrelevant in payment of Zakat. The return to the payment of Zakat in gold and silver is an essential part of the re-establishment of Islam. ‘If the Zakat was obligatory by considering its substance as a merchandise, then the nisab would not be stipulated according to its value but according to its substance and its quantity, as is the case with silver, gold, grain or fruits. Since its substance [paper] is irrelevant [in value] in respect to the Zakat, then it should be treated as copper, iron or other similar substances.’ Shaykh ‘Illish

TO BUY AND S ELL The Dinar and the Dirham are the currency of the Islamic Ummah. No more hundreds of different paper currencies diseased with inflation. A piece of gold is equally valid wherever you are in the world. In the past, Muslims were able to travel throughout the Islamic world and trade with Dinars, as they could at home. From the 15th century onwards the Europeans started to introduce the banking promissory note into Muslim lands. Paper money gave European traders an incredible purchasing power that

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

overwhelmed and eventually surpassed the Muslims’ superiority in world trading. Gold was money well into this century, and for at least two centuries before, most bonds, including governmental ones, were gold bonds. But after the First World War, since the financial demands of the war had led governments to print paper money in excess, the convertibility to gold was at first suspended for the most part, then finally terminated.

HOW IMPORTANT ARE THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM TO THE DEEN OF ISLAM? Al-Qurtubi (d. 1273), one of the greatest commentators of Qur’an, wrote in his renowned Tafsir about the following ayat of Qur’an, ‘O you who believe! Obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in command among you. ...’

that the ayat is an order to ‘obey the Sultan with respect to seven things: the minting of the Dinar and the Dirham, fixing weights and measures, legal judgments, Hajj, Jumu’ah, the two ‘Eids and Jihad.’

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The minting of the Dinar and the Dirham is therefore the first obligation of the Sultan to be commanded and to be followed.

RELIABILITY Gold cannot be inflated by printing more of it. It cannot be devalued by government decree, and unlike paper currency it is an asset which does not depend upon anybody’s promise to pay. Portability and anonymity of gold are both important, but the most significant fact is that gold is an asset that is no-one else’s liability. All forms of paper assets: bonds, shares, and even bank deposits, are promises to repay money borrowed. Their value is dependant upon the investor’s belief that the promise will be fulfilled. As junk bonds and the Mexican peso have illustrated, a questionable promise soon loses value. Gold is not like this. A piece of gold is independent of the financial system, and its worth is underwritten by 5,000 years of human experience.

FATWA ON PAPER MONEY Paper Money is not a legal medium of exchange. If paper money is a debt representing a merchandise (dayn): The debt must have a definition of what is owed. But even if it is defined as a proper debt, a debt cannot be used as a medium of exchange. Concerning paper-money as wealth entrusted to non-Muslims, this is not allowed.

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

If paper money is tangible merchandise (‘ayn): Its value corresponds only to its weight as paper. Equally we take the value of the Dinar by its weight not by its nominal value. Either way, paper money cannot be accepted as a medium of exchange.

AN INSTRUMENT OF TYRANNY We have heard economists saying: ‘We need a flexible currency,’ ‘We need a currency that can be expanded or contracted according to the needs of the economy,’ ‘An increase in currency will quicken industry.’ These are all fallacies to justify the insolvency of the issuers of the notes in order to avoid their obligations to pay. There is, in truth, a great charm in the idea of being able to pay off all our needs, satisfy all the government expenses and to make the whole community prosperous, just by printing a few characters on bits of paper. But when a man is capable of believing that, he will believe anything. Another fallacy to justify theft is to say: ‘It is an emergency’ — indeed a war can influence anybody to accept what appear to be solutions. After the emergency comes the semi-emergency of a crisis, or an almost-emergency time or an almost-normal time. In every case our individual rights are no longer in our hands.

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Any failure to repay in whole or in part what is due by the promissory note is but a form of theft.

THE RING - The trap and decay of the Khalifate Up until the 15th century the Muslims were in total charge of world trading. From then on the Europeans started to take over by the power of the ring. The ring is a simple mathematical equation, which, as mentioned by Richard Wagner in his famous opera, gives total power to the person who uses it, although it contains a curse: ‘Whoever uses it will never be loved.’ Power was not wielded by gold, but by storing it in a guarded cave. People slaved to mine it, but were ruled by whoever possessed the ring. This mathematical formula attached to debt and symbolic money destroyed the Muslim Khalifate. This mathematical formula is what banking is all about. The formula needs a pre-condition: the existence and acceptance of symbolic money. Then it consists of lending ‘at interest’ symbolic money they [the banks] do not have. By lending 20 times more than they have, all repayments of 10% become in accounting like 200% (20x10%). We pay 10%, but they collect 200% of what they originally had.

