At first sight, the western strip of the Sahara, yawning south of such famed Moroccan cities as Marrakech and Fez, and separating the Mauritanian desert from the Atlantic coast, might not seem an obvious site for regional competition. In fact, the Western Sahara, with its large phosphate reserves and its blue-hued stones, has been the main prize in a decades-long conflict that drew in the region’s major players with continuing repercussions today. This article will trace the background of the dispute up to a seminal moment: the “Green March” of November 1975, an extraordinary coup-de-main by Morocco’s monarchy that split the region with Mauritania and led to a conflict with Algeria and the Sahraoui Polisario Front that has yet to entirely ebb fifty years later.

Background

For centuries, Morocco was the premier power of the Islamic West, or Maghrib as the region was called at the time. Since local clans of the Amazigh or Berber ethnic group welcomed Idris bin Abdullah, a descendant of Ali bin Abi Talib fleeing the nascent Abbasids, a continuity has bound this western edge of the Muslim world, whose authority at its peak extended north across the Mediterranean and south into the Sahara. Nor was the trajectory of power one-way: a thousand years ago, a confederation of austere Sahraoui Islamic warriors, the Murabitoun, advanced north from the desert, taking over Morocco and entering Andalus to confront a Christian resurgence. We need not trace the trajectory of every faction that ruled Morocco to realize a close link between the regions around modern Morocco, a constant reference point for Moroccan nationalists.

Yet though its sultans, including the Alaoui dynasty that has ruled since the mid-1600s, frequently claimed a caliphal title as Emirul-Mouminin, they were not unchallenged among the Muslims of the West: to their east, the Ottoman sultanate arrived as far as Algeria through links with seafaring corsairs, and to the south they competed with such West African sultanates as the Songhai. Cycles of competition and coexistence marked Morocco’s relations with her neighbours.

In the colonial heyday of the nineteenth century, as France in particular swallowed up much of northwest Africa, Morocco’s position became both more critical to the Muslims of the West as well as more delicate. A sultan such as Abderrahmane bin Hisham (1822-59) could wield influence with largely autonomous religious leaders, such as his neighbour Abdelkader bin Mohieddin, who fought against the brutal French subjugation of Algeria; yet bruising encounters with the French army persuaded him not to overextend himself.

Hoping to modernize, the sultans of the late 1800s entered a pattern of negotiation, debt, and eventually a soft subjugation to the European power that had contemporary echoes in Istanbul and Cairo. If this was uncomfortable for Muslim rulers, its effect on them was scant compared to the periphery of their realms, where jihad and raids were repeatedly launched by clansmen and Sufi adventurers: often officially in defence of the Moroccan realm and with links but little long-term support from the sultanate.

Watering Eyes Amid Colonization

Such a Sufi leader was the fighting scholar Mustafa “Maelainain”, or “Water of the Eyes”, who preached among the Sahraoui clans in the far south. A prolific writer and occasional tutor of Moroccan elites, he nonetheless had considerable autonomy in what is now the Western Sahara and dealt with other local principalities such as the small Mauritanian sultanate of Adrar. Maelainain tutored both the Moroccan prince Abdelhafiz bin Hassan, a great-grandson of Abderrahmane, and Adrar sultan Sidahmed Ould-Aida, and acted in effect as a frontier warrior for both realms against France. Maelainain was already nearly seventy years of age when he began raids on French garrisons, building the town of Smara as a base for a relatively sophisticated force. He had some help from the sultanate as well as from France’s rivals, like Spain and especially Germany.

In 1906, colonial competition led to a division of privileges in Morocco, to which Sultan Abdelaziz bin Hassan, a great-grandson of Abderrahmane, unilaterally agreed. This dismayed many Muslims, including Maelainain, whom French propaganda portrayed as an ingrate and rebel. It was, however, urban Muslim opposition in northern Morocco that ousted Abdelaziz and installed his brother Abdelhafiz, unprecedentedly pledging loyalty on the condition that he use his position to wage jihad against the colonialists. Instead, once established, Abdelhafiz brutally purged his supporters.

Maelainain also broke with precedent by leading an army from the south into the Moroccan heartland in order to salvage the sultanate’s independence. Abdelhafiz made no move as his former tutor was defeated and repulsed south to his stronghold, Tiznit. The sultan even enlisted the aid of French soldiers to crack down on his own protesting subjects.

This in turn sparked an international crisis, Germany objecting to France’s direct involvement, and raised the colonial stakes higher for France. Both Maelainain’s former students, Ould-Aida in Adrar and Abdelhafiz in Morocco, gave way in 1912: Ould-Aida was forced to yield his realm and join the French army, and Abdelhafiz was forced first to sign away independence in favour of a protectorate and then to abdicate anyway. With Maelainain having passed away, his son Ahmed Hibatullah now took up the banner and announced himself sultan of Morocco. Known thus as the Blue Sultan, he made it as far as Marrakech before he was defeated in battle against the French army.

French newspaper from 1912 reporting on the “Blue Sultan” Ahmed Hibatullah’s campaign from the south.

Led by wily viceroy Hubert Lyautey, France employed a strategy of colonization in Morocco different from its summary wreckage of Algeria. The Moroccan elite of the time was coopted rather than crushed, symbolism around the monarchy was enhanced even as its power was stripped away, and this ensured a breathing space: unlike Algeria, where Arabic language and Islamic leadership had been systematically crushed, Morocco experienced a “soft colonization” that nonetheless deeply impacted the way its elites saw the world.

Spain Enters The Fray

The next major anticolonial resistance took place not against France but against Spain in the 1920s, in the Rif region of northern Morocco rather than the south. Like Maelainain, its leader, Mohamed Abdelkerim, had respected Islamic stock and managed an impressively organized army of clansmen, who spectacularly humiliated the Spanish army at Anoual in 1921. It took a major French intrusion to oust and exile him five years later, and French encouragement for Spain to turn to the Western Sahara in the far south, to which it had first laid claim in 1884 but would only manage to occupy fifty years later.

Sahraoui clans put up long-running resistance, often led by Maelainain’s family: his sons, Mohamed Laghdaf and Murabbih Rebbouh, and nephews, Mohamed Mamoun and Takiullah Ouadjaha, led resistance alongside preachers like Mokhtar Ould-Boukhari and commanders such as Aissawi Tibari, who led dozens of raids totalling thousands of miles across the desert. Even Sidahmed Ould-Aida, the ousted Adrar ruler, deserted the French ranks and joined the resistance, where he was killed. Nonetheless, by summer 1934, a joint French-Spanish campaign had secured the region; such leaders as Laghdaf and Mamoun preferred to deal with the Spanish rather than the dreaded French army. Spain was further weakened by a major civil war in which the eventually triumphant right wing of the army, led by Francisco Franco, fired the first shots by seizing garrisons in colonial Morocco.

French-ruled Morocco eventually saw a separate civil resistance, epitomized by the Istiqlal party led by Allal Fassi, largely based in the cities among ascendant intellectuals. This symbolically claimed loyalty to the Moroccan monarchy, and called for independence from colonial rule to rule over a “Greater” Morocco comprising the sultanate’s entire older realms. Mohammad V bin Yusuf, nephew to Abdelaziz and Abdelhafiz, was a particular pole of attraction, as he began to show more assertiveness during the Second World War when France, and indirectly its colonies, were overrun by Germany.

Independence And Its Limitations

No longer the imposing phantom of the past nor minded to reform itself, the 1950s French empire faced varying levels of opposition throughout North Africa. In Algeria, this featured a vicious war; in Tunisia involved unionist protest and smaller peasant revolt; and in Morocco, a mixture of both protest and revolt. France briefly stripped Mohammad of the Moroccan crown, but protests forced them to restore him, and he declared independence in 1956. Morocco supported the anti-French insurgency in Algeria and was keen to engage Mauritanian dissidents against France, such as Hurma Ould-Babana, who announced loyalty to Rabat.

