Palestine after Gaza – Reality check primer

 

Whilst the world watches Palestinians dying and being maimed daily, politicians and the media keep talking, warning of an impending humanitarian catastrophe as if that was not already the case. Meanwhile, the extermination policy pursued by Israel continues. Part of the problem is the public disbelief that such large-scale destruction can ever be deliberate, and if so, they try to assign the blame to a single psychopath at the helm, Netanyahu. However, we are not dealing with a lone psychopath, we are dealing with a psychopathic mindset which has taken hold at almost all levels of the “civilisation” upheld by Pax Americana and of which the brutally naked variety displayed by Israel is only a more extreme version.

As outrageous as the slaughter is, the apparent inability or unwillingness of most to do something to stop it is even worse. The only way to explain this passiveness is to understand that those who are not members of the psychopathic elites are thoroughly conditioned to fear and obey them. Due to this uneven power relationship the narrative has also been severely skewed. This article is aimed to dispel some of the prominent misconceptions.

History did not start yesterday

Anybody who views the onslaught on Gaza as an “over-the-top” reaction to the jailbreak of 7 October 2023 has obviously not paid attention or fallen for Zionist propaganda. But even those who talk about 75 years of occupation miss the point that the colonising project did not start in Palestine in 1948. Nor did it start with the British Mandate after WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate (well prior to the Holocaust usually cited as justification). In effect it started with the first crusades which were an organised scheme by the allegedly Christian West to enlist criminals and adventurers in order to conquer and plunder far-off lands, ejecting and eliminating their people. The entire European project and its prosperity is a spin-off of this campaign, later expanding through the European age of colonialism into the Americas, Australia, Asia and Africa. Israel is merely the last colonial project of a self-declared superior race who considered the rest of the world to be rightfully theirs to take.

A land without people for a people without land

A myth and slogan both Nazi Germany and Israel have in common besides many other commonalities. They may claim to need the land, to have been disadvantaged or persecuted. Yet, earlier trauma cannot become a free ticket to abuse. It is not unusual for the abused to become an abuser in turn, in which case he must be stopped. No historic suffering can justify the perpetration of genocide.

Conquerors rarely conquered empty wastelands. The only reason the land claimed by them ends up without people is because they removed them.

The Biblical promise

Those who argue that it is most unreasonable and irrational in today’s world for Israel to claim Palestine as their Biblical inheritance and birth right from millennia ago themselves miss the point: the majority of Israeli colonisers, whilst professing Judaism to some degree (the majority are secular) and speaking Hebrew, are not Israelites and have absolutely no connection to the land of Palestine. They are what Arthur Koestler called the 13^th tribe[i], impostors from Eastern Europe who converted to Judaism for political convenience and then hijacked the cause of Judaism to the extent that even Jews of sound lineage (Sephardic or Oriental Jews) became marginalised. These people, the Khazar, are more than likely the dreaded Gog and Magog (Ja’juj and Ma’juj), Gog, son of Japeth, son of Noah, and his descendants. They were infamous for the damage they inflicted on their neighbours until Dhu-l-Qarnayn (Alexander the Great?) walled them in. They would breach that wall at a time when, according to the Qur’an, people would intermingle with each other like waves[ii]. Since their release, they have subverted every stratum of humanity. Zionism, the subjugation and plundering of all other peoples, is their ideology. Once we look at the history of the past thousand years from this perspective, things begin making sense, from the crusades, the knights templars, the Jesuits, the slave trade, exploitation through interest and the invention of fractional reserve banking, the industrialisation of labour (and everything else), to colonialism and never-ending wars.

A lone lunatic

For normal people who do not share the psychopathic mindset of Zionists, the pure evil of their actions is hard to comprehend. It is therefore easier to project this evil on just a few deranged personalities, such as Netanyahu. But he did not occupy the position he holds out of a vacuum. He has been put into this position by a society just as hateful and evil as himself. A society founded on the dehumanisation and destruction of the other, the forced displacement of the native population and the perpetual punishment of any remnants of them in order to prevent them from ever gaining independence or taking revenge. Israel is a state founded in inequity and has absolutely no chance of redemption unless it forfeits the Zionist claim of a chosen or superior people distinct from all the rest.

