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First edition: Madinah Press 2002

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LETTER
TO AN
ARAB MUSLIM
SHAYKH DR. ABDALQADIR AS-SUFI
with a Postscript by
RAIS UMAR IBRAHIM VADILLO
I
Oh Arab people! The Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him
peace, and may his name be honoured and may love of him be
preserved among the muminun, said that people would love
the Arabs by love of him and people would hate the Arabs by
hatred of him. It is because of our intense and constant love of
him that I am moved to send this message to you, however
painful it may be for you to receive. He also said, Allah bless
him and grant him peace, that the Deen was nothing but good
counsel and it is in obedience to this reminder that this
message is sent to you. It is well known in medicine that in great
sickness the patient may reject the medicine because of the
bitterness of its taste. This is the station of the child. The
station of the man is that he takes the bitter medicine because
he knows that the pain and the damage of the illness would be
greater. So it is that I trust that what is said here will be taken
by the Arab men and women who must surely know how
extreme and almost terminal their sickness is.
5
What is the sickness?This is the question of the intelligent
patient who wants to know, because part of recovery is to
understand the sickness in order to be able to dominate it.
Well, it started as an inner sickness until it spread to the outer
limbs. At this advanced stage of the illness, for a complete cure
it is too late to treat the inward and treatment of the outward
would be most difficult because of the spread of the disease.
However, with the light of reason applied to the condition of
the outward and by an inward desire for health, that is by a
complete and integral treatment of the total condition and the
diseased environment of the patient, health can be recovered,
inshaAllah. The sickness itself is kufr. It began as inward kufr
and it edged slowly throughout the whole body politic of the
disastrously fragmented Arab community until it spread in all
the parts. A cure of the parts would be useless. Cure the hand?
The foot is diseased. Cure the skin?The organs are diseased.
There is no cure for Egypt. There is no cure for Arabia. There
is no cure for Syria.
The doctor says to the patient when did this malaise begin?
What are the symptoms?Can we observe the development of
the disease?To cure alcoholism it is not enough to remove the
toxicity in the body, but also the metabolistic craving.
Rehabilitation would also demand that you no longer sit
among the other alcoholics or frequent the bars to join in the
conviviality of the addicts.
Know, oh Arab people, that Islam was sent down by Allah
subhanahu wa tala on the Rasul, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, giving us the exalted Quran, his blessed
Sunna, and the triumphant social model of Madinah.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
6
We have only sent you as a mercy to all the worlds.
(Al-Anbiya 106)
After the Khulafa Rashidun and the great Fitna the Muslims
continued united and in expansion. Under the Abbasid
Khalifate a great, extensive and triumphant civilisation was
founded in the east. Balkh, Samarkand and Bokhara became
centres of tremendous learning and halal trade. When the
Muslims there turned in on themselves to use their wealth they
became weak and decadent and so Allah sent the irresistible
force of Genghis Khan and the great Hordes. At that time Ibn
Taymiyya, himself a Qadiri Sufi who gave primacy to the Ahl-al-
Madinah as the Umm-al-Madhahib, warned that the internal
survival of the Muslim polity demanded an unrelenting, strict
and comprehensive adherence to the imposition of the Shariat
concerning the Dhimmis.
On the west the Islamic presence established itself across North
Africa into the Maghrib. From there the Andalusian triumph of
the Murabitun secured an ongoing Islamic presence inside
Europe giving to the world great scholars and philosophers like
Al-Qurtubi and Ibn Rushd Al-Jidd and his renowned grandson.
The Andalusian, European Muslim community survived just as
long as there was strong adherence to the school of Madinah
and this included the implacable obedience to Allahs
commands, and the Messengers, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, to both protect and dominate the Dhimmis.
Ironically the jews and christians were able to flourish only
because they paid the tax and were kept in check and in
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humility by this strict application of a law which guaranteed the
power, majesty and generosity of the Islamic way.
When Genghis Khan mounted the mimbar and made his
famous declaration, I am the scourge of Allah! it must be
understood that he did not say that he was a scourge against
Allah. In the depths of his being this extraordinary man
somehow knew that he was cleansing and purifying the ruins of
the great and betrayed Deen of Islam. Our beloved Messenger,
may Allah bless him and grant him peace, has said that the
child is the hidden secret of the father. So it was that one by one
the sons of the great Khan in their turn became Muslim
leaders. To their west the Turkic tribes had already taken on
Islam, at first under the authority of the Seljuk armies. In his
early days, further to the west, the followers of Osman Ghazi
expanded their territory and their influence while naming the
Seljuk ruler in the Friday Khutba. The Osmanli rule began on
the day that Osman Ghazi ordered his name to be said
throughout the land in the Khutba. When the great Waliullah
Yavuz Selim Khan took his armies south through Damascus
until he reached Baghdad, the Khilafa of the Abbasids was
secured and the great Ummah of Islam was unified. On the
periphery lay the Sultanates of the Malay, the realms of Mughal
India, and the western kingdom of the Maghrib. All of these
maintained the deepest spiritual and intellectual relations with
the Sultan and his authority as Khalif. These were ties that did
not waver through all the upheavals of history. The civic
intercourse of ulama, architects and scholars between the
Osmanli and the Mughals could not have been more profound,
deeply affecting both the great Osmanli language and the
Punjabi and Urdu of the Subcontinent. Right up until the time
of Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan, may Allah be pleased with this
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8
great Khalif, battleships were sent to the Indonesian
archipelago to escort the hajjis safely through pirate waters.