At first supported by Morocco, Sahraoui insurgents led by Benhamou Mesfioui also overran much of the Western Sahara and besieged Spanish garrisons in 1957-58. But when Spain agreed to withdraw if Morocco took responsibility. The Moroccan government’s role transformed to that of controlling rather than supporting the revolt, preferring to engage with Madrid. Mohammad’s son and future successor Hassan II led the Moroccan army into the region to restore the situation, helped by friendly chieftains such as Khatri Ould-Joumani; to the dismay of such Moroccan expansionists as Fassi, Hassan II would ally strongly with Spain. In the Rif region, Rabat also crushed a revolt that aimed, among other things, to bring back Abdelkerim, the still widely influential scourge of the Spaniards.

Succeeding the throne, Hassan II spent the 1960s in hostility with newly independent Mauritania, which he saw as a French puppet and refused to recognize until 1969. However, relations were also tense with Algeria, which had wrenched independence through war but retained economic links with France as well as conceding the French government a small foothold in its deep south. After border skirmishes, a pattern emerged whereby Algeria, soon under military rule, and Morocco would house one another’s dissidents, who in the Moroccan case were largely leftists.

Spain had set up a regional assembly in the Western Sahara, which largely incorporated local chieftains and had limited influence. This was insufficient to stop protests in the Western Sahara, whose most notable leader, Mohamed Bassiri, disappeared. Though the Western Sahara is often treated as a case of opposite societies between Sahraouis and Moroccans, the situation was much more complicated, and many Sahraoui activists maintained at least a hopeful attachment to a Morocco whose government was, however, unwilling to risk its Spanish alliance, no matter how much Moroccan nationalists wanted.

Take the case of Khalili Reguibi, who had fought Spain in the 1950s and then joined the Moroccan army; he remained loyal to Morocco, but his frustrated son, Mohamed Abdelaziz, joined the Polisario Front, a leftist group that led an insurgency against Spain. This was less bizarre than it seems now: at the time, Moroccan nationalists could agree with Sahraoui nationalists that Rabat should help evict the Spanish colony; unfortunately, Fassi regretfully informed Sahraoui contacts, there was scant prospect. As late as October 1974, even Algeria, Hassan’s rival, informed the United Nations that the Western Sahara should join Morocco, and even Polisario originally requested the monarchy’s support. However, perhaps in part because of the longstanding negative experience with Rabat, a United Nations survey found widespread support for independence rather than joining Morocco.

The Green March And Its Discontents

Not until Spain’s impending withdrawal, in the last days of Franco’s rule, did Hassan stir into a flurry of action. He sent his prime minister, Ahmed Othmane, to Madrid to hammer out a joint administration of the Western Sahara with Carlos Arias-Navarros and Hamdi Ould-Meknes, the foreign ministers of Spain and Mauritania: this was to be an interim affair before a referendum. But in a spectacular fait-accompli, half a million Moroccans, unarmed and bearing only the Quran and the Moroccan flag, marched south into the Sahara with chants of takbir. This meticulously organized Green March, a scene to gladden the heart of any Moroccan patriot, was organized and led in person by Hassan II himself, flanked by Othmane and security boss Ahmed Dlimi, and widely applauded across the Moroccan political spectrum.

Ahmed Dlimi

This was in direct contrast to the reception in the Western Sahara. The Sahraoui assembly, led by chieftains such as Baba Ould-Hassina and Ould-Joumani, objected and even threatened to join Polisario to expel the Moroccan intrusion. Yet in an example of how quickly chiefly opinions could adjust to circumstances, two-thirds of the assembly joined Morocco over the winter while Dlimi followed up the Green March by imposing army garrisons. Though Sahraouis would be much better-placed in Moroccan officialdom than under Spain, thousands left the area, many decamping to the Algerian border town Tindouf, which became a de facto headquarters for Polisario’s “shadow government” led by Lamine Ould-Ahmed.

While Morocco and its junior partner Mauritania set about arranging administration, with Hassan’s chamberlain Ahmed Bensouda as governor-general for the Moroccan sector and Abdullah Ould-Cheikh his Mauritanian counterpart, Algeria supported Polisario. Not only Algerian dictator Houari Boumediene but also his leading lieutenants – future ruler Abdelkader Bouteflika, prime minister Moussa Abdelghani, and party chief Salah Yahiaoui – were intimately involved in support for the Polisario Front. The Algerian army clashed directly with its Moroccan counterpart over the winter, but Mauritania was an easier and softer target for Polisario. In summer 1976, its chief Ouali Sayed led a devastating raid into the heart of the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott; though he was slain, a line of lieutenants, including his brother Bechir, Abdelaziz, Brahim Ghali, Sidahmed Battal, Ayoub Lahbib, and Brahim Hakim, would lead Polisario either on the battlefield or in international diplomacy.

Throughout the next fifteen years, the Western Saharan war had major regional and international repercussions: it cemented a simmering rivalry between Algeria and Morocco, helped bring down a Mauritanian government or two, and played into the Cold War with Morocco firmly in the Western camp. Though a ceasefire held for nearly thirty years, during which time such Polisario leaders as Hakim and Lahbib joined Morocco, the conflict has flared up again in the 2020s.

Conclusion: A Split In The Islamic West

So what are we to make of the Western Saharan conflict? Comparisons often made by left-leaning critics with Israel’s occupation of Palestine are plainly absurd: at no stage did Morocco descend to the level of viciousness, ethnic cleansing, or systematic massacres periodically on display by Israel, and there are undeniable historical, religious, cultural, and social links between Moroccans and Sahraouis that are plainly not true of Israelis and Palestinians. From the nineteenth-century desert mujahids to as late as the 1970s, Sahraoui leaders and groups often identified with Morocco, so much so that in 1912 the Blue Sultan set out to take the entire country and liberate it from France. Until the 1970s, Morocco’s own abstinence from reciprocating this solidarity owed more to an attempt to balance France out, if through an unpopular alliance with Spain, than any lack of public sympathy.

On the other hand, the Moroccan government itself has a record of using and discarding the region to Rabat’s convenience, whether in the days of Abdelaziz and Abdelhafiz or Hassan II. The harsher Moroccan tactics, such as Dlimi’s construction of a major “sand wall” in the early 1980s, resemble colonial tactics, even if comparisons with Israel are ridiculous. Moroccan protests that Polisario is simply a tool of the Algerian junta ignore its own militarized treatment. And the tensions accruing from a decades-long conflict have polarized the people of the Islamic Maghrib, foremost of the Western Sahara itself.

 

Related:

– From Algeria to Palestine: Commemorating Eighty Years Of Resistance And International Solidarity

– Islam In Nigeria [Part I]: A History

The post Green March In The Sands Of The Blue Sultan: Morocco And The Conflict Over The Western Sahara appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Blavatnik foundation is deeply enmeshed with Israel’s academic-military architecture of occupation.

A short phone call with my family in Gaza.

I took Visionaire, a course about making “dream duas,” the last time it was ever taught by Shaykh Muhammad al Shareef. While I thought I would continue to learn and deepen my understanding of his teachings for years to come, Allah had different plans. As I revisit the course in preparation for Ramadan this year, here are the basics of what I learned about making dua from the shaykh before his passing. 