The right to exist

Of course, all people under God have a right to exist. Yet the apartheid state of Israel does not. A state which preaches and practices the utter destruction of its neighbours does not have that right. A state which elevates the killing of children and women and men and doctors and nurses and journalists and academics and any expression of culture other than their own to official policy does not have a right to exist. Nor does it have a right to “defend itself”, because it is the attacker, not the attacked.[iii]

The inherent weakness in the superiority complex

Like with any bully, Israel’s perceived strength is entirely dependent on others believing in it. Anybody who thinks themselves superior and invincible becomes out of touch with reality. This soon turns into an apparent weakness. The myth of Israel’s army as the most powerful in the Middle East was destroyed in a single day. The myth of its benign, democratic, moral credentials has been buried during the ongoing genocide. This weakness also translates to those who backed it unconditionally throughout its (in historical terms) brief history. The decline of Israel is a harbinger of the decline of the West as the leading power on the globe, but like a fish out of water it won’t die without flapping violently. The first casualty is the so-called “rules-based order”, the fig leaf by which Anglo-American enterprise gave itself a halo of respectability and legality when going on a killing spree abroad in order to plunder resources.

Greater Israel

Israel is not content with secure borders as many in the West naively believe. Nor does it want a sovereign Palestinian state at its borders. “Eretz Israel”, the “Land of Israel” extends well into Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and parts of Saudi-Arabia (Madinah).

The colonial mindset

The resistance in Gaza demonstrated in only a few months that Israel can easily be defeated and the land of Palestine can be liberated. Yet, at this weakest point in Israel’s history, nobody grasped the opportunity to deal with this cancer in their midst once and for all. Amongst the Arab nations only Yemen, arguably the poorest, itself ravaged by war, stood up for the Palestinians without compromise. Other resistance groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria helped take off some of the pressure. It suddenly becomes clear why the prophet of Islam, Muhammad peace be upon him, singled out the people of the Levant and of Yemen for special blessing at the end of times but not the Arabian heartland[iv].

It is apparent to both Israeli and non-Israeli analysts that Israel cannot survive a prolonged war. Even though they make large-scale use of mercenaries, my estimates are that almost ten percent of their armed forces have already been put out of action. A full-scale attack by Hezbollah would flatten Tel Aviv and the rest of the country. Turkey has a million men in arms ready at any time and advanced hardware. However, all they would have needed to do is to send an aid flotilla to the coast of Gaza flanked by warships and put NATO on notice that they expect the alliance to defend them if attacked by Israel, a non-member. There would be some inherent risk in this strategy, but if it failed to deliver aid it would blow the cover of NATO forever. The USA is already overstretched and cannot afford opening another front, be it with Turkey, Iran or with China (over Taiwan). Yet every country is holding back not realising, it seems, that if they allow the bully to get up and recover, he is coming for them next. One at a time.

All of the Muslim state actors colluded with Israel in one way or another, exposing their utter dependency on Israel’s backers. Whether it be Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, who are scared to lose their recent riches, or Egypt, heavily in debt to America and dependent on aid, these countries will not only fail to grasp the opportunity to rid themselves of a poisonous neighbour, they don’t even see the opportunity – they are like a caged dog waiting for daily rations. You open the door of the cage and he prefers to stay put.

The same logic explains why, with a few laudable exceptions, Muslims are also not at the forefront of direct action against Israeli colonialism and American imperialism.

Fair play and the two-state solution

The colonisers have a twisted idea of fairness: if they can’t get rid of you completely, they might be willing to share what is rightfully yours, at least for the time being. When a burglar takes over your house and locks you in the basement, justice does not consist in him reluctantly agreeing to let you run the basement following your own rules whilst he retains control of entry and exit points. The only viable solution is a one-state solution which will either be an oppressive Zionist state with few or no rights for others or a non-Zionist Palestinian state with equal rights for all.