During all this time, Islam was a triumphant, expanding and
successful domain and the centre of its governance was
Istanbul as before that it had been Baghdad and before that
Madinah. The Islamic world of the Malay peoples, the Islamic
world of the Mughal Subcontinent, and Anatolia, the central
power base of Osmanli governance, manned by Turks,
Albani ans, Arabs, Kurds all these were centres of
tremendous wealth and all these lands were obsessively
desired by the kafir hordes of Europe. One thing alone held
back the astonishing greed of the European kuffar, and that
was the majestic power and effectiveness of the Islamic armies
of Jihad which were the terror of the earth. The Osmanli army
was never defeated in any major confrontation during all its
history, although in its final stages it received serious
peripheral defeats in Russia and the Balkans.
The Osmanli world Islamic community was not defeated
militarily, it was defeated by the subversive influence of the
kuffar in persuading them that the means to technical
modernity was dependent on a financial procedure which in
itself had nothing to do with technology but appeared to be the
magical process which, if indulged in, led to the appearance of
the technological event. All the inroads into the Osmanli power
base consisted of the friendly persuasion of the kafir society
calling on the abandonment of the Islamic Deen piece by piece.
It is not an accident that the day of the disbanding of the
Yeniceri, which had been the multi-national war-sustaining
force of Jihad throughout the centuries, was to find its
anniversary celebrated across Turkey annually by a rash of
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advertisements in Turkish magazines declaring that this event
led to the presence of kafir banking inside Turkey. It could be
said that at the point of history which saw the presence of the
great spiritual and political genius of Sultan Abdulhamid II
Khan, the first forces of treachery and betrayal by Muslims
began to appear. Those forces which eventually triumphed
based their success on the abolition of Khalifate, the denial of
Madhhabs, and as we shall see, an active war of hatred against
the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and
restore him to the highest place which he claimed as being the
first of the sons of Adam, Allah bless him.
I am not going to go into the arrogant and superficial claims
made by these self-styled modernists. All the claims they make
on the fiqh reveal themselves to be nothing more than slanders
on the great Muslims of the past. Their resentment at love of
Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is something
that merits only the deepest contempt. The next most shocking
element of all has been the astonishingly anti-intellectual attack
on the Sufis and the teaching of Tasawwuf. What we must look
at is the end result of their disastrous and appalling and savage
attack on the Muslim peoples. It must be understood that they
did not attack the kafirun, they attacked the Muslims. They did
not attack the kafir leaders, they courted them, sought their
approval and accepted their rewards. They openly and
shamelessly entered masonic lodges. They counted as friends
the English and French governors of the Middle-East. The most
loathsome and scandalous of them were on a barge in the Nile
in the company of the great kafir Winston Churchill, at a
dinner in which he exclaimed, Your religion forbids pork and
wine, my religion permits it, so I will have my pork and wine,
and you can go without, bon appetit! Having humiliated them
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10
he spread the map onto the table, stained with his slopping
brandy, and said, You will be the king of Iraq, he will be the
king of Jordan and you will be the king of Arabia, to which the
newly kafir-anointed king declared, Saudi Arabia! What
Islamic fiqh can come from such a meeting?Under his sons an
absolute financial and technological kafir presence was
established in the land of Arabia. From the first day, Ibn
Taymiyya, master of their Madhhab, was raised to the highest
shelf of honour, but safely out of reach. The law of the
Dhimmis was abolished. Under their disastrous control the
whole realm of Palestine, itself previously a waqf declared by
Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan, caved in before the jewish
invasion, and their only response was to ignore their military
obligation by transforming Al-Aqsa into a sacred shrine of Islam
and thus a spiritual matter. How easy to ignore Ibn Taymiyyas
insistence on the Hadith of Rasul, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, which had declared that no mosque was over
any other mosque except the Haramayn. Since the rebel Sauds
could not acknowledge the legality of the Islamic Osmanli
polity, they were unable to refute the absurdity of the jewish
claim to Jerusalem which had no foundation in anything
understood as international law.
One of the conglomerates involved in the oil extraction and
expropriation, ARAMCO, issued a glamorous brochure to
explain Islam to its clients (jewish bankers and christian traders?)
with the requisite and expected colour photos of Islamic
artefacts. There were maps and outlines of history. In this
document it claimed that Islam had been an Arab phenomenon
and that there had never been either an Osmanli or a Mughal
governance. What was being designed was an Islam that was the
private property of the Najdi tribe to the exclusion of the great
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world community of Muslims who had sustained its presence
and triumph over centuries. All this had been wiped out.