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

1 Dollar x 20 Real Profit = 200%

20 Dollars 2 Dollars

10% nominal interest

But if everyone seems to win, who is the loser? The losers are all passive holders of the currency who will suffer the inflation originated by the money created out of nothing. That is it! Once the Muslims accepted their symbolic money they inadvertently authorised the magical system which gave the banks a previously undreamed of world dominion. The ring did not just conquer the states, its power was so fascinating, that it transformed the states into banks. And the states became banks This convenient method of ‘coining credit’ was soon discovered by the governments and they issued their own promissory notes in payment of their expenses; a resource all the more useful, because it was the only mode in which they were able to borrow money without paying interest, their promises to pay on demand being, in the estimation of the holders, equivalent to money in hand. The governments, incapable of containing their own expanding deficits, then created the legal money. The law of legal tender established that all money issued by the issuing authority must be accepted by force in payment of any debt.

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The legal money abolished the contractual law that guaranteed the freedom of the people to choose and imposed on the citizens an artificial currency with a legal value established by the government.

THE RETURN TO GOLD In the beginning there was gold

then paper was issued as a promise to pay in gold = and finally the issuers broke their promise and transformed paper into a non-redeemable official note.

We should now reverse the process...

governments should freely convert their currency, = and finally eliminate all paper currency.

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

MONEY, A COMMODITY OR A SYMBOL? Until the beginning of the 20th century the most popular and universal medium of exchange was gold and silver coins. Currency was considered to be as flexible as any other merchandise. People responding to their own particular needs demanded the coins and also offered them, thus their market value was established daily. Today money is represented by pieces of paper as non-redeemable official notes whose quantity can be increased at will. This symbolic money originated from private contracts or promises to pay issued by goldsmiths and later by banks. The debate that divides the defenders of gold and silver and their adversaries is not new, it has been going on for more than three centuries.

TWO VIEWS: 1) Money is a symbol and not a commodity: •‘It is the denomination of the currency of the money that men regard in bargaining, not the quantity of silver. It is the public authority upon the metal that makes it money.’ (Nicolas Barbon, 1696) •‘Money is a symbol of a thing and represents it.’ (Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, 1748)

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• ‘Money is the symbol of all commodities.’ (FrançoisVeron de Forbonnais, 1776) • ‘All monetary functions which are usually performed by gold and silver coins, may be performed as effectively by a circulation of inconvertible notes having no value but that fictitious and conventional value... they derive from law.’ (John Fullarton, 1848) 2) Money is a commodity and not a symbol: • ‘Silver and gold, coined or uncoined, though they are used for a measure of all other things, are no less a commodity than oil, tobacco, cloth or stuffs.’ (Josiah Child, 1689) • ‘Money is not a mere symbol, for it is itself wealth; it does not represent values, it is their equivalent.’ (Guillaume-François Le Trosne, 1777) • ‘Gold and silver have value as metals before they are money. The coins which today have a merely ideal denomination are in all nations the oldest; once upon a time they were all real, and because they were real, people reckoned with them.’ (Fernando Galiani, 1803) • ‘The false definitions of money may be divided in two main groups: those which make it more and those which make it less, than a commodity.’ (Wilhelm Roscher, 1858)

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

SOME COMMON FALSE OBJECTIONS TO GOLD & SILVER AS A MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE In any debate about gold and silver, certain objections are repeatedly raised by opponents of monetary freedom, even though those objections have been refuted many times before. Some of these objections are: •There is not enough gold. •Russia and South Africa, since they are the principal producers, will benefit. •Gold is subject to undesirable speculative influences. •Gold will produce instability in prices. The first objection, that there is not enough gold, is based upon a misunderstanding of the price of gold. It assumes that the present exchange ratio between a weight of gold and notes is the exchange ratio that must prevail when the gold is made a medium of exchange. Such is obviously not the case. To put it simply, lower prices under gold currency will eliminate the necessity for larger sums. One could buy a suit that costs 400 paper units with 20 gold equivalents at a different exchange ratio. The second objection, concerning Russia and South Africa, is equally groundless. It could be considered an advantage, in the same way oil or a fertile soil could be, in comparative terms. The amount of gold already taken out of the earth in the last two thousand years is already superior to the known but unminted reserves of Russia and South Africa. The unminted reserves of Russia are estimated to be about 250 million ounces which is less than what the United States already has in minted 125