It’s Sunnah to Aim for the Highest in Your Duas  

The Prophet’s final words were a dua. He was lying in the lap of his beloved wife, Aisha , and she just used a miswak to clean his teeth. His final words were, “Oh Allah, in the highest companionship,”1 referring to his desired station in the akhirah. Throughout this dua, we can see the final act of the Prophet was making a lofty dua. 

Following in his footsteps, we should also make huge duas that only Allah can fulfill. Dua is not about us, what we can have, or what we deserve; dua is about the One who will answer it. Thus, we raise our standards when it comes to dua without needing to be timid, moderate, shy, or embarrassed to ask Allah or anything we want.

If we can reach the zone of “slightly unrealistic,” we’ve started asking Allah at a scale that is fitting to His Majesty. We’ve reached that zone when we become confused or feel uncomfortable because we can’t figure out how a dua could ever come into volition. For example, someone wants to change their career and needs time and money for further education. Once they start struggling to figure out the logistics of how they would make ends meet without working full-time and balance their family life, that’s where Allah’s Divine capability intercedes. The duas we make should aim to reflect Allah’s infinite ability and not our finite human limitations.  

You Can Make Dua out of Pain or Pleasure

We can make dua from a state of pain or pleasure, and that Allah listens to both. 

Allah answers the duas of pain and desperate need and says so in the Quran.

“Is He [not best] who responds to the desperate one when he calls upon Him and removes evil and makes you inheritors of the earth? Is there a deity with Allah? Little do you remember.” [Surah An-Naml; 27:62]

The Prophet has also taught us that Allah guarantees to answer anyone who uses the specific dua of Prophet Yunus 2

 

“And [mention] the man of the fish, when he went off in anger and thought that We would not decree [anything] upon him. And he called out within the darknesses, “There is no deity except You; exalted are You. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers.” [Surah Al-Anbiya; 21:87]

The good news is that when we are trapped in the belly of the whale, so to speak, in our own lives, we know our pleas will be answered. However, if times of crisis are the only times when we make dua, we will find ourselves constantly needing to be in a disaster to perform this powerful act of worship. On the flip side, when we’re not in pain, we completely disconnect from dua and remain quiet. That sounds pretty sad and is a huge disadvantage to only make dua from pain. 

However, we can also make dua out of pleasure–ones that make us excited and put a smile on our faces. These duas are the ones we say, “I can’t wait to get into sajdah to make dua for this” because we’re looking forward to having them answered with so much anticipation. These duas can be separated into three broad categories: things we want to experience, things we want to own, and the type of person we would like to become. Being able to connect to the duas that encapsulate our dreams, is not silly or trivial. They build the intimacy in our relationship with Allah because we continue to ask and ask and ask from Him, even during the good times.

Finally, we should look for hacks to create optimistic duas we can feel excited for even during times of sadness and distress. If we are experiencing doom during a calamity, is there a happy future we can look forward to? We should try to make dua for that as a solution to the current crisis we are facing. For example, a woman has just given birth but has severe health complications and has been in the ICU for a week. While her family is distraught, hoping she’ll recover, they probably can’t think of anything else to pray for. Instead of repeating Ya Allah, give her a full recovery, maybe they can look forward to the mom enjoying her baby’s first birthday or high school graduation in full health. Ya Allah, let her bake the baby’s first birthday cake. Ya Allah, let her make a heartfelt speech about her baby’s accomplishments at his graduation dinner.  Doesn’t that sound optimistic, exciting, and so beautiful? Sometimes, it is easier to repeat a dua and stay consistent with asking for it when the dua itself looks on the brighter side of a painful, trying situation.

Give Your Dua an Emotional Charge

The undercurrent to making dua regularly and being truly committed to it is being moved emotionally in some way. As mentioned above, the emotions can range from negative to positive–sadness, desperation, outrage, fear, excitement, joy, anticipation, etc. Finding an emotional charge for a dua, and specifically a “dream dua,” entails knowing it can be real and imagining it as so. Using visualization techniques, such as making a collage of photos that represent what the actualized dua would look like or imagining what it might smell or sound like, can help build the emotional charge we need to fuel our dua habit. We will find even more excitement when we ask for something if we’ve taken some time to relish in what it would be like to have that dua answered exactly as it has been asked.

Dua is not just Spontaneous, it Involves Careful Preparation and Diligent Work

Dua doesn’t have to be a spontaneous string of words that come from fleeting feelings in our hearts at the given time of the dua. Dream duas that we commit to repeating often involve careful preparation. We must introspect on our current lives and the future lives we wish to live. We can try to visualize what those duas would look, smell, feel, sound, and taste like. We can explore all of the possibilities and brainstorm before committing to a select few. We can think about the words that best capture what we imagine. It might take 10 or 20 attempts to find the perfect wording for a dua and even involve input from others. The duas we make don’t have to be carefully guarded and secret; we are welcome to get help for them. 

The work doesn’t stop at coming up with the duas. We can commit to making dua according to a dua habit we devise. (Specifically in Visionaire, the dua habit involves making dream duas multiple times a day/night throughout Ramadan and for 6 months afterwards.) We can also commit to working on making those duas come true with our own efforts, keeping in mind that we seek the worldly means and trust in Allah .3

Grand Duas Help us Grow

As humans, there is no point where we’ve finally “arrived” or “made it” in our lives because things constantly change. We are either growing or dying in everything we do. There is always another mountain to climb; we just have to be the ones to find it. The champion MMA fighter Khabib couldn’t get any higher than being a world champion, right? What he decided to pivot to next was coaching a future world champion. He found another goal to fight for. Our grand “dream duas” benefit us by helping us find, and eventually achieve, our next growth. 

Moreover, dream duas can help motivate us, keep us focused on a clear vision, and hold ourselves accountable. If we find that there are duas we keep coming back to over 5-10 years, we can double down on investing in ourselves in those areas to complete our end of the bargain.4 We can do whatever we can in that area and leave the rest to Allah .   

Don’t Feel Guilty about Making Dua for Dunya 

There is nothing wrong with making dua for the dunya. In the Quran, we are taught to say a dua that asks for the best in this dunya.

 

But among them is he who says, “Our Lord, give us in this world [that which is] good and in the Hereafter [that which is] good and protect us from the punishment of the Fire.” [Surah Al-Baqarah; 2:201]

The key is that we are not exclusively making dua for the dunya. That feeling of guilt is coming from Shaytan, who is trying to prevent us from engaging in a good deed. We shouldn’t be shy about asking for anything from Allah. As a matter of fact, the more we ask, the happier Allah is and the closer we become to Allah through dua. 

Another form of guilt that can deceive us is feeling as if we shouldn’t ask for more if we’re supposed to be grateful for what we already have. However, Allah states that those who are truly grateful will experience an ever-increasing abundance of more to be grateful for [https://quran.com/ibrahim/7.] This dispels the idea that being truly grateful means that a person will never deserve, or desire, more.

I’m Too Scared to Make Dua for the Wrong Thing

Some of us may be faced with dua paralysis when we feel nervous that we are going to ask Allah for something that will turn out to be bad for us in the end. To quell this fear, we should look at the three ways in which Allah answers duas. The first answer to the dua is yes, and exactly what the dua asked for. The second answer is yes, but not now. It will happen later. And the third is yes, but I have something better for you. The protection from making dua for a bad thing is built into the way Allah promises to answer all duas, so make the dua and then leave the rest to Allah . We must have the best opinion of Allah and know that He will always send us good according to His all-encompassing knowledge5.  