The map did not show Turkey, nor the Subcontinent, nor
indeed the Maghrib. The heart of the doctrine was an overt
Arabism which denied the hundreds of millions of Turkic
Muslims, Indian Muslims, Malay Muslims and Berber Muslims.
The truth of the matter is that the new revised religion they
have created and persist in calling Islam was and remains
something utterly unacceptable to the great mass of the worlds
Muslims and their ulama. We will later look at these truncated,
twisted and perverted doctrines which they have set up in the
name of Islam, a religion which finds itself utterly content with
kafir military dominance, kafir political practice, kafir financial
systems, and kafir foundational usage of usury, something
which is endemic to all the banking system including Islamic
banking. Claiming they wish the Islamic Shariah, they have, as
we have noted, abolished the law of the Dhimmis. They have
abolished the Islamic household permitting four legal wives, in
open denial of the Book of Allah. They have abolished Awqaf,
the welfare system of Islam. They are harsh with the Muslims
and gentle with the kafirun, exactly the opposite of what Divine
Guidance has ordained.
Returning to our metaphor of the sick man and his doctor,
perhaps the sick man will recall one of the first episodes which
manifested the terrible disease. Muhammad Abduh had been
raised to high office by Lord Cromer, governor of Egypt and
scion of the Baring bankers family which traced itself back
through christian conversions to the ghettos of Lithuania.
Already rejected by the greatest alim of the time, Shaykh
Illiysh, who had struck his head and drawn blood because of
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12
his insults to the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him
peace thus rejected by the greatest faqih of Islamic Shariat he
found acceptance in the masonic lodges of Cairo and in the
company of the cynical deceiver, the Iranian Shia adventurer
Jamaluddin Al-Afghani. Raised by his kafir boss to the Muftiat,
he declared permissible the practice of the Post Office in the
role of banking. Here was the first symptom. The rash spread.
Soon afterwards the Rothschilds were to establish their zionist
base in Palestine in the office of a bank.
Oh Arabs! Look closely at the historical reality if you want to
see the acting-out of a false aqida. Who was the enemy of the
Khalif of all the Muslims?It was the kuffar. Who raised their
hands against Sultan Abdulhamid II Khan?The Young Turks,
spawned in the secular clubs and masonic lodges of Salonika,
among them Mustafa Kemal, of dubious parentage, almost
certainly a Dnme, the heretical jewish cult dedicated to the
overthrow of the Khalifate. The kafir bankers. The kafir
politicians. The sons of Saud. Saud had been led captive to
Istanbul and charged with treason against Sultan Mahmud II.
The Muslim army led by the Egyptians in 1813 had defeated
the wild, primitive horde of wahhabites who had desecrated
Makkah and Madinah. On the orders of the Sultan he was not
to be tried for treason, but to be tried by the ulama to test his
Islam. He was declared an extreme zindiq and so ordered to be
executed without the right of two rakats before death which
would be the due of a simple traitor. Thus Sauds head was
placed on the walls of Istanbul. If this was the unanimous view
of all the Hanafi ulama, accepted by the legal Khalif of all the
Muslims, either the universal judgment was true or everybody
was kafir except the bedouin ruler! Here was the view of
history that was to be adopted by a regime which was to end up
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in a global act of destroying Islam in the name of this new
Khawarij heresy.
It is no longer possible for this new aqida which represents the
antithesis of Islam to continue its intimidation of us. The
constant attacks on Tasawwuf and on the Sufis are clearly a
deception when it can be seen that over the last century the so-
called purifiers of the religion have utterly placed their wealth
and their energies in the hands of the kuffar and become their
servile followers. What we can now see of their true nature has
been revealed to all the Muslims directly by the power of Allah.
By that I mean that the unfolding of the destined events in the
history of the last hundred years has shown the true nature of
the wahhabite purifiers and what they intended for the
Muslim masses. Up until now they have accused the Sufis of
bida, and this word bida has been an instrument of attack
against not only the devout lovers of Allah and his Rasul, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, but against the Awliya of
Allah, may Allah be pleased with all of them. The destruction
of the zawiyyas and tekkes of the Sufis was the shared
programme of the evil and destructive kafir dictator of Turkey,
Mustafa Kemal, and the hypocritical betrayer of his Khalif and
the usurper of his power, the loathsome and shameful
Abdalaziz Ibn Saud. There is no need for a defence of
Tasawwuf, and the accusation that the strong Muslims who
follow their Shaykhs in the great universal brotherhoods of the
mighty Naqshbandi and Qadiri paths are in bida is beneath
contempt. Before the closing of the zawiyyas by the wahhabite
anti-Islamic forces, and Mustafa Kemals secular forces, which at
least openly declared themselves kafir, the Muslims were strong
and their great Middle Kingdom was dynamic, expanding and
triumphant. When the anti-Islamic forces were finished their