International law

International law and the international community are only international in the sense that they are imposed globally, not however in a participatory sense or by way of equal application. This legal framework served the dominant power to demand total submission not only through force but also through entrapment within rules serving its own purpose in the name of freedom, democracy, human rights (all the way to imposing transgender anomalies as the new normal). The Covid pandemic made it abundantly clear that all nations on the globe were ruled by the same system, receiving their dictates from the same elite, notwithstanding whether they were right-leaning or left-leaning, communist or fascist. However, the Gaza genocide and tacit to outspoken Western support for it have exposed the hypocrisy of this rhetoric and, as Hezam Al-Asad, Ansarullah Political Bureau member of Ansaruallah in Yemen has been quoted, in response to America's claim that the seizure of a ship was a "flagrant violation of international law": "International law was killed in Al-Shifa Hospital, its remains scattered in Al-Rantisi Hospital, and buried under the rubble of Al-Maamadani Hospital."

Whilst using international law, as South Africa successfully did, to expose the hypocrisy of the “rules-based order” and, sometimes, force the beneficiaries of this order to abide by their own rules, the legal avenue alone will not bring about justice in the face of brute force.

Muslims (as well as most of other ordinary people) have been both physically and intellectually disarmed, asked to apologise for the concept of jihad (just war/resistance) whilst being at the receiving end of ongoing unjust wars. You cannot fight oppression using the toolkit of the oppressor, hence a liberation of the mind is first of all necessary.

Existential threats

Just as Israel wants to portray the fight against oppression as an existential threat, the global elite indoctrinates the world population with the threat of an imminent demise unless everybody surrenders to its mandates. Whilst struggling to survive the challenge they face in Palestine, they have not retreated elsewhere and continue to try to impose restrictions on the world population, handing ever more power to unelected world bodies, such as the World Economic Forum or the World Health Organisation. If the environmental crisis lobby was serious, they would not obsess with cow farts but prohibit the use of explosive weaponry. The Pentagon is, after all, the largest polluter on the planet[v]. As long as they keep dropping bombs, their apocalyptic warnings aimed at restricting the free movement of ordinary people even further, ring hollow.

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[i] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazar Empire and its Heritage. London: Hutchison 1976

[ii] Al-Kahf 99

[iii] ICJ advisory opinion 9 July 2004

[iv] Narrated Ibn `Umar:The Prophet said, "O Allah! Bestow Your blessings on our Sham! O Allah! Bestow Your blessings on our Yemen." The People said, "And also on our Najd." He said, "O Allah! Bestow Your blessings on our Sham)! O Allah! Bestow Your blessings on our Yemen." The people said, "O Allah's Apostle! And also on our Najd." I think the third time the Prophet said, "There (in Najd) is the place of earthquakes and afflictions and from there comes out the horn of Satan." Al-Bukhari, Book of Afflictions.

[v] Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change and the Costs of War, Crawford, Boston University 2019

 

Flying Imam is now on Substack: https://flyingimam.substack.com/

Conceptual Islam - new book published

Below are some selected quotes from my new title "Conceptual Islam - Escaping false paradigms" published on Kindle. A print edition may follow.

Most textbooks on Islam tell us that Islam is a way of life. The briefest of reality checks will tell us that Muslims’ way of life is today shaped by a plethora of other influences with Islam as an add-on. This apparent discrepancy has relegated the notion of true Islam into either the past as a praised, but lost historic example from the days of the prophet and his companions or into the future as a utopian dream of a return to the golden age "when the Mahdi comes". Neither offers much solace or hope for the Muslim struggling with the here and now.

Conceptualising Islam means to move away from the narrow constraints of mere practices and to discover the underlying purpose. Naturally, Islam being a divinely inspired, or rather ordained, way of life, not a man-made system, such a road of discovery must always be guided by the teachings of both the Qur’an and the prophet. Yet, at the same time, it must not get stuck in the environment in which the Qur’an was first taught. Early Muslim scholars well understood this need for adaptability. Sadly, most of today’s Muslim scholars are only apt at passing on knowledge, not wisdom.

My analysis postulates that we are trying to hold on to an Islamic paradigm whilst having willingly surrendered to non-Islamic (secular) concepts. Examples for these are heliocentricity, relativism or evolution. We inertly resent some of their teachings, because they challenge the divine origin and destiny of all that is, and that is exactly what they intend to do. Yet we have become unable to assess their merits and shortcomings since we have accepted "science" as the benchmark of truth, adding a little bit of "Islamisation" at the frills, instead of measuring its claims against the yardstick of revelation.