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reserves. The demand for gold as a medium of exchange will release the existing hoardings, a process which is already in vogue in most central banks. The third objection, that gold is subject to speculative influence and therefore too unstable to be used as a medium of exchange, is also false. During the 1970s, gold became a major hedge against inflation. The run-up in gold prices from $35 to $850 per ounce came as a result of fears about the value of papermoney and developing international crises. People who object to gold because it is speculative confuse cause and effect. The real speculation is provoked by an irredeemable paper-money system and people who logically want to protect themselves from it. The fourth objection says that gold will produce instability in prices. Comparing prices in gold in the U.S. in 1833 with 1933, just prior to the abandoning of the domestic gold standard, the index of wholesale commodity prices increased only 0.9 percent in one hundred years! Since then the index had increased 350% by 1971, when President Nixon, declaring international bankruptcy, announced that no more gold would be given in exchange for dollars. In the last twenty years the index has gone up around 400%. Gold is therefore stable and fit to be money, and history has shown us that there is no money more unstable or unfit than paper-money.

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

THE EFFECT OF THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM ON BUSINESS Paper-money, which does not render any service except in exchange for something productive, is made artificially productive by interest. On the other hand, every genuine enterprise, like the use of a house or a manufacturing process, can only be productive by the services rendered to society. Interest competes and wins over genuine enterprises profitable to society. The genuine business has to pay the interest out of the profit from a genuine service to society, but the bank makes profit out of the interest through the artificial expansion of the money lent. The final result is that the higher the interest rates the greater the destruction of ‘less competitive’ businesses.

THE EFFECT OF THE RETURN OF THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM WILL BE: The shift of capital investment from the most ‘speculative areas’ to the more productive areas. As a result a new landscape associated with the Dinars and the Dirhams will re-emerge, that is, the world of Islamic Trading.

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A new re-start for trading will come about through the restoration of two of its most representative but lost institutions:

the market-place which will replace supermarkets and the caravans which will replace monopolistic distribution

And the return of the guilds, that is, associated independent intelligent work-teams, in which the relationship master/apprentice will replace employer/employee

THE EFFECT OF THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM ON REAL ESTATE Today you want to buy a house and a bank will offer you a mortgage. This is how the ring distorts the operation: The annual rent of a house is 10% of its value, but, the same money is offered by the bank at 5%, which considering inflation is a bargain! Why would the bank be so generous, when it could rent the house and obtain the house plus a higher 10% return? This is the paradox of the ring. Out of that 5% interest the bank will make a 100% profit with the mathematics of the ring.

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–Introducing the Dinar and Dirham–

The borrower thinks that the interest is better than paying the rent, the bank makes a higher profit out of expanding money — who loses? — All the holders of the newly inflated currency by its loss of value (inflation). A house can be rented, it is a hireable merchandise. Money cannot be rented, it is a non-hireable merchandise. Profit and rent come only from real services to society — this is the end of speculative economy and the beginning of real prosperity to society. This is because investment will have to be directed towards real services, instead of being drawn by the artificial profit of the ring which like a parasite lives off real services. Without the mortgage, housing prices will simply find a new stability established by the equilibrium between the offer and a new demand based on what people can really pay. ‘Money is something which it is not permissible to hire.’ (Imam Sahnun, in the great Madinan text, ‘Mudawwana al-Kubra’, 12:46)

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THE DINAR AND DIRHAM IN CONTEMPORARY USAGE The Islamic Mint is now minting the Islamic coins in five different countries, while gold is used as a medium of exchange by thousands of people in at least 60 countries. In order to facilitate trading between these people, Islamic Mint created the first Islamic Wakala. This traditional form of contracting between a wakil (agent) and a muwakkil (principal) using modern telecommunications will replace the usurious banking system as a system of payment. The e-Dinar — www.e-dinar.com The e-Dinar is a payment system that supports the Islamic Wakala using digital technology. It allows the Islamic Wakala to sell Islamic Dinars and Dirhams over the internet and to set up accounts for users of the coins, thus enabling their use as money. It offers all the services of the Wakala via internet and networks the growing number of wakala institutions world-wide.

‘Money is any merchandise commonly accepted as a medium of exchange.’ Imam Malik

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