The war on Muslims - III

comment on previous two posts by JustOne

I agree with you, but...

Do you think maybe it starts from a far more micro level then what you have proposed?

The muslim world is faced either with things like dwindling literacy rates and minimal health care OR with mismanaged resources.  Not to mention petty corruption, broken homes, and a preoccupation with western popular culture that is spacing out both the youth and adults.

I mean I point the finger at myself first.  Currently, I am a part of the problem, if only by lack of action to bring about a lasting change.

timbuktu's reply:

Of course, the problems do stem from the individual, whether of the elite or the common man.



I am not sure if it is true that there is dwindling literacy and health care rate. True that the government funded services have failed to keep with the rising needs brought on by increased population, urbanization, improved infrastructure and hence demand, and increased expectations. In the private sector, however, both indicators have gone up, unless the increase in population has caused a decline in the percentage of those covered.

The economy, literacy rate, and health care can be improved if there is investment in the Ummah. As I have mentioned on other threads, consider the 3.1/2 trillion dollars of only Saudi money parked in the US. $2.3 trillion of this was private money, and $0.8 trillion was Saudi government's. Who are the Saudi individuals who have that kind of money? They are the princes and associated tycoons, of course. Where did they get this money from? From sale of the oil and execution of infrastructure projects at inflated rates. To whom does the oil belong? It should belong to the Saudi people, but since this is a kingdom, it is usurped by the royal family.

Imagine what just the investment of this 3.1 trillion dollars can do to the Ummah. There are other Muslims with large amounts of money - the Kuwaitis, the Emiratis, etc. And here the external factors come into play. If Suhartu had not been placed in power in Indonesia by the CIA, the murder of over a million Indonesians would not have taken place, and the oil money from Indonesia would have been invested in Indonesia, not in the US. Similarly, the history of Iran would have been different if Musaddiq had not been deposed by CIA.

The leadership of Pakistan has been mostly feudal, and it pays only lip service to Islam, which it uses with either direct assumption of peership, or co-opts the local peer to control the rural population.

There are other players here, too: Musharraf and other generals before him, Zardari and other corrupt people before him. If the money they had swindled from their nations had not found safe havens in the West, it would have to stay in their homelands, and would have to be invested there.

Since these generals and politicians and business leaders come from the ordinary citizen class, it is indeed our failure at the micro level. We are not just good Muslims. Having accepted that, is it necessary to become good Muslims in order to defeat the Imperialists of today? It is true that the Quran tells us if we are good Muslims, Allah (swt) will hand over power to us.

If you look at the history of Muslims, time and again an ideologically motivated group has managed to gain control of a region and dispelled the kuffar. Yusuf bin Tashfeen's murabeteen were not the same as the easy-going urbanite Andalucíans, yet they were the need of the hour. The muwwahedeen who replaced them were followers of Imam Ghazali, a different approach to the deen, but they too were successful in defeating the Christian Reconquesta until the Andalucians as a whole fell to schism on ethnic and sectarian grounds.

The culprit then is schism, but I agree that this comes from the individual's ignoring of the basic injunctions of being one ummah in the Quran and Sunnah, hence it is a failure at the micro-level. What I have demonstrated above is that despite this schism, many times it was possible to impose rule of one group, and keep the kuffar at bay. Of course it is better that instead of a coercive imposition, there is voluntary acceptance (and that would definitely involve power sharing). There are many organizations that claim to bring Muslims together as one. Some individuals among them may falter, but by and large these organizations do try.

Unscrupulous people come mostly from the class educated in the secular western way. Me and you are part of this class. But not all from this only class are corrupt. The madrassa educated (and scion of the very pious Mufti Mahmood) Fazlur Rehman gets into politics, he plays the same game, but he is not the only Islamist player. There are others, and they are seemingly pious.

What happened in the decolonization era was a fraud. The departing empires left behind a class to which the empire's capital was still home. The leadership was subservient to the white master. The leading world powers also devised financial institutions - the World bank and the IMF - that served to bring the so-called independent nations under inflated debt burdens, so as to keep them permanently under their thumbs. The leaders of these third world countries were encouraged to be corrupt and wars were imposed on them so that the loot could find its way into the banks of the West.

This is the story of my generation. We understood some of what was happening, and we struggled in our own ways to break the yoke.

My intention is to make people aware of what is happening around them. Just as decolonization was made possible due to several factors - indigenous struggle, development of an aware class in the center of the Empire, economic decline of the Empire through wars, this struggle for emancipation may involve  all three factors. Of course, it is Allah's will that will cause the emancipation. But we have to analyze and struggle accordingly. Praying in the dead of night may not be enough.

If people in the West were made aware of the money-laundering that goes on there, eventually loot and corruption on such a large scale may come to an end.