Truth is absolute and cannot be divided. The claim that there may be many truths is an aberrant mind game defying basic logic. Whatever is true cannot, at the same time, be false, hence the opposite of an established truth cannot, at the same time, also be true. Relativism, therefore, is an erosion of truth.

Power can be taken or given. Sometimes, power feels the need to be justified, at other times it views this as a weakness. However, power does not exist in a vacuum. It has both a source and a purpose. We need to understand where a given power is derived from and what it aims to achieve.

Knowledge can be learned. Wisdom needs to be acquired through experience. Experience is gained from both success and failure. Too much success tends to make people careless, too much failure, on the other hand, despondent. The latter very much describes our present reality. Sadly, Western philosophy did not embrace the clarity of Kant (whose PhD certificate incidentally is headed with the Bismillah formula), but rather the materialism of Darwin, nihilism of Nietzsche and confusion of Heidegger. Where reasoning is applied consistently and consequently, empirical research ultimately reaches the same conclusions as those imparted through revealed knowledge.

Secular science has replaced geocentrism with heliocentrism, that is, it has replaced the earth as the centre of the universe with the sun. Again, there is more to this than meets the eye. If the earth is not special, then man is not special; he evolved rather than purposefully having been placed there.

Sun and star worship has always been a substitute for the worship of Lucifer, the false light made from fire who pretends to free man’s spirit and actions from the yoke of God, and thus making the sun replace the earth as the centre of our world is also symbolical of replacing worship of God with the worship of the devil.


In Islamic cosmology, there are seven heavens, our universe, ornamented with stars, being the lowest of them. ... Allah’s throne rests above all of them (carried by eight) and is the only permanent point of reference, everything in creation being subject to the cycle of life and thus circling around it. The circumbulation of the Kaabah is a visual representation of this fact on earth, with the black stone, besides representing a handshake between all Muslims, the first and the last of them, being a "portal" to other dimensions. The concentric circles surrounding the Kaabah of the faithful praying establish an energy field on earth which provides a measure of protection from harm. That the Tawaf was halted completely during the lockdown period of the alleged pandemic is therefore not insignificant, nor is the continuous barring of pilgrims from touching or kissing the black stone. It indicates a triumph of materialism over the spiritual, yet I am not aware of a single contemporary Muslim scholar having raised objections to these arrangements.

Instead, the very same "teachers" of Islam who earlier insisted that the media and politicians who were peddling the Islamic terrorism narrative were corrupt, spreaders of immorality and could not be trusted, suddenly, when supporting the Covid-19 narrative and the permissibility of and need for the vaccination programme, tried to convince us that the same media and politicians only had our best interests at heart and worked tirelessly to protect us from a deadly virus...

We now live in the age of the Dajjal, the great liar and deceiver. For centuries we have been lied to until it is hardly possible to distinguish the truth from falsehood. Good manners are deemed old-fashioned, immorality and rudeness considered liberating and progressive. Most of what we have been taught as reality is built on a lie. The fiat money we use has no intrinsic value. In the name of freedom we have been enslaved to an industrial process. Democracy sells us the illusion of power and influence whilst all relevant decisions are made without our involvement. In fact it is an adversarial system of competing parties which prevents cooperation for the greater good, just as the adversarial court system prevents the dispensation of true justice.

The "divide and rule" method of control goes deeper than commonly thought. In computing it is known as digitisation: a real image or sound are reduced to binary digits from which a representation or semblance of the image is created for ease of control, in this case portability and manipulation. Society, likewise has been remodelled by breaking it down into constituents which can be more easily re-arranged.

A further tool in the arsenal of the deceivers is virtualisation: reality is replaced by a projection of reality. Advances in communication technology have made us largely dependent on devices through which we perceive the world around us. Real friends are replaced by virtual ones, real relationships by commercialised encounters, real news by infotainment, real convictions by pseudo-beliefs.

The solution can therefore not be based on the same false premises which lead to the problem. For Muslims, wanting to escape from the bondage of secular concepts, a complete rethink is required.

Having been disarmed, dispossessed of land and deprived of sound Islamic education, it is difficult for the Muslim Ummah to find its feet. Some individuals or groups may be more fortunate in being able to limit the effects of the system around them, especially those living in rural areas, however for most Muslims living in cities this is extremely difficult. Since our scholars, mostly bought or blindfolded, have let us down, we need to rely on our own resources and mutual support. In attempting to do so, paradoxically, we depend on the very structures provided by the system which we are trying to evade or escape: the internet, smart phones, digital payment methods etc. Alternatives, such as barter trading, are limited to a locality. Resolving this contradiction appears an almost impossible task and must be given high priority.

