From a headscarf ban for French athletes to social cleansing in the capital, these Games rest on a foundation of injustice

The Paris Olympics opening ceremony was a stunning spectacle for global audiences, projecting an image of a proudly inclusive and festive France – even if the awkward truth is that, just a few weeks earlier, our country was on the verge of putting a racist far-right party into government. The ceremony’s various tableaux were presented as a triumphant display of our different cultures performed by artists of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and genders, and fuelled by references to historical struggles against oppression.

But this unifying narrative introduced an Olympic and Paralympic Games that in reality are not all that inclusive.

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Israel aims to “burn the entire region” after failing in Gaza, Hamas’ Khalil al-Hayya says.

People ordered to evacuate have very few options.

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh is yet another throw of the dice by a state unhinged by impunity.

In these times of rampant injustice and oppression in Palestine, one figure seems to be constantly on the minds of the Muslim American: Musa . From khutbahs to lectures and one on one conversations, since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began we have turned to remembering Musa as an exemplar of standing up to tyranny for the sake of Allah . His steadfastness, trust in Allah , and commitment to justice are all traits we are striving to learn from. 

There is, though, one other part of Musa’s story that has perhaps gone underexplored but one that is intensely relevant to our time: his willingness to step up at a moment’s notice. Reading Musa’s narrative and knowing how it ends, it can be easy for us to forget just how shocking receiving Allah’s Call may have been for him. At the time of his call to prophethood, Musa had an established life; a settled, comfortable life in Midian complete with a job and family. Being told to return to Egypt, a place of oppression and terrible memories, and to not only return but to put his life at risk by confronting the tyrant who he had fled in the first place, was likely quite the shock; a complete and sudden rupture of his status quo. And yet, Musa stepped up. He rose to the occasion despite not even knowing exactly what his mission would entail, let alone what the consequences might be. 

This element of Musa’s story stands out today, as many of us find ourselves asking whether we will risk comfort to step up; to answer our calling as Muslims to stand up for justice in ways we cannot anticipate or predict. Many Muslims have found themselves suddenly called upon to take roles they would not have imagined themselves in previously: masjid communities have answered urgent calls for donations and support from college encampments, Muslim students have found themselves leading chants, giving interviews, and planning a movement, and we all feel compelled to bear witness and speak up about the atrocities happening in Gaza. Like Musa , we have found ourselves stepping into the role of advocate in unexpected ways. 

This feeling is not without precedent though. In the spirit of practicing the Prophet’s injunctions that “the believers are like one body in compassion” and “the believers are like bricks of a building, each part strengthening the other,” we must remember that we can draw on the struggles for justice of past Muslims for inspiration. We are not the first to be called to oppose tyranny and we ought to remember the Muslims who came before us, appreciating the long tradition of the ummah standing up in unprecedented ways. 

One important moment in this tradition was Muslim American involvement in the campaign to end the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s, a moment where Muslim-Americans found themselves called upon to step up and organize in unanticipated ways. There is much more to say about this period than this article can capture, so the following sections are intended as just a brief introduction to some of the key histories we should remember today. Based on interviews with participants and written materials they have previously published, this is an invitation to reflect on what earlier moments of standing for justice and against genocide can teach us today. 

Creating the Bosnia Task Force 

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Serbian nationalists aiming to construct a “Greater Serbia” began a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide towards Bosniaks (the term for ethnic Bosnian Muslims). Faced with news and photos of massacres, concentration camps, and mass rapes, American Muslim leaders and communities knew they had to take some stand for justice on behalf of their fellow Muslims. However, there was no developed infrastructure for such large-scale Muslim organizing in the United States: the community found itself having to learn to unite and organize on the fly in response to a clear calling to witness the atrocities being committed. 

In the summer of 1992, this sense of needing to act produced the Bosnia Task Force, a coalition of different mosques from across Chicago and national Muslim organizations like the community of W. D. Mohammed and ISNA. BTF was incredibly improvised, produced by the community sensing the need to step up but without having prior experience with creating a national political campaign. As Imam Mujahid, the eventual national director of the BTF, described it in an interview, he was persuaded to step into the role despite initial reluctance: having “never hired anybody,” he was suddenly tasked with hiring a staff and developing an organization using an initial budget of fifty thousand dollars provided by Chicago masajid. From a basement office in Chicago, with one-full time and two-part time staff members, a fax, two phones, and student volunteers sitting around a table, organized Muslim-American efforts to speak up began. 