Dua is a Lifeforce that will Change You

Dua is a lifeforce that reminds us of the miracles that we are. Aren’t humans just “ghosts inside a skeletal meat living on a rock hurtling through space?” Shaykh Muhammad reminds us.6 Our lives are a sign of Our Creator, the One who can do what we aren’t even capable of imagining or knowing. Thus, dua isn’t about us; it’s about the all-powerful and infinite God whom we worship. As a matter of fact, even non-Muslims know dua works–they just call it by different names like manifesting, the principle of positive attraction, etc. Even Shaytan knows dua works…and he shows us how intensely he understands that duas are not about the asker, but the Responder. Shaytan makes the craziest dua–to live forever and have the power to tempt and lead mankind astray. That is a scary level of yaqeen we can all learn from.

Dua is the only tool we have to rewrite our destiny. Dua is larger than us. Sometimes we feel like we have to change a lot of things in our lives in order to start or return to making dua. However, we don’t need to change; all we need to do is begin in order for dua to change us. Allah will outstrip our smallest baby steps at the onset of this journey and facilitate our progress as we strive to turn and ask from Him.7 So, what are we waiting for now? Get excited about making dua. Godspeed!

 

Related:

– Constructing Your Personal Arafah Dua List I Sh. Muhammad Alshareef & Sh. Yahya Ibrahim

– From The Chaplain’s Desk: Sayyid Al-Istighfar – The Greatest Dua For Seeking Forgiveness

 

1    https://sunnah.com/bukhari:44632    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:35053    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:25174    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:25175    https://sunnah.com/bukhari:74056    https://quran.com/51/20-227    https://sunnah.com/ibnmajah:3821

The post What Shaykh Muhammad Al Shareef Taught Us About Making Dua appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

JewBelong co-founder teams up with the Christian Broadcasting Network and Larry Huch Ministries.

Israeli forces bulldoze UN compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

Israel Antiquities Authority takes part in new Brussels-approved project.

When my father evacuated to Italy I was hopeful my family would be next; my hope is now fading.

The horrors being imposed on Gaza today are a model for repression elsewhere.

We talk to Mohammad Marandi, cover resistance in Gaza, UK hunger strikes, pro-Palestine backlash in Australia and much more.

Muslims swept off the street by ICE, Somalis in Minnesota targeted by racism from the President of America, Palestinian activists illegally detained: post-Trump America is a hellish dystopia… yet one that many Muslims voted for.

In this episode of the MuslimMatters Podcast, Zainab bint Younus speaks to Imam Dawud Walid about the political and cultural pendulum swinging to the right after the leftist allyship of the 2010s, and the phenomenon of Muslims voting for Trump in the last election. She asks him about his book “Towards Sacred Activism” and what priorities Muslims need to keep in mind before choosing to engage with or seek allyship with political and cultural groups in the West. Are Muslims meant to be right-wing or left-wing? Tune into this episode for a deep dive into this contentious discussion.

Imam Dawud Walid is currently the Executive Director of CAIR-Michigan, member of the Imams Council of Michigan, and advisory board member of Muslim Endorsement Council (MEC) which is a national endorsement and support organization for Islamic chaplaincy. Imam Dawud has ijazaat in various disciplines of the Islamic sciences, has served an imam for many years, in addition to writing several books, authoring essays, and speaking at multiple institutions around the world.

Related:

Podcast: Priorities and Protest | On Muslim Activism with Shaykhs Dawud Walid and Omar Suleiman

Holding Onto Prophetic Etiquettes When Protesting: Encouragement And Advice For Muslim Human Rights Advocates

The post [Podcast] Should Muslims Ally with Conservatives or Progressives? | Imam Dawud Walid appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The principal role for which Naledi Pandor of South Africa is known is politics, but her principal interest lies in education. During the final year of her career in 2024, the septuagenarian foreign minister of South Africa gave an education in principled politics with perhaps the most concrete step of any government minister against Israel’s assault on Palestine when she took them to an international court for genocide.

There were personal costs to pay, of course, given the ferocity of Zionist propaganda that has accompanied the genocide. Most recently, in November 202,5 her visa to the United States was revoked in an extraordinarily petty move, which was nonetheless celebrated by Zionist organizations, many of which had spent months attacking both South Africa in general and her in particular for having had the temerity to challenge their bloody assault on Palestine.

But for Pandor, the vindication of being on the right side of history was well worth it. Speaking at Ottawa during a whirlwind trip through Canada just days before the cancellation of her visa, she described the feeling when, after months of personal attacks, professional snubs, and outright mistreatment by both local rivals and foreign peers, her case was found to have been valid all along: “Thanks be to Allah, it’s a wonderful feeling.”

Not that there was any let-up in the urgency of the Palestinian cause, of course. With the genocide still afoot, she emphasized the importance of civil society and mass, organized international solidarity. Palestine’s plight required, she said, that its supporters “build a united global front” in support. This front can not afford parochialism, sectarianism, tribalism, and hatred.

Background

Pandor grew up amid the downtrodden black majority in apartheid South Africa in a family with both educational and political roots. Her grandfather, Zachariah Matthews, was a professor renowned throughout Africa, who was exiled from his homeland after opposing apartheid in 1956 and became a diplomat for the newly independent Botswana before he passed away. Though he was also exiled, Zachariah’s son Joseph Matthews, Pandor’s father, ended up taking a different route: after apartheid ended, he left his father’s party, though he served a few years as minister in charge of police in a subsequent coalition cabinet. By contrast, Pandor, like her grandfather, spent her political career in the African National Congress, which has ruled South Africa for the past three decades.

The African Congress’s rise to power in 1994 came at the end of several generations’ worth of struggle, where they were the main, banned party representing South Africa’s downtrodden majority against the apartheid regime. Their leader, Nelson Mandela, is renowned in anticolonial circles for, among other things, his unfettered solidarity with Palestine, famously remarking, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It was this internationalist solidarity that Pandor inherited; speaking at an event arranged by the Justice for All organization, she emphasized the need for human dignity and freedom across borders – highlighting, along with Palestine, the cases of Rohingya, Uyghurs, and Kashmiris as oppressed people deprived of their rights.

From South African Apartheid to Israeli Genocide

“Pandor stressed the importance of civil society as nimbler, more flexible form of activism than reliance on officialdom” [PC: Al Jazeera]

Israel’s supremacist regime over Palestinians has often been likened to apartheid; Pandor recounted the similarities in militarized townships, forcibly separated places for different races, and the seizure of land for European settlers. In some respects, the current situation is even more ludicrous: where the apartheid regime in South Africa handpicked puppets to impose on the majority black population, today Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and notorious neoconservative ideologue, is being trotted out as a prospective viceroy for a Gaza that does not want him.

But Pandor also emphasized certain key differences. In South Africa’s minority rule, the majority workers in unions were able to organize and protest on account of their importance to the South African economy, thus pressuring the same apartheid regime that deprived them. This is not applicable to Palestine, especially under the current genocide, where the role of international solidarity becomes that much more important.

Pandor stressed the importance of civil society as nimbler, more flexible form of activism than reliance on officialdom: civil society can also afford to stick to its principles in ways that officialdom may not. In taking political stances on principle, she remarked, “For some of us, we are there for freedom, for others we are there for the selfie – and actions will tell which one [is which].”

As an experienced diplomat, she lamented the limitations of even multilateral international bodies and particularly urged the reform of United Nations institutions to break free of the control of the major powers: “It is tragic that the body we rely on for peace and security,” she said, was dominated by five member states more responsible between them for global insecurity and war than the others put together.

The role of principled activism was therefore paramount for Pandor, who quoted Mandela’s advice to youth: “Be a person who makes trouble, but make good trouble.”

South Africa’s Fight for Justice, Home and Abroad

Fighting for a just cause dovetailed neatly with Pandor’s understanding of Islam, to which she converted earlier in life. The African Congress had a considerable amount of support among South Africa’s Muslim minorities, many of whom had been engaged in the campaign against apartheid. For Pandor, faith in Allah enabled her to withstand frequent barbed attacks from political opponents. These could go from sweeping bigotry, as evidenced by much of the attacks on South Africa’s current government in recent years, to the pettily personal: she drily recounted how rivals attacked a slight British inflection in her accent, having studied and taught in Britain in her youth.

Education was Pandor’s first job, and after a stint leading South Africa’s equivalent of a senate, the first woman to do so, she held a number of ministries largely related to educational advancement. She also served a brief stint as interior minister, and ended her ministerial career with five years as South Africa’s foreign minister. As a veteran politician well-versed in the cut and thrust of power, her initiative in a principled cause meant that much more. So too did her emphasis on the importance of civil society, something located well outside the realm of the corridors of power.

Since it threw off apartheid in the 1990s, South Africa has generally been seen as a leader on the African continent and is often catalogued among rising states in the international system. With that system having long been dominated by first colonial, and then Cold War superpowers’ competition, Pandor emphasized the importance of this moment in history: when these “Global Northern” powers, who have dominated international relations for centuries, are in flux. It was a huge opportunity, she said, for the “Global South” to reconfigure international relations to a more equitable keel.

It was only a few days later, after her trip to Canada, that Pandor found that her visa to travel to the United States had been revoked. This stemmed partly from a general hostility toward South Africa by the United States, especially during Donald Trump’s current reign, where far-right activists regularly and speciously claim that Pretoria’s anti-apartheid measures discriminate against the white minority.

This reached such a stage that Trump personally berated South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa for this fictitious oppression and offered asylum to white South Africans fleeing the country, a ludicrous proposition that even baffled many of its intended beneficiaries. And it also stemmed from a linked Zionist campaign against South Africa, which is accused of being in cahoots with Hamas to malign the Israeli state. Pandor, the highest-profile Muslim minister, a black veteran of the anti-apartheid movement, and the lady who took Israel to court, was a central target.

Throughout it all, the South African has kept a dry wit, a stiff upper lip, and an iron will. “Remain engaged until freedom is won,” she said at Ottawa. “That is all.”

 

Related:

– Who’s Afraid Of Dr Naledi Pandor? – Zionist Panic and a Visa Revoked

– When News Becomes Propaganda: Gaza, Genocide, And The Media

 

The post Iron Principle Under Pressure: A Profile Of Naledi Pandor appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

A writer returns to Gaza City to ring in 2026 only to find that the city is not what it used to be. 

A day of prayer, work, and long-buried family truths ends with Darius left behind, wondering what he is not being told.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

* * *

Darius’s First Prayer

As ordered, I rose at dawn without prompting – I could almost hear my own cow back home calling, wanting to be milked – and dressed to tend to the morning duties.

As I walked toward the door, Haaris took my hand to stop me. “Not yet,” he said. “We have to pray Fajr.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but Zihan Ma entered from the front door, sleepy-eyed, but with his face and beard dripping water. He said gently, “Make wudu’. Haaris, show him how.”

Haaris led me out into the cold, to the outhouse. It was a long walk, as the outhouse was on the edge of the property next to the safflower fields, in an area where the land sloped downhill. There was a hedge planted in front of it, shielding it from view, and I saw that there were actually two of them. Haaris explained that it was a twin-pit system, in which one pit was allowed to decompose while the other was in use. When fully decomposed, it would be emptied and the waste would fertilize the fields. The latrines stank a bit, of course, and flies buzzed about. That was normal.

We relieved ourselves, then walked back to the house. On the western side of the house there was an open space with clothes lines strung up. The well was there, surrounded by a circle of flat stones, and with a large stone basin beside it. Using a ladle to scoop the water, Haaris showed me how to wash my hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hair, ears and feet.

“You do this every morning?” I was amazed, for I had typically not bathed more than once every three or four days.

“More than that,” Haaris said.

Inside, a large bamboo fiber mat had been laid down in the living room. We arranged ourselves in a formation, with Ma Shushu in front, myself and Haaris behind him, and Lee Ayi behind us. I understood that we were about to begin a religious ritual of some kind. Lee Ayi had assured me that they did not pray to statues, and that was obvious, as there was no statue in sight. According to her, they prayed to Allah, an eternal, all-powerful being.

“What if I am not yet ready to participate in this ritual?” I asked.

Ma Shushu gazed at me solemnly. “Nothing will happen. There is no compulsion in religion. You will still be a part of the family.”

I remembered my father’s words: “The only one to worship is Allah.” He had not explained, but my heart told me that if he were here, he would not object to this ritual, even if he himself did not participate. I exhaled, feeling my chest relax. “I will pray with you. But I don’t know what to do.”

“Just imitate Haaris’s movements for now. We will teach you the words later.”

I raised my hands as Haaris did, and Ma Shushu began to recite. The words were foreign, but his voice was deep and pleasant, and the rhythm of the chanting was hypnotic. I felt myself falling into River Flow, just as I did when practicing Five Animals. We bowed, stood, prostrated, sat, prostrated, and stood again. At one point we looked right and left, and I did not know the prayer was finished until Ma Shushu turned in his place and sat cross-legged.

“How do you feel?” he asked me.

I felt close to tears, was the truth. All those times I had stopped and watched the people in the temple, and felt envious of them in spite of their stupidity, and felt a pull to join them – now I understood why. I felt small and humble, but not humiliated, and certainly not stupid. Rather I felt elevated, not in a literal sense, but as if my heart had grown in my chest. I could not express any of this, and in the end I only said, “I feel calm.”

Ma Shushu nodded. “That is a good way to feel.”

Women’s Work

I was prepared to go out and start the farmwork, but Ma Shushu stopped me. “Not yet. Your shoulder is not ready. Only light housework for now.”

First I swept the entire house. Then Lee Ayi set me to work at the low table near the window, where the morning light poured in, deep and yellow. I sifted a huge sack of rice to remove small stones, and when that was done I shelled peanuts into a clay bowl, the dry skins crackling softly between my fingers. I worked quickly but methodically, not missing anything. My shoulder still ached, but the work was slow and did not strain it.

The scent of the peanuts reminded me of home, and I found myself missing Far Away and Lady Two. My poor cat. Where was he now? Running from house to house at night, pawing through the garbage for a scrap? A dairy cow was valuable, someone would always care for her. But a stray cat with no parents who loved him, no home, no job? They would throw stones and chase him away. I sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Lee Ayi asked as she rinsed a pile of vegetables.

I shook my head, saying nothing.

Outside, I could hear goats bleating and the dull thump of hooves, the steady noises of a working farm that went on without me.

Lee Ayi moved quietly in and of the room, taking the vegetables outside to dry on woven trays, and lifting lids to check simmering pots. Every so often she glanced at me, not to hurry me, but to be sure I was not favoring the wounded arm too much.

“You work like your father,” she said at last.

I looked up, startled. “Is that good or bad?”

She smiled faintly. “Both.”

She sat across from me and began stripping safflower petals from their heads, her fingers quick and practiced. The petals fell into a shallow basket like small flames.

“I feel bad,” I said, “that I am doing women’s work, while Haaris is outside by himself.”

Lee Ayi gave an annoyed click with her tongue. “There is no men’s work and women’s work. There is only work. All work holds dignity. A cook and a floor sweeper are no less dignified than a horse trainer or an army general. As Muslims, we serve Allah by serving humanity. When you work to benefit others you are working for Allah, and that is the highest calling.”

This was a foreign concept to me. What did humanity have to do with me? My father had never believed in serving anyone nor benefitting anyone except himself, me and my mother. Perhaps a compromise would be to understand it as service to family. By serving this family, I served Allah. I could accept that.

Highway Robbery

“Yong was always restless,” Lee Ayi said, as if reading my mind. “Even as a boy. Cai Lee tried to beat it out of him. It did not work. The harder Father pushed, the more Yong pushed back.”

I said nothing. I had never heard my father spoken of as a child.

“He had no patience for books,” she went on. “Nor for rules. The only things that ever held his attention were fighting and gambling. Martial skill came to him as easily as breathing. Gambling too. He was very lucky. Or perhaps very cursed.”

Her mouth tightened briefly, then relaxed again.

“He never cared for religion. Not even a little. When he began drinking as a teenager, Father said enough was enough. He cast him out. No food, no money, no place by the hearth.”

She did not look at me as she said this, but at the safflower petals.

“I used to meet him in secret,” she said quietly. “I would bring him steamed buns, or rice wrapped in cloth. A few coins. He always said he would pay me back one day.”

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “He never did.”

I would have smiled at the ridiculous notion of my father paying anyone back for anything, but the image of him as a hungry youth wandering the roads sat badly in my chest. As my father had lived, so had I as well. Was that the curse my aunt spoke of? Would I pass the same curse on to my own children?

“One day,” she continued, “Yong came upon a carriage stopped on the road, surrounded by three thieves. Highwaymen. Atop the carriage sat a noble Hui family, the Shahs. Among them was their daughter, Shah Nur. She was sixteen years old and beautiful. Yong fell in love at first sight.”

I froze, watching Lee Ayi intently. Shah Nur was my mother. I had never heard this story before, nor did I know anything about my mother’s family.

Lee Ayi went on: “I suspect if not for the beauty of Shah Nur, Yong would not have interfered. But he took it upon himself to attack the highwaymen. He carried nothing but a staff, while the highwaymen were armed with swords. Yet Yong killed one of the robbers in seconds. Seeing this, your grandfather, Shah Zheng, dismounted and joined in, taking the dead robber’s sword. Between them they drove the other two off.”

It was easy for me to imagine my father doing that. In my mind I could picture the entire battle, and could describe precisely what moves Yong had performed. This was the only incident I’d ever heard of in which my father’s fighting skills had been used to help someone. I felt proud of him.

The Shahs

“The Shahs,” Lee Ayi went on, “are descended from Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, the companion of the Prophet, peace be upon him, who brought Islam to our land. They are the most noble of us all, and the most wealthy, as they organize and finance huge caravans that carry goods from here to India, Persia and Turkey.”

“I saw a caravan once,” I enthused, pleased to be able to tell Lee Ayi something she did not know. “We passed it on the road from my family’s town to the city. It had fifty horse-drawn wagons, can you believe it? They were loaded up with textiles, spices, armor, pistachios, and other things I could not see. It was guarded by many men. I never thought there could be so many armed men outside of the army.”

“Did the wagons bear an emblem of a mountain peak surrounded by five stars?”

“Yes!” I grinned at her. “How did you know?”

“Those wagons belong to the Five Stars Trading Company. That is the Shah family’s company.”

I gaped. “One family owns all of that?”

“And much more. Anyway, Shah Zhen rewarded Yong well for saving their lives. It was more money than he had ever seen. It happened, however, that as he had fallen in love with Nur, she too was captivated by him. For the Shah family, such a match was out of the question. Yong was nominally Muslim, but he was a nobody, a lout. So Yong met with Nur secretly and convinced her to leave with him. It was madness. But she was young and brave, and ready for an adventure. They used the money to buy a farm in another town. They disappeared.”

She resumed stripping petals.

“After you were born, Yong came back only once, alone, to give us the news. But the Shah family had never stopped looking for Nur. They put a price on Yong’s head. He knew if he stayed, he would bring danger to us all. So he left again and never returned. We knew that you existed, but that was all.”

I set the last peanut into the bowl and rubbed my fingers together, brushing away the skins. A multitude of thoughts swirled in my head. I didn’t think my poor mother had gotten the adventure she dreamed of. My father had never been cruel to her, had never beat her, but neither had he been the loving husband she must have hoped for. He had a temper, he shouted at times, he went to town to drink and gamble, and he was in and out of jail as far back as I could remember. Our farmhouse was decrepit and non-productive, and we had been very poor. And now Shah Nur, daughter of a great and noble family, was buried in a small flower-lined plot behind an abandoned, broken-down farmhouse.

I must have been silent for a long time, because I found Lee Ayi beside me, rubbing my shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “What’s done is done. Your mother is with Allah, just as we all will be one day. The best thing you can do is remember her love for you. That is her legacy.”

I nodded. Feeling the need to defend Yong Lee, I said, “My father did better in the end. He changed.”

Lee Ayi nodded. “I believe it. He joined the army to provide for you. That was an act of love.”

My lower lip trembled at that, but I managed to stifle it.

Dhuhr

At that moment, Ma Shushu came in from outside, his arms and face again dripping water. “Time for Dhuhr,” he said simply.

We laid out the mats. Lee Ayi adjusted my cushion so I would not strain my shoulder. Haaris was still out in the fields, his voice carrying faintly as he called to the animals.

“What about Haaris?” I asked.

“He is tending to the animals,” Ma Shushu said. “He will pray on his own.”

I felt a flush of heat rise up my neck. The boy was outside working while I was in here, clean and sheltered, shucking peanuts and sifting rocks out of rice. I reminded myself of Lee Ayi’s words: All work holds dignity.

When the prayer was over, Ma Shushu – seeing my obvious embarrassment – said, “You will be back in the fields soon enough. Do not borrow tomorrow’s pride today.”

After prayer, we ate a simple meal. Rice, greens, a little salted fish. I ate slowly, forcing myself to be mindful.

Lee Ayi made a plate and asked me to take it out to Haaris. I found him in a wide, grassy field on the other side of the outhouses. I hadn’t even known this field existed. The scent of the grass was rich in my nostrils. Haaris sat on a boulder, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, holding a bamboo switch and watching the cows, donkeys, and goats as they grazed. His boots were dirty, and he looked tired. He accepted the plate eagerly and began to devour it.

“Watch the baby goat.” He indicated with the chopsticks. “It keeps trying to headbutt the calf.”

I squeezed in next to him on the boulder and watched. The goat was more than a baby – maybe six months old, I would guess, though my eye was unpracticed – while the cow’s calf was younger but much bigger. As I watched, the goat bleated loudly, reared up on its hind legs and aimed its forehead at the calf, which was busy grazing. At the last instant the calf moved its head to the side and the goat missed. Haaris laughed out loud, spitting a bite of green beans.

I smiled as well. “The goat is a fighter.”

“Say ma sha-Allah.”

“What is that?”

“Oh, it’s like, this is something good that Allah made.”

“Repeat it.”

Haaris repeated the phrase, and I did my best to pronounce it.

“I’d better get back,” I said.

“I’ll see you soon,” Haaris promised. “We have studies.”

Studies

I changed the sheets on the beds then took the food scraps – vegetable peels and such – out to the compost pile. Outside, the sounds of the farm went on. Inside, the day settled around me like a garment I was still learning how to wear.

A few hours later Haaris and I sat on woven mats in Ma Shushu’s study, the afternoon light slanting in through the window and laying a pale rectangle across the floor. A low desk stood before him, its surface worn smooth, with a stack of books neatly arranged at one corner. Haaris sat cross-legged beside me, already alert, his back straight and his hands folded in his lap as if lessons were a form of prayer in themselves.

Ma Shushu began with numbers.

He drew figures in charcoal on a wooden board, simple at first. Counting, grouping, dividing. Haaris answered quickly, eager to please. I was slower, unused to putting numbers to paper, but the logic of it came easily enough. When Ma Shushu shifted from grain tallies to weights and measures, I leaned forward without realizing it. This was useful knowledge. Real knowledge. The kind that kept accounts honest and prevented quarrels.

“Math is justice,” Ma Shushu said, tapping the board once. “If you cannot count, someone else will count for you, and it won’t be in your favor.”

After that came reading and writing. Haaris fetched brushes and ink while Ma Shushu laid out a sheet of paper. He wrote a single character and explained its strokes, the order, the balance. Haaris practiced carefully, tongue caught between his teeth. When it was my turn, my hand felt clumsy around the brush, but Ma Shushu corrected my grip without comment and had me try again.

“Slow,” he said. “Meaning comes from care.”

My father had taught me to read and write by drawing characters in the dirt, using the wooden training dao. I had literally grown up writing with a sword. However, I was not used to the brush, or the small scale. Once my hand became accustomed to the grip, and I learned to ease the pressure and make everything smaller, my hand began to flow. The brush whispered across the page.

“Have you done this before?” Ma Shushu asked. “You pick it up fast.”

“My father taught me using a – “ I stopped myself. “A stick.”

“A stick?” Ma Shushu sounded offended. He shrugged. “Well. Not everyone has resources.”

I stiffened for a moment, not sure if my father was being criticised. Then I took a breath and relaxed. I did not want to see my father and Zihan Ma as opposites or opponents. My father’s lessons in Five Animals had literally saved my life. Once, at the town fair, I had seen a relay race, where the teammates passed a red ribbon from one to the next. I imagined my father passing a ribbon on to Zihan Ma. I was that ribbon. That was my hope, anyway.

When the ink was set aside and the brushes rinsed, Ma Shushu poured water into three small cups. He drank first, then gestured for us to do the same.

“Now,” he said, “we speak of deen.”

Haaris shifted closer, his expression changing. This was his favorite part, I could tell.

Ma Shushu did not open a book. He rested his hands on his knees and looked at us, first at Haaris, then at me.

“All of it begins with tawheed,” he said. “The Oneness of Allah.”

He did not raise his voice or dramatize the words. He spoke as if stating a fact as simple as the sun rising in the east.

“There is one Creator. Not many. Nor should anything else in the creation be worshiped. When you understand this, many other questions become smaller.” He went on to explain the concept of tawheed, the Oneness of God, and its many applications to our lives. I began to understand that this central belief of Islam was deep and all-encompassing.

“That is enough for today,” he said eventually. “Tomorrow we continue.”

“What do you think?” Haaris asked me when the lesson was over.

“I think I have a lot to learn.” That was the best I could offer.

Jum’ah

The next day was Friday. Once again I was relegated to housework. Once the early morning tasks were done, Ma Shushu and Haaris began hitching the donkeys to the carriage. The carriage was piled high with safflowers that the farm laborers had harvested yesterday.

“Are we going to town?” I asked.

“Haaris and I are going,” Ma Shushu said. “It’s market day, and it’s Jum’ah, the main day of prayer for Muslims. We will deliver the safflowers to my sister and a few others, then attend prayer.”

“What about me?”

Ma Shushu did not meet my eyes. “Your shoulder is not healed yet. The jostling of the carriage would not be good for you.”

As they departed, all I saw was the back of the wagon and a heap of flowers. I waved, but no one saw me. The whole thing was very strange, and I couldn’t feeling there was something I wasn’t being told.

They were hardly out of sight when Lee Ayi called me to the west side of the house. She nodded to the clothes on the lines.

“Help me take these clothes down and fold them,” she said, speaking quickly. “Then take the lines down.”

“Some of the clothes are still damp,” I remarked as I took down a pair of Haaris’s trousers.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lee Ayi replied. “We’ll put them back up later.”

This made no sense to me, but I did as ordered. Lee Ayi worked fast, rushing, which was not like her at all.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 6 – A Single Step

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

 

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Searching for Signs of Spring: A Short Story

A Wish And A Cosmic Bird: A Play

The post Far Away [Part 5] – There Is Only Work appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

A Maccabi Tel Aviv fan gives a Nazi salute at a match in Stuttgart, Germany

Last week the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, retired after admitting presenting inaccurate information sourced from an artificial intelligence app, Microsoft CoPilot, in a report on the security situation that would ensue if the away fans of the Israeli football team, Maccabi Tel Aviv (MTA), were to be allowed to travel to Birmingham to see their team play Aston Villa. The information included mention of a fixture between MTA and West Ham, an east London side, which had never taken place. The mainstream media has been full of angry debate about who was a threat to whom in the event of the MTA fans coming; pro-Israel outlets and figures claim that the police, whom they claimed are under the sway of local ‘Islamists’, were underplaying the threat of local “Islamist thugs” to the Israeli fans while local MPs and Palestine supporters point to the club’s actual record of racist violence, both inside and outside Israel. In the event, the club withdrew the fans itself after a riot between their fans and another local team’s fans in Tel Aviv, but the latest revelations have prompted an orchestrated outrage from Zionists, securocrats and racists who claim that the MTA fans were blameless and that the opposition to them attending was motivated by antisemitism, or was antisemitic regardless of motive; this includes sections of the ‘official’ Left, notably including this sickening article by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian last Friday, who tells us that the affairs “stirs deep-seated fears” of being “obliged to retreat from mainstream spaces to spare everyone else the awkwardness of having to battle for their inclusion”.

How many times do we have to say that this is not about the right of Jews to walk any street they like, but about the ‘right’ of a group of foreign football supporters, most of whom have served in an army whose principal role is oppressing people, supporting violent settlers as they encroach on more and more native Palestinian land, and who have for the past two and a half years been slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, to travel through the streets of Birmingham or indeed any other city in the UK where there is a large Muslim population? Let’s not forget that Russia has been excluded from international sport since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so there is no danger of its fans antagonising Polish or Ukrainian communities, and its war crimes, though still dreadful, do not approach genocide. Everyone who has been on a Palestine demonstration will know there are Jewish allies; you would not know who was Jewish and who was not unless they wore Haredi clothing and you do not know which of them supports Israel or not unless you ask or they tell. When it’s Jews who claim to feel threatened, of course, it’s another matter: when anti-genocide demonstrators wanted to demonstrate outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House on a Saturday, the day most people have off work, it was banned because there was a synagogue a few streets away. 

The same people expecting Birmingham’s Muslims to tolerate this complain constantly about “fighting-age males” from Muslim countries being offered asylum, accusing them without any evidence of being a stealth invasion. We have been told that the real threat was to the Israeli fans and came from “Islamist thugs”, a phenomenon unseen in this country and who went unnamed but no doubt referred to the potential for demonstrations: actual peaceful demonstrations against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza and its ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank are referred to as “hate marches” while the media refers to actual thugs who stop aid reaching Gaza as ‘demonstrators’ or ‘protesters’. There has been outrage that the panel which selected Craig Guildford included an imam; it would, surely, have included other faith leaders as well. It was meant to represent the community and Muslims are a major part of the community in Birmingham. Matthew Goodwin (who until recently was a senior fellow of the UAE-funded Legatum Institute, which now trades as Prosperity Institute) lectures us that “Islamists” are starting to have influence, not bothering to distinguish between Muslims and “Islamists”; it is natural, in a democracy, that sections of the community have influence over decisions that affect their lives.

Jews do not have a right to be cosseted if they choose to throw in their lot with violent football hooligans and a foreign power that is oppressively and murderously racist. They deserve to be held accountable. Over the past several years, we have been lectured endlessly that their feelings are all-important, that they must feel safe and they alone have the right to dictate what constitutes antisemitism (and it must be the right kind of Jews, i.e. not dissenting ones). David Baddiel wrote an entire book called “Jews Don’t Count”, castigating the Left for failing to acknowledge Jews’ feelings of oppression or to count them among the oppressed, regardless of their whiteness in an age when that matters more than anything else, their ample access to media and to power; people who question their status as an oppressed minority stand to lose out, as Diane Abbott did in the years before the 2024 election. Meanwhile, a drumbeat campaign goes on to drive Muslims out of public life, which has now culminated in a senior police officer losing his job for failing to treat Muslims with the contempt they believe we deserve. Yes, he made some stupid mistakes, but none of these are the reason he was forced out. We all remember the quote about Islamophobia “passing the dinner-table test”; we are now entering an age in which it is less risky to be racist than not.

Nearly 2 million people have been forcibly displaced in Gaza and 1.3 million are without adequate shelter as the cold bites.

Julie Norman accepts post with Chatham House, which counts BAE Systems as a major donor.

Laila Cunningham accused of endangering Muslims after saying it ‘has to be assumed’ people hiding their face for a criminal reason

Reform UK’s mayoral candidate for London has been accused of endangering Muslims after she said women wearing the burqa should be subject to stop and search.

Laila Cunningham, who was announced as Reform’s candidate for the 2028 mayoral elections last week, said no one should cover their face “in an open society”, adding: “It has to be assumed that if you’re hiding your face, you’re hiding it for a criminal reason.”

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At least 100 children killed during “ceasefire” period.

Grief, an emotion, an exclusive state of being; a membership to which one never wants, but is nevertheless served. Thousands and thousands before me have lived through it, and many thousands more will come after me who will experience the aching pain of grief. I know for sure, each one of those lived experiences will be as unique as the leaves that drop from the trees at this time of year. As I finish yet another salah where I’m wiping away tears with my prayer garment, I feel an intense throbbing, deep inside my heart, a struggle that erupts out as tears. It seems to have no end. 

It is a Sunday night, which means work tomorrow; the beginning of yet another week where I will carry my invisible yet ever-so-heavy grief around with me: finding that smile when greeting others, listening attentively, and communicating, because, as expressed in every language, life must go on. It’s now a little over a year since I lost my father. I have carried on in the best way I can, making sure I only cry behind closed doors. You see, the problem with that is, you are then always expected to carry on – so the invisible weight of grief becomes even heavier on the already constricted heart. 

Understanding Fate

At times, usually when I’m driving, I remind myself of the immense blessing of grieving for my father well into my forties. Allah , Ar-Rahman, blessed me with a kind and loving father for over four decades – a gift many hundreds of people have not been privileged to have. I have seen close friends and family lose loved ones at much younger ages, and they have carried on beautifully. Why then does my heart hurt in this way? Am I an ungrateful soul? I’m not sure I know the answer to this. Can a grateful heart not feel pain?  Isn’t pain also an emotion felt by the living, just as gratitude is? Just because I cry, does it mean I am not accepting of Allah’s beautiful and perfect decree in my life? 

It is the human in us. The very thing that differentiates us from all of Allah’s Creation is our ability to feel continuously. We love and are loved, but this does not mean that we don’t experience sorrow or are exempt from hurting others. We can be grateful, yet have endless tears. This is what makes us humans with hearts: a heart that is more than an organ, a heart that feels. This is what my year-long exclusive membership to the emotional field of grief has taught me. It is one of the many emotional states that will now be with me – until I myself leave this dunya. I can hide it, but I cannot avoid it. I may never find the right words to describe it, but every inch of my beating heart will feel it every single day. 

Grieving As A Believer

“Life has to go on, but how should a heart carrying the badge of grief carry on?” [PC: Duniah Almasri (unsplash)]

Life has to go on, but how should a heart carrying the badge of grief carry on? The Qur’an and the Seerah of Prophet Muhammad are my answer. You would think worship is easier for the one who loses someone dear, but no one talks about how you freeze with worship when grieving. How the heart has a yearning to connect with its Lord, but the mind remains still, lost and struggling to move. It is then that the years of holding the mus’haf close to the heart help revive it for worship. It is then, -knowing that the tears running down Muhammad’s (saw) face after losing his infant child, knowing he continued with his role as the last Prophet of Islam-, that this helps you take steps towards living life. We know about all the losses in his life, from before his birth; from the death of his father, to losing his mother, grandfather and then later his beloved wife and uncle. The seerah weighs heavily with death and grieving, but life, purpose and calling upon Allah continue. It is then that you are reminded of what a real human experience of grief is, because in the example of the Prophet Muhammad , we know is for us the ideal believer and human. 

I don’t think anyone truly learns to live with grief. I think it can be soul-consuming; we either park it somewhere or find a way to carry it with us – but it is always there. At times, the intensity of missing someone, remembering their face, the pain they lived with, the sacrifices they made, all of this and more, can make us feel lost and detached from the every day of life. It is for these moments that having a daily relationship with the Qur’an brings focus back into our day, allowing us to understand how life can feel bearable.

For many years now, I have run a group of daily Qur’an recitation with other sisters. We recite ten verses a day and read the translation of the same ten verses. This has been running for over a decade now, but it was in my year of grief that the group was my anchor and I realised the true blessing of having a daily relationship with the Qur’an. For all the verses I had read and learnt about, they came as a soothing balm in my time of hurt. It allowed me not to be dismissive of feelings but rather gave meaning and purpose to the overwhelming fear that comes with mourning someone we love. It is a form of therapy, but with the Words of Allah – His Speech – how can we not find comfort in it? 

 “Your Lord has not forsaken you” [ Surah Ad-Duha;93:3]

Dua’ – A Gift For The Deceased And For The Living 

After a year-long journey of wiping away tears at night and walking with a forced smile during the day, I have taught myself to make dua’ for my father’s soul in a way I have not done so before. There is an enormous comfort in knowing that when we make dua’ for a departed soul, they benefit from it. 

Abu Huraira narrated that “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, ‘Verily, Allah Almighty will raise the status of his righteous servant in paradise, and he will say, ‘O Lord, what is this?’ Allah will say, ‘This is (due to) your child seeking forgiveness for you.’” [Sunan Ibn Majah]

I cannot express in words how much relief this provides me. To know that my good actions can aid my father now allows me to continue; it allows me to want to do good, and it also helps this private experience to feel acceptable. 

Allah , The Most Wise, in His Wisdom permitted us, His servants, to know about this; to know that we can benefit those who have left the dunya. This knowledge that He has shared with us of the unseen is of great benefit for both the living and the dead. 

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah (saw) said: “When the human being dies, his deeds end except for three: ongoing charity, beneficial knowledge, or a righteous child who prays for him.” [Sahih Muslim]

It is by knowing this that a grieving believer can refresh and re-intend to carry out good. It is by knowing that I shall make every tear a means of dua’ for my father, but also live such a life that I do both: attempt at being a righteous child of my father’s, but also leave behind children who will also pray for me in this way. In order for this to happen, there is much work. And this is faith. This is what faith is like for us Muslims. It is not something confined to our prayer mats, but has to be present when we do everything else; and this includes when and how we grieve, too. It is only because of faith that I am able to navigate the waves of sorrow and understand its permanent residence in my life. 

 

Related:

– Unheard, Unspoken: The Secret Side Of Grief

– Sharing Grief: A 10 Point Primer On Condolence

The post Keeping The Faith After Loss: How To Save A Grieving Heart appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.