In economy, the debt- and interest-based exploitative system must be replaced with a charitable system of mutual support. For decades already, Muslims have tried to compete on the market place of financial instruments and derivatives, looking for novel legalistic interpretations to make the haram halal, such as alleged Islamic mortgages which are usually more expensive than others available from high street banks. If standard mortgages are taking advantage of the need of the poor, then “Islamic mortgages” do so to an even greater degree by charging them even more overall. The prophet of Islam was not sent as a lawyer or accountant, he was sent with justice.

Never before in known human history has there been so much mass slaughter as since the advent of industrialised "civilisation". Contrary to history teaching, these global wars were engineered by a hitherto hidden power elite who used interest of a means to manipulate the economies of the world and enslave its people and used wars to consolidate their power. War and interest are inextricably linked.

A sound analysis of a problem or correct diagnosis of a disease is a mandatory requirement prior to prescribing a course of treatment. It does not mean that a treatment is readily available or even that a cure exists or will be found. Yet, once a problem is known, solutions tend to present themselves over time.

Foam of the sea

Thauban reported that the messenger of Allah said: "It is near that the nations will call one another against you just as the eaters call one another to their dishes." Somebody asked: "Is this because we will be few in numbers that day?" He said: "Nay, but that day you shall be numerous, but you will be like the foam of the sea, and Allah will take the fear of you away from your enemies and will place weakness into your hearts." Somebody asked: "What is this weakness?" He said: "The love of the world and the dislike of death." (Abu Daud) 

There can be little doubt that the prophet, peace be with him, was talking about us.

In verse 6 of Surah al-Hujurat, Allah admonishes us: “Oh you believers, if a sinner comes to you with information, verify it before you afflict people in ignorance and then regret what you have done.”

We did not pay heed. We placed our trust in the sinners and took their word for the truth without further verification. We closed mosques, even the Kaabah, cancelled Friday prayers and Tarawih, and contemplated cancelling Hajj, because they told us that we were in grave danger and might die. The love of the world and dislike of death made us abandon our religion wholesale. Whereas this world is temporary and death is certain, lockdown or not, as the Qur’an tells us in verse 78 of Surah An-Nisa’: “Wherever you are death will reach you even if you were in fortified towers…”

According to official statistics just over 200 people have died with (not from) Covid-19 (292 in the whole of Saudi Arabia). That’s about 25 per week. During Hajj about 1700 people die of heat exhaustion or heat stroke (in a single week!), so based on those figures we should never have allowed Hajj in the first place, for such a large gathering in such a hot country is almost ten times more dangerous than the new Corona virus.

What has happened to our scholars? What has happened to our leaders? It has become evident that they are no different from the secular scientific advisers and political leaders and peddle the same untruths about the unprecedented dangers from a virus hyped up by media propaganda, by the very people whose news or information we were meant to verify, knowing from their track record that they are immoral and sinful. Our scholars and leaders can no longer be trusted to guide us.

Abu Hurairah reported that whilst the prophet, Allah blessed him and granted him peace, was talking, a Bedouin came to him and asked: "When will the hour come to pass?" He replied: "Wait for the hour when trust will be destroyed." He asked, how it would be destroyed, and he said: "Wait for the hour when the rule will be entrusted to those who don't deserve it." (Bukhari).

In verse 57 of Surah Hud, Allah warns: “Then if you turn away, then I have already conveyed what I was sent to you with, and my Lord will replace you with another people and you will not harm Him at all, for my Lord is keeper of everything.” And in verse 38 of Surah Muhammad: “…and if you turn away He will replace you with a different people who will not be like you.”

We have experienced a Ramadan like no other in Muslim history where our mosques and the Kaabah have been placed into isolation. We are just over two months away from Hajj season. If the Muslims of today do not reclaim their heritage and God-given rights and over-rule those who have destroyed their trust, may Allah hasten His promise and raise amongst us people who will restore justice.