Empowering a Community 

Vitally, though, organizing was not focused only on the Bosnia Task Force: BTF’s work would have been impossible without a grassroot network of masjids and their communities across the nation who made the strategic vision developed in Chicago into a reality. As Imam Mujahid puts it in his writings on the experience, “It would be wrong to claim much credit for Bosnia Task Force, USA since the work to stop genocide in Bosnia became a true grassroots movement in the Muslim community.” Essentially, organizing worked through BTF sending out action alerts via fax and phone to local communities who would then organize within their masajid to put the national strategy into action. As Imam Saffet Catovic, who at the time worked to coordinate the outreach and organizing efforts in the United States for the Bosnian Mission to the UN, put it in an interview, the campaign was not just the national leadership in Chicago: it was the product of many smaller campaigns and organizing efforts across the country, the result of everyday Muslims devoting themselves to the cause of the ummah. Or, as Imam Mujahid eloquently writes, “Many people sacrificed their time and jobs to work tirelessly to stop genocide in Bosnia,” the product of “a sudden wake-up call after seeing the horrors” and thinking “Should we not stand up against injustice for once instead of clucking our tongues in sympathy and then forgetting about the issue?”  

It’s impossible to understate how significant a development this rising to the occasion by Muslims across the country was. Describing the landscape of the Muslim-American community in the face of the genocide, Imam Saffet notes that, beyond simply having never done it before, there were considerable psychological and structural barriers to organizing in place that Muslim-Americans had to overcome. Islamophobia, on the rise in the wake of Western panic in response to the Iranian Revolution, presented a formidable threat. As a largely immigrant community, many Muslims were already in precarious positions, leading to a communal attitude of keeping your head down and avoiding political risk; this attitude was only reinforced by the fact that many carried with them the experience of immigrating from countries where repressive governments made any public activity dangerous. With these historic constraints, Muslim-Americans simply did not have much of the experience that helps make a successful campaign; as Imam Saffet put it, it’s difficult to hold a protest when you have never filed for a permit, meet with a member of Congress when they’ve never heard of you, or receive national media coverage with no press connections.

Muhammad Ali meeting with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović

But these barriers were, in fact, overcome: Muslims came out to the streets for actions held across the country in massive numbers. This included traveling from all over the country to attend a national rally in Washington, DC, which was endorsed by Muhammad Ali and attracted a crowd estimated to be anywhere from a hundred thousand to a quarter million, drawing, most likely for the first time, national media coverage by outlets like CNN and the Washington Post to an effort undertaken by the Muslim-American community. Imam Saffet and Imam Mujahid both stress just how significant this DC rally was: a community largely isolated from the American political scene suddenly stepped decisively onto the stage, many traveling long distances when they had never even previously attended a protest. Rather than be deterred from striving for justice, Muslim-Americans claimed a powerful sense of agency, highlighting the power of the community when it feels nothing, no worldly obstacle or consideration, is more important than rising to the moment of need. 

Changing International Law

The power of this grassroots activism would quickly be proven. Muslim Americans changed the conversation on not just a national level, but an international one in ways that would have significance even after the 1995 Dayton Accords formally ended the conflict in Bosnia. While based in the United States, organizing around Bosnia reflected a truly international vision; a vision of solidarity within the ummah that goes beyond national borders. Pressure was put on American politicians, but the aim, ultimately, was to impact global politics. An example of this was Muslim American organizing to lift the UN arms embargo which prevented Bosnians from getting the tools they needed for self-defense—by pressuring the White House and members of Congress, Muslims were successful in getting Congress to pass a resolution calling for the lifting of the arms embargo, reflecting a successful strategy of starting from local politics to influence the global. 

One particularly important example of this strategy is the decisive role of Muslim-Americans in having rape declared a war crime. As famed scholars of law and gender like Catherine MacKinnon have noted, the response to the Bosnian genocide was key to making people and legal institutions aware of the need to protect the human rights of women and prosecute the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. The idea that international human rights law could address sexual violence and rape could be charged as a war crime came to prominence through Bosnia, and, as Imam Mujahid recounts, the idea for the strategy came from a group of college students, sitting around a table in a basement office in Chicago. From that table, the strategy grew to an unlikely and unprecedented alliance between Muslim-American organizers and prominent feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women that led to rallies in cities across the country, eventually leading to tangible declarations in international law that rape was a war crime. These grand changes in international law were produced by the grassroots efforts of Muslim activists like Aminah Assilimi who should be household names and who reflected a vision of unity across the ummah that goes beyond the artificial boundaries of the nation-state.

Forging Alliances 

As the successful effort to have rape declared a war crime shows, the response to the Bosnian genocide was also an important moment for the Muslim community coming out of its shell and learning to manage alliances with diverse groups. Resonating with the experience of Muslim-Americans working in the diverse pro-Palestine encampments across the country, in the case of Bosnia the community had to quickly figure out who to align with and how. In the case of working with organizations like NOW, for example, Imam Mujahid describes how sisters involved in the movement had to navigate explaining hijab in terms of personal choice that were understandable to left-leaning feminists. Similarly, Imam Saffet notes that Muslim communities had to suddenly and quickly learn how to do interfaith organizing. Many mosques, he notes, had few connections to the communities around them until, when news reports of a genocide against Muslims spread, groups from nearby churches and synagogues “came knocking” and asked how to help. These alliances were an experience of learning on the fly, responding to the needs of the moment of crisis as they arose. 

Conclusion

In their interpretations of the story of Ibrahim and Ismael , scholars have noted the powerful example their relationship provides of different generations working together and learning from each other. Ibrahim does not simply sacrifice Ismael with no warning, but instead asks him “So tell me what you think,” recognizing in his son agency and offering his son the opportunity to obey the command of Allah , an opportunity to show what he learned from the example of obedience that Ibrahim, Khalilullah himself had set. Later, they would rebuild the Kaaba together, again showing the value of different generations striving for the sake of Allah together. This must be our model as an ummah today: the young learning from those who came before them, different generations working alongside each other, men and women working alongside each other like Ibrahim, Ismael, and Hajar (may Allah’s peace be upon them all) did, and all Muslims trusting one another to rise to the moment and obey the command of Allah like Musa, Ibrahim, Ismael, and all His Prophets (may His Peace be upon them all) have done in the face of false ideologies and tyranny. 

As they step into the leadership of a new movement for justice then, hopefully the new generation of Muslim-American activists can learn from the example of what the community achieved in bringing an end to the genocide in Bosnia. Today, like in the 1990s, the challenges may feel vast: from our positions as everyday people in local communities, people who have perhaps never been activists before this moment, it may seem impossible to organize a movement in response to a constantly developing crisis that can have an international impact. But Bosnia shows what is possible when, setting those anxieties aside, people step up, people answer the call to stand firm for justice, and claim a profound sense of agency. Bosnia shows that by the will of Allah , more good will come when we take the first steps to do good, even if our inability to predict the outcome may fill us with dread. If activists today can do that, if we can honor the pioneering Muslims who came before us, then hopefully, those involved in ending the genocide in Bosnia can recognize us as their descendants in righteousness.  

July 11th marked the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, an act of genocide by Serbian forces that produced 8,000 Bosniak martyrs. In the words of Alija Izetbegovic, the first President of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a great Islamic thinker in his own right, “If we forget the genocide done to us, we are compelled to live it again. I shall never tell you to seek revenge, but never forget what has been done.” Today, we are called upon to honor and remember these martyrs by affirming over and over again the truth that they died for: La ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah. If we truly affirm that truth, we must stand against injustice and for Truth in every place, at every time. Let us honor our martyrs, from Bosnia to Gaza. 

 

Related:

– Oped: The Treachery Of Spreading Bosnia Genocide Denial In The Muslim Community

– Srebrenica 2023: Political Instability And Rampant Genocide Denial

 

The post Rising To The Moment: What Muslim American Activists Of Today Can Learn From Successful Community Movements During The Bosnian Genocide appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Israel has caused huge destruction to our land.

More than 250 bodies recovered after military withdraws from Khan Younis in south Gaza.

Traditionally trained in Islamic studies through the International Islamic University of Malaysia, Ustadha Safiya Ravat has so much to share with listeners about da’wah, family, and more! From growing up without many examples of public-facing female scholars, to discovering a beautiful world of female Islamic scholarship in Malaysia, and eventually joining the ranks of ustadhas and shaykhas herself, Ustadha Safiya’s story is inspiring and meaningful for Muslim women everywhere. Ustadha Safiya also talks about the importance of spiritual mentorship for young Muslims, and how female scholarship encompasses so much more than talking about hijab, menstruation, and motherhood. (And don’t forget to listen to the previous podcast with both Ustadha Safiya and her husband, Imam Mahad!)

Ustadha Safiya Ravat began her Islamic Studies journey in 2008 under Shaykh Isam Rajab at Arees Institute, and continued on to attend the Bayyinah Dream Arabic Program. She then pursued her Bachelor’s Degree in Islamic Fiqh and Usul al Fiqh (Islamic Law and Jurisprudence) from the International Islamic University of Malaysia and a Master’s in Pastoral Counseling in Marriage and Family Therapy. Safiya also holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Houston. She and her husband, Imam Mahad Qamar, are the founders of Suhbah Institute.

Related:

Podcast: Love in the Era of Da’wah | Imam Mahad & Ustadha Safiya

The post [Podcast] Ustadha on the Da’wah Front Lines | Ustadha Safiyah Ravat appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Antonio López-Istúriz has offered excuses for the Gaza genocide.

We were forced to spend the night on the beach, the waves soaking us and our belongings.   

By Ibrahim Moiz for Muslim Matters

“You Don’t Have To Be a Mufti to Know” – Part 1 of 5

The academic school year of 2023-24 has been bookended in North America by major protests and encampments against Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. Efforts by both Zionist circles and governing establishments against these protests have often relied on vilification of and incitement against Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and black people; even many purportedly progressive university administrations have been guilty of this.

Much has been said and written about the uproar, but one perspective that remains relatively obscure is that of Muslim faculty and university chaplains. MuslimMatters caught up with chaplains Omer Bajwa of Yale University and Abdul-Muhaymin Priester of Grinnell College to hear their thoughts about these tumultuous events. Below is the first of a five-part series based on this interview.

Chaplains’ Experience With Recent Protests

Ibrahim Moiz: We’ve seen a lot of large protests in the last few months, especially in the last month or so, across different universities throughout the United States, against the Israeli attacks on Gaza and other Palestinian territories. What`s your experience been with regards to how these protests have been organized and how their conduct has been?

Abdul-Muhaymin Priester: Well, look, the pictures that we’ve seen regarding the murder and oppression of our brothers and sisters in Filastin, for myself I stopped looking at that stuff months ago. I think the last one that I looked at was the young girl, they were pulling her through the rubble, and she was making dhikr and reciting the kalimatain. And even right now I want to cry; I cried when I saw that, it was like I couldn’t look at it no more after that. That was like, because you was seeing that stuff which like, you just go down a black hole.

Because I come from a background where I’ve witnessed a lot of violence among people at some point in time, sometimes on a daily basis. Just understanding the nature of oppression, how people can be very abusive and disruptive and understanding that even Muslims, we allowed ourselves to become very naïve in regards to the oppression that the Zionists are capable of. It’s just, for me it was just like I need to just leave that alone and find a better way to start interacting with people in regards to the situation.

At some point in time, what’s going on is good and needs to be talked about… but we know that in six months when everything stops and the lights cut off, the majority of the people who are making noise right now, they’re not even going to be thinking about the situation no more. And that’s something, that’s another difficult conversation that Muslims really need to come to grips with.

Because we’re [saying], ‘Oh yes, they’re protesting, and the word’s getting out’ – okay, yes, but from my own personal feel of that is like, yes those things are necessary, we have to do it – but at the end of the day, when we look at all of what’s going in within the campuses and even in regards to what we see with the images and whatnot, we’re not the ones leading the charge. We’re participating in what others are doing, but we’re not the ones leading the charge. And that changes the entire dynamic and the conversation that is being had around what’s going on, how do we respond to it, why does it matter, you understand.

“I Didn’t Have to Pull Punches”

Omer Bajwa: Sure, Bismillah. So thank you so much for that context and the question. You know, I’m gonna split it [into] two phases…One thing as a context, this is my sixteenth year at Yale, alhamdulillah. I think after Imam Khalid Latif I’m currently the second oldest Muslim chaplain in terms of the time served and tenure. What [has] happened is that I have been able to build, alhamdulillah thumma alhamdulillah, really deep ties vertically, upward and downward. With the community, I’ve seen literally generations of students go. I get invited to student weddings and aqiqas now, right – kids that I saw as undergrads are getting married and having children now. So really to have that longevity and that sort of investment.

And then the second is through the administration, I’ve seen two [Yale] presidents come and go, multiple deans and whatnot. With that, alhamdulillah, you develop trust and respect with the administration.

Why am I saying all of that? Because after 10-7 [7 October 2023], I used every khutbah, every halaqa I had, I didn’t have to pull punches. I mean, my community knows very clearly my politics. I use the g word, genocide. This is also very rhetorically bombastic in many places. I’m very mindful of that, actually; I’m very careful about what time and place you have to use that, but in terms of my platform I don’t have to pull any punches, because I mean the rabbi knows where I stand, right, the Hillel knows where I stand. I go to the encampment, I go to the protest, on campus, off campus, etcetera, I’m there for my students.

That puts me in a unique place because I also have an institutional job, right? And I have this, like, embedded [position], where a lot of chaplains are part-time volunteers, or they have a very tenuous [position], because they’re new, they just don’t have that. And I’m very mindful of that, so in my mind, personally, what my mashaikh have said is that, if Allah Taala has given you this platform for this long, you’ve got to really cash that in now, right? You’ve got to use it for what it’s worth…

A Rainbow Coalition

(Omer Bajwa continues):

So really, six, seven months from 10-7 onward, our students were protesting, were doing stuff off campus, we were working with local, you know, Palestinian solidarity efforts, etcetera; there were marches on campus, we would go march at Jummah, etcetera. Many of my Muslim students were doing it, but it wasn’t exclusively [Muslims] as Sidi Priester said.

You know we had many students of colour, the black community, the Latinx community, the queer community, the indigenous community, it was a whole coalition, right? And I’m not saying this to be cheeky, but it was quite a rainbow coalition, right, of people on this…

So, by my record Columbia was the first encampment in the [United States] this year, and Yale was the second encampment, so we were just literally, I think, two days behind Columbia’s encampment. You know, Columbia became international news, with the violence, with the suppression, with [the New York Police], with this, like, Gestapo-like tactics and all of that.

Thank God, alhamdulillah, Yale was nothing like that. We had two series of arrests, one of them were violent arrests at Yale, but it pales in comparison to what Columbia did. Columbia is, I think, when history gets written about, that is going to be like a case study unto itself, right, on how they navigated this.

The Majority Have Been Women

(Omer Bajwa continues):

So all that’s to say [that] right now, before the encampment the Muslims were really one of the principal parties organizing it. I think when the encampment started, Muslims became one of many. There’s a lot more groups, right? A lot more non-Muslim groups, so we were a fraction in the encampment, but when we have the rallies a lot of our Muslims were coming out…

By my impression from talking to my colleagues across the country, this is the noteworthy point, the majority of the Muslim participants have been Muslim women. The Muslim women have been at the forefront, on the frontline, muhajjiba or non-muhajjiba, they have been in the trenches, sleeping overnight, praying maghrib and fajr, you know, literally in broad daylight in front of counter-protesters.

[And] where are the Muslim men? “Oh, sister, is protesting really jaiz? Is it halal? Should we be protesting? You know, why are we standing next to queers and to [Black Lives Matters] activists and to these radical anarchist communists? Is that how we want to be seen in the world?” And the sisters are like, “There are people walking around with their siblings’ body parts in bags in Gaza! You don’t have to be a mufti to know where you should be.” So these are the kind of conversations that are happening at Harvard, at Yale, at Columbia, I have to say.

Get An Imam’s Permission?

Ibrahim Moiz: I noticed two things – one, a lot of people sort of selectively feel that they have to get an imam’s permission for everything, and then the other is this whole thing of “How are we going to look to conservative Americans”?

Abdul-Muhaymin Priester: Personally, you know, I think that’s just a cop-out that people use, because at the end of the day it’s about communities. You know, the women are the ones taking charge of a lot of the things, they’re the ones taking the classes, showing up at the halaqa, things of that nature there. You know, and even if the husband does come, he’s sitting at the foyer drinking coffee and talking on whatever – they’re [the women] are the ones that are actually getting into the thick of it. It’s been like that for years.

So I think it’s really emblematic of just how much of a problem we have within our community, just in terms of how we’re supposed to be responding to things – how we’re supposed to be not so much responding to them, but actually – because we should have known this was going to happen…You know, it’s been quiet for about a year now, something’s about to happen. It’s just, the settlers are acting too crazy, something’s about to start happening, it’s time for something to happen. And if this intelligence would allow us to be a little bit more perceptive of these things.

That’s the other reason I got to say for myself, I come from a history of social rights activism and community development, my family’s done that for years, okay, and seeing what I’m seeing, personally, it doesn’t sit well with me. Because you know, most people would ask, you know, “Why don’t you do something?” Because I know I’m going to be the one at the front of the line, and when I turn around you’re going to be all standing back there looking at me, “Why did you do that?” What do you mean?

Next: The Moment of Speaking Truth to Power

Related:

American Muslim Scholars Express Support For University Student Encampment Protests

Protests: An Islamic Perspective

The post University Chaplains Perspective: Interview With Imams Omer Bajwa And Abdul-Muhaymin Priester, Part 1 appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Released detainees speak of severe beatings.

Inconsistent with known facts and survivor accounts, report aims to exonerate Israeli forces of killing their own citizens in Kibbutz Be'eri.

Neama is now in hospital.

Most of the victims were women and children.

When I first told my Tunisian teacher that I was writing my dissertation on the thought of the late 19th/early 20th century philosopher-poet of the Indian subcontinent, ʿAllāmah Muhammad Iqbal, he immediately recited one of Iqbāl’s most famous lines that had been translated into Arabic:

China and Arabia are ours, India is ours

We are Muslim – the entire world is our homeland

I wasn’t surprised that my teacher had memorized lines of Iqbāl’s poetry, nor that he was even familiar with his thought. There was once a time, not too long ago, when Iqbāl had animated movements across the Muslim world; when his poetry was translated to several Muslim languages; when philosophers and statesmen crowned themselves champions of Iqbālian thought. 

Then, like a forest fire put out by a sudden deluge, Iqbāl disappeared from the collective Muslim imagination. He disappeared because Iqbāl is hope incarnate, and we are a people in despair. He disappeared because he is life incarnate, and we are a people whose lives are akin to living death. As Ghalib, the court poet of the last Mughal emperor said a generation before Iqbāl:

They say people live on hope

We don’t even have hope to live

The cause of our sorrow, our despair, our living death, is that we are a people twice defeated. Our first defeat began with the incursions into, then conquests, then complete subjugations by European powers of Muslim lands. We were overwhelmed, enslaved, pillaged. Violence of all kinds was meted out without mercy or recourse: physical, social, economic, epistemic, and spiritual. But the Muslim body can be chained; the Muslim society can be ravaged; the Muslim economy can be pillaged; the Muslim episteme can be tarnished; but the Muslim spirit cannot be so easily broken:

We are not ones who can be subjugated by falsehood

O sky! You have tried us a hundred times before

                                                    –  Iqbal, “Tarāna-e-Millī”

Two hundred years of colonial rule led to the independence movements of the 20th century, and, after World War 2, Muslims successively cast off the yoke that had so long suffocated us. Those were decades of hope, when movement turned to triumph, and triumph turned to jubilation. And yet, that jubilation was not to last. Our yoke had not been cast off; rather, it was simply transferred from one hand to another. We had not escaped the colonial system; it had simply changed forms. Jubilation turned to realization, realization turned to desperation, and desperation finally settled into an unending melancholy, an endless depression. Twice conquered; twice defeated.

But Iqbāl was, as is so often the case, entirely correct. This ummah can be defeated; it can be subjugated; but it cannot be so easily broken. We are witnessing a complete revival of radical anti-colonialism amongst our youth. Whether their imaginations were sparked by the protests of the Arab spring; or they were inspired by the solidarity of Black Lives Matter; or their belief in resistance erupted with the global outrage over the genocide Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinian people in general and the people of Gaza in particular; the youth have traded the lethargic depression of their parents for active resistance.

Unlike their previous generations, however, they are divorced from the past projects of Islamization of knowledge or Islamic political dreams. Mawdūdi and al-Banna are distant names to them, if they’ve even heard of them. The education in resistance came from Fanon and Said, not Iqbāl and Shariāti; and older generations of Muslims who are disillusioned by their own projects of resistance offer them nothing but snide remarks and a politics of eschatological quietism – an alternative that the young and hopeful rightfully and profoundly reject.

And that is why, in this moment of a second uprising a hundred years after the first one, we need the foremost thinker of Islamic revolution, Allāmah Muhammad Iqbal, once more. We are again at a crossroads in history. If we are not able to offer an authentic, Islamically founded, and Islamically grounded theory of practical resistance, our youth will gravitate further towards ideologies that have profoundly extra-Islamic foundations; and, in the process, they will fight for the liberation of Muslims in exchange for their own Islam.

If, however, we can reach into the depths of our intellectual heritage and forge a reinvigorated Islamic decoloniality rooted in the love of Allah and His Messenger , we can capture the energy of an excited ethic of resistance, breathe new life into a defeated ummah, and resurface an Atlantis-like drowned Islamic civilization from the seas of darkness.

Iqbal: The Man and the Thought

Iqbāl as a man was the perfect image of his thought: the son of Kashmiri migrants to Sialkot, Punjab, who was educated in India, England, and Germany but wrote in Farsi and Urdu (languages that were, at the time, natively spoken by almost no one in his chosen city of residence, Lahore), Iqbal lived between cultures, between centuries, between traditions, between languages, and somewhere between the freedom he desperately dreamed of and the subjugation he was born into. His father was an illiterate store owner, and Iqbāl was the first in his family to be completely educated – only to become one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals of the last 200 years. When asked why he didn’t write an autobiography, Iqbāl responded that his thought was far more interesting than his life. In general, I agree, and so I will spend little time on his life and much more on a basic sketch of his thought.

Plaque at Portugal Place, Cambridge signifying that Allama Iqbal lived there whilst he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge [PC: Wikipedia]

Iqbāl was educated in both India and Europe (England and Germany) in some of the finest colleges of his time, including Cambridge. He spoke Punjabi, English, Urdu, Farsi, and German (which he learned in a few months) and wrote poetry in each of those languages except English. He mastered the Western and Islamic philosophical canons, Islamic metaphysics (both mystical and theological) as well as the poetic canons of Farsi and Urdu. His own thought was almost impossible to trace back to any major thinker: he was as influenced by Ibn Sīna and Rūmi as he was by Nietzsche and Bergson. Iqbāl was a master of synthesis and an heir to traditions both East and West, bringing together ancient and modern metaphysics with new disciplines like economics and sociology. He was, in almost every way, a school in and of himself in that he was indebted to every tradition that he was exposed to and mastered but belonged to none of them entirely.

The Basics of Iqbālian Thought

His thought, as well, is difficult to trace back to any one figure. The basic question that animated Iqbāl’s inquiry was that of colonialism – specifically, why the Muslim world had become so utterly subjected to colonial empires. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Iqbāl did not resort to easy answers. Instead, he understood the foundations of the colonial system and set his sights on understanding the ways in which it is perpetuated. His inquiry brought him face-to-face with a stark and desperate realization: that Muslims are willing participants in their own subjugation, and that colonial rule would be impossible without the willingness of Muslims to sell the struggle of freedom in exchange for a more comfortable slavery. This led to a final question, one that would absorb him for the entirety of his life: why are Muslims so comfortable being slaves when Allah has called them to embrace their role as the best of nations brought about for mankind?

Iqbāl’s answer was that colonial subjugation affects the Muslim at such a deeply emotional level that it profoundly alters the very way Muslims imagine themselves. The shock of such overwhelming defeat and the methods of control inherent in colonial orders broke the Muslim self-imagination, and the ummah had fallen into intense depression and despair. This psychological state had metaphysical implications. A desperate, depressed person has no hope in Allah , and despairing in the Mercy of Allah is tantamount to disbelief. And so, when this hopeless Muslim was asked to exchange his love for Allah and His Messenger for a more comfortable slavery, hopelessness allowed him to acquiesce.

Colonial rule led to a fundamental reimagination of what it means to be Muslim, and that broken spirit eventually led to an individual and communal loss of love for Allah .

Khudi

It was from this point of departure that Iqbāl crafted his most important philosophical concept that animated his entire work – the concept of khudi (selfhood). In classical Sufi thought, where the chief good was dissolving the self in the love of Allah , khudi was the chief antagonist. For Iqbal, however, khudi was both the beginning of the spiritual path and its end. 

At the beginning of the path, the heedless, unreformed person is self-important, selfish, and driven by his base desires (a state the Sufis of old called khudi in Farsi and Ananiyyah in Arabic). He is unrefined in character and capable only of looking out for himself and his whims. Then, the person begins to grow his love for Allah and His Messenger until it reaches such a point that everything loved by Allah is loved by him and everything hated by Allah is hated by him. His love for the divine consumes him like the love of a lover for his beloved.

When a person reaches this state, he recognizes the heavy burden and incomparable honor that Allah has given His truest servants: that of khilāfah (vicegerency) on this earth. The Muslim is not only the worshiper and lover of Allah ; he is also His representative on earth. When he recognizes that, a Muslim reaches the true beginning of the spiritual path – one that takes him right back to his khudi. This time, however, this khudi is neither self-obsessed nor selfish. Instead, selfishness is replaced with a deep sense of sovereignty of self.

This is manifested not only in complete obedience to Allah and His Messenger but also in a complete refusal to bow one’s head to subjugation. A Muslim is too self-sovereign to be a slave. He is too proud of his role in the world as a representative of Allah to sell himself for comfortable slavery. A Muslim is meant for the vicegerency of Allah on this earth, and that can only be achieved when he is entirely free.

Why We Need Iqbāl Today

In many ways, Iqbāl’s thought was much ahead of his time. He may have written his most important works in the 1930s, but they wouldn’t be entirely understood till 2030. Core to his understanding of colonialism is that colonial regimes are sustained by an international socio-economic order, and that force of arms is secondary to force of thought and force of wealth. The Muslim elite is purposefully brainwashed by a Western education system that embeds everything good and moral and reasonable within Western thought and divorces the Muslim from his own intellectual heritage and legacy. The Muslim is educated in Western thought and illiterate in his own. Then, this spiritually unrefined and illiterate person is offered lucrative careers and contracts in systems that perpetuate the subjugation of his own people.

For Iqbal, if Muslims refused to participate in the intellectual and economic foundations that underpin the colonial order, colonialism would eventually collapse. In order to do so, however, a true Muslim civilizational revolution would have to create its own economic, political, and cultural order – one that had the technological and industrial know-how, personal ingenuity, and communal commitment to goodness and justice to sustain itself. It would also need the depth of understanding of its own intellectual and spiritual heritage and marry it with brilliance in analysis and critique of European modernity to avoid benign a crude, off-brand knock-off for Western civilization – to be a real alternate Muslim modernity and not a European one with a sticker of a Quran slapped on top of it.

As I’ve written before, Muslims have been fooled by the international liberal order for more than half a century. Muslim movements believed that force – not culture and economics – was the primary means of maintaining the colonial order in the world. We have come to realize – perhaps most powerfully demonstrated by the genocide in Gaza – exactly what Iqbāl had almost a hundred years ago: that the boots on the ground are secondary and purchasing Muslim acquiescence to subjugation is the primary mode of colonialism.

This is a moment of history, one in which Muslims will either lose themselves forever or realize that freedom is our birthright, the prerequisite to fulfilling our spiritual purpose as khulafāʾ (vicegerents) of Allah on this earth. We are not like other nations. We are the heirs of prophets, the carriers of tawḥīd, the representatives of Allah on this earth. And the moment of our uprising is upon us – if only we recognize and accept who we are. 

This ummah will not be liberated as a hobby to take a break from our 9 – 5 jobs and to enrich our American dreams. It is a social, cultural, economic, political, intellectual, and spiritual project. Our task is the reconstruction of an entire civilization, not remodeling a deck. It all begins with remembering and believing in who we truly are – and the one who reminds us most of who we are is ʿAllamah Muhammad Iqbāl.

We Are Unicorns in a Herd of Horses

What’s the difference between a unicorn and a horse wearing a party hat? There are two: reality and belief. Imagine a unicorn that grew up in a herd of horses that wear party hats on their head. To an onlooker, there is no difference between the unicorn and the horses: they all look like horses, and they all have a cone on their head. The unicorn itself might even be excused in thinking that it is, in fact, just another horse – that its horn is nothing more than a decoration.

What separates that unicorn from all the other horses is its unicorn-ness  – that its essence is different, its capabilities are different, its responsibilities are different. But that inherent difference does not mean that the unicorn will necessarily practice and achieve the potential of its unicorn-ness. First, it must believe that it is, in fact, a unicorn. Every moment that the unicorn spends doubting itself is a moment that it fails to live up to its potential. Every moment that a unicorn behaves like just another horse is another day the unicorn has wasted its life.

We are the ummah of Muhammad , the heirs of prophets, the protectors of the banner of tawḥīd. We are the unicorn in a herd of horses:

“You are the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah. If only the People of the Scripture had believed, it would have been better for them. Among them are believers, but most of them are defiantly disobedient.” [Surah ‘Ali ‘Imran: 3;110]

We have lived surrounded by horses wearing party hats, been ridiculed for our horn, until we ourselves have begun to believe that we are just another horse wearing another party hat. We have become embodiments, manifestations of the powerful couplet by al-Mutanabbi:

I have not seen anything from the faults of men

Like the capable failing to reach their potential

We are not like the strong failing to be strong, or the intelligent failing to be intelligent, or the humorous failing to be amusing; we are the best nation brought about for people failing in our God-given responsibility to act as His vicegerents on this endarkened world. We fail to be the unicorns we are, not just because we have stopped acting like them – but because we have even lost our belief in them.

We have to choose to bet on ourselves – to not simply run the race made for everyone else, but to create the race that we were always made for. As Iqbāl says in one of his most famous poems, Jawāb-i-Shikwa:

The mind’s your armor, and love’s your blade!

My dervish! Your reign holds the world in gaze!

Your call sets all but Allah ablaze!

Be Muslim, and fate is what you have made!

Be true to Muḥammad, and We are yours;

Not just this world: the pen and slate are yours!

 

[This article was first published here]

 

Related:

– Seeking Out The Spiritual Underpinnings Of Our Ritual Acts of Worship

– Podcast: Is Harry Potter Haram? Islamic Perspectives Of Poetry And Literature With Sh. Shahin-Ur Rahman

 

The post The Tolling Bell Of Revolution – Why The World Needs Allamah Muhammad Iqbal Now More Than Ever appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

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