Abdullah ibn Mas’ud narrated that the prophet Muhammad, peace be with him, said:

“If only one day of this world remained, Allah would lengthen that day till He raised up in it a man who belongs to my family, whose name is like my name and whose father's name is like my father's name, who will fill the earth with equity and justice as it has been filled with oppression and tyranny”. (Abu Daud)

The Crown has no Clothes

By now, over a month into "lockdown", more people are beginning to speak out that the cure is worse than the disease. But hardly anybody seems to have figured out that the cure is in fact the disease. We have been made to surrender three fundamental human rights to governments who declared an unprecedented state of emergency world-wide on the recommendation of an unelected international body, the World Health Organisation: freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and, to a greater degree, freedom of speech. Because anything contradicting the official narrative is dismissed as harmful fake news and censored accordingly.

We have given up those freedoms out of the fear of dying of a disease we were told was as infectious and deadly as none before. To reinforce the message, we are bombarded with figures in an endless television "news" advertising campaign which sustains the largest ever social experiment conducted in modern history. And the economic fall-out of the exercise is such that people will doubtless die, lots of them. But as of today, 22 April, the global death toll of people who died "with the virus", i.e. in whose death the virus might have been at least a contributory cause (not people who have positively found to have died "of the virus") stands at 182,114. Looked at in isolation, this is, of course, a large amount of people, more than a medium-sized town. But this figure has to be looked at in relation to a world population of almost 8 billion (approx. 7,779,550,000 as of today). And today alone, with, as I am writing this, only three quarters of a twenty-four hour complete, a total of 130,000 people have died on the globe. When the day has completed, this number will have reached almost 175,000 individuals, in other words, almost as many as have died with (not of) Corona virus during more than the last quarter. The number of new births, by the way, is twice as much, so the world population is still steadily growing.

Worldometers.info gives a running count of what is going on in the world as far as statistics are concerned. 18 million people have already died this year, in the very same period during which 180,000 died of this dreadful virus. This means, the virus accounted for a mere 1% of deaths, the rest being attributable to other communicable diseases (4 million), cancer (2.5 million), smoking (1.5 million), alcohol (770,000), HIV (520,000), traffic accidents (420,000), suicide (330,000), malnutrition (300,000), malaria (300,000), seasonal flu (150,000) and mothers dying in child birth (95,000) to name just a few. In other words, the unprecedented virus has killed only about twice as many people as there were mothers dying during child birth, and only slightly more than the seasonal flu, but significantly less than traffic accidents, alcohol or smoking or even suicide. And these killed that many people every year, day in and day out, yet we didn't stop living or surrendered our freedoms. If there was an argument for banning people from leaving their homes, then traffic accidents would be a more powerful one than Covid 19. As an aside, there were more than 13 billion abortions world-wide this year, yet the world population, as already mentioned, continues to grow.

So how have we been so easily fooled into compliance? The power of advertising. Death written across TV screens and public monitors from early morning till late at night. Subliminal "Stay at home" messages everywhere we care to look. Fear, a powerful tool of control, being spread far and wide, and people, afraid to die, desperately looking for a cure to a disease that is hardly out there and a solution to an engineered problem. And, of course, before we were all put under house arrest, we were already conditioned and isolated, real friends replaced with facebook ones, social gatherings replaced with social media, everybody on their own with their smart phone, which they will now willingly allow to be used as a tracking device.

In Hans Christian Anderson's tale of The Emperor's New Clothes, the tailors' cunning trick only works because everybody in society has been conditioned not to challenge the established order and each, worried about themselves, goes along with the pretence. The same happens in this tale of deception and hype woven out of an imaginary plague visiting every house in the form of the evasive but ever-so persuasive Corona (Crown) virus. There are all the official news outlets singing from the same hymn sheet. There are politicians, professors and scientists preaching the danger of interacting with fellow human beings, and there is the co-opted opposition, which talks about lab-created viruses or even 5G-induced illness (and I am not belittling the dangers of 5G as another tracking and control tool), akin to somebody, in the fairy tale, who would challenge the tailors (or magicians) not by pointing out that they had not woven any cloth at all, but by protesting that the cloth they had woven was not of pure silk as they claimed, but of coarse cotton, that they cheated the Emperor knowingly in order to profit from their trade - thereby also perpetuating the myth.

And unlike Moses, who exposed the magicians' tricks for what they were, today's Muslims are also part of the fabric of the Dajjal (false messiah, anti-christ) society: they are pleased to point out that quarantine was an Islamic invention (and so it was, but to deal with, for example, the plague, not with a media-created threat), and so were vaccines (no need therefore, to probe into what they contain and whether they might be more powerful in reducing the growing world population through inadvertent but intentional sterilisation effects, provided they are accepted large-scale or can be made mandatory). Not a whisper from Muslim "leaders" when told to shut mosques, cancel Friday prayers, do without congregational Tarawih prayers this Ramadan and potentially forego the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The Kaabah has even been provided with a triple "face mask" in case it might get infected, pushing worshippers further and further back and away from it and towards the manifestations of the Bedouin complex of erecting tall buildings, which the prophet Muhammad spoke of as one of the signs of the last days, including what looks like the golden horn of the devil at the top of the Saudi version of the Big Ben clock tower, which was foretold to be elevated in the Najd, a tribute to Baal, the money god, the golden calf.





The man-made virus crisis may ease up (it is said to have peaked) and we will be told that it wasn't as bad as expected because "social distancing" worked so well. We will be sold tracking and vaccines by the same media which scared us half to death with this never-seen-before disease. The economic effects will last for years to come, many will die of starvation, unemployment and dependency on hand-outs will have risen, many small and medium-sized businesses will have gone to the wall, even some larger ones, creating more monopolies and concentrating more power in the hands of a few families running the banking system. Governments will have got even deeper into debt in order to help their wounded economies, and instead of issuing the necessary funds, they will borrow them from banks which, in turn, create them out of thin air. For this is another Emperor's New Clothes story, that banks lend out deposits. Who on earth has so much wealth that it is more than all the governments of the world, or rather, all the people of the world, can pay off in decades? The wealth does not exist. The money is created by book entry and backed up by an empty promise. And in the process, we have all been enslaved. For some time, some of us were bought out with a measure of luxury and entertainment. Now we are also imprisoned. The next phase, I guess, will be even less benign. Apologies for being bleak in outlook, but until somebody pulls the veneer of this charade and points at the emperor's nakedness, there is little hope for change. As for Muslims, we have plenty of preachers still, some more honest than others, but I don't see any leaders.

Down to Earth - Video series about Islamic concepts

Most textbooks on Islam tell us that Islam is a way of life. The briefest of reality checks will tell us that Muslims’ way of life is today shaped by a plethora of other influences with Islam as an add-on. This apparent discrepancy has renegaded the notion of true Islam into either the past as a praised but lost historic example from the days of the prophet and his companions or into the future as a utopian dream of a return to the golden age “when the Mahdi comes”. Neither offers much solace or hope for the Muslim struggling with the here and now.

In a previous book (Surrendering Islam, co-authored with David Livingstone whose more recent book Transhumanism is an important contribution to show how pagan religious ideas disproportionately shaped the politics of our age), I have shown how we arrived at this unfortunate state of affairs. As a historical treatise it examined the reasons for having lost our glorious past and is a tale of betrayal. But it does not show the way out. In the attempt to find solutions, serious rethinking is required, namely to deal with ideas or concepts.

Concepts are that which is conceived, initially in the mind, then put into practice; hence the term covers both abstract ideas and concrete plans or intentions. The prophetic saying that “Works are by intention” springs to mind. If the intention is all wrong, the works cannot bear fruit, no matter how diligently they are performed. This is exactly the problem of today’s Islamic reality. Without clear concepts about what Islam represents and aims for, all the effort at Islamic revival is at best misguided and at worst counter-productive.

Conceptual thinking might eventually lead us to a solution to Islam’s ineffectiveness vis-à-vis the dominant secular worldview by re-examining the deeper and wider meaning of Islam. Conceptualising Islam means to move away from the narrow constraints of mere practices and to discover the underlying purpose. Naturally, Islam being a divinely inspired, or rather ordained, way of life, not a man-made system, such a road of discovery must always be guided by the teachings of both the Qur’an and the prophet. Yet, at the same time, it must not get stuck in the environment in which the Qur’an was first taught. Early Muslim scholars well understood this need for adaptiveness. Sadly, most of today’s Muslim scholars are only apt at passing on knowledge, not wisdom.

In trying to re-establish Islam as a living concept, we need to deal with paradigms. The concept remains true, but the paradigms change. Paradigms are patterns or models of how things are, theoretical frameworks within which we operate. They are derived from concepts. One definition of paradigm is that of a framework containing the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodology commonly accepted by members of a specific community. Both concepts and paradigms are therefore ways of making sense of the world around us. Concepts deal with the larger picture and paradigms with the interactions within a given framework. To benefit us, the two must agree, which is exactly the problem of why Islam does not “fit in” in the globalised society around us no matter how hard we try to adapt.

The key problem of Muslims today is that we are trying to hold on to an Islamic paradigm whilst having willingly surrendered to non-Islamic (secular) concepts. Examples for these are heliocentricity, relativism or evolution. We inertly resent some of their teachings, because they challenge the divine origin and destiny of all that is, and that is exactly what they intend to do. Yet we have become unable to assess their merits and shortcomings since we have accepted “science” as the benchmark of truth, adding a little bit of “Islamisation” at the frills, instead of measuring its claims against the yardstick of revelation.

Like Moses, we have grown up in the dazzling world of Pharaoh’s magicians. Like Moses, we are suspicious of its pronouncements. But unlike Moses, we are unable to challenge their magic since we try to compete with them or beat them at their own game rather than expose and diminish the falsehood of their imposing achievement. Modern-day magic is not conjured by sticks and ropes, it is conveyed through words and images. Words are powerful, be they those of revelation or those of deception. Yet the two are not equal – one swallows up the other. Beating the swindler at his own game, therefore, is impossible and merely turns us all into pretenders.

Conceptual thinking is what Allah gave Adam as a distinguishing gift over other creation. He taught man language in order to both comprehend and express concepts. The quest for meaning is thus ingrained and essential to human nature and where it is abandoned, man sinks to the level of or below that of the animal kingdom. Evolution teaches that man is part of the animal kingdom, stripping him of his dignity. Neither is he central to creation, being a mere accidental development from lower forms, nor is the earth he inhabits central, being a mere rock floating in space. The secular worldview permits worshipping God as a fiction of one’s imagination. What it cannot tolerate is to elevate Him to the absolute supremacy a believer is demanded to afford Him, because in the secular mind-set the existence or non-existence of God is non-consequential.

Truth is absolute and cannot be divided. The claim that there may be many truths is aberrant mind game defying basic logic. Whatever is true cannot, at the same time, be false, hence the opposite of an established truth cannot, at the same time, also be true. Relativism, therefore, is an erosion of truth. The common accusation hurled by secularists at believers is that they are fanatics. Yet, so are the secularists, as neither are prepared to compromise their religion. Either is only willing to tolerate the other as long as he doesn’t challenge their supremacy. Thus, the status quo is not only a result of ideas but also of power.

Power can be taken or given. Sometimes, power feels the need to be justified, at other times it views this as a weakness. However, power does not exist in a vacuum. It has both a source and a purpose. We need to understand where a given power is derived from and what it aims to achieve. Hence, simply wanting to usurp power in the hope that this will change everything is a fallacy. The path to empowerment is through education and, again, particularly through understanding concepts. Reviving those concepts should, I hope, lead to empowerment of us Muslims, first individually, then collectively. Entering battle unequipped is suicidal. Seeking a confrontation with the wrong opponent equally so. Knowledge is a source of power, and by that I mean knowledge of both the truth and how it has been covered up. Wisdom is the art of applying knowledge correctly within a given situation, taking account of all circumstances. Knowledge can be learned. Wisdom needs to be acquired through experience. Experience is gained from both success and failure. Too much success tends to make people careless, too much failure, on the other hand, despondent. The latter very much describes our present reality. After too many a lost battle, it becomes necessary to retreat, regroup and go back to the drawing board.

With a view to kick-starting this process I have recorded a series of short talks on Islamic concepts to be screened on my Youtube channel and called them “Down to Earth”. The first of those talks (episode 1: being grounded, staying focused) is available here. My hope is that it will move the discussion from the “niceties” of being a Muslim, to the substantial, and that this in turn might lead to a genuine revival of Islamic thought in the 21^st century. Stay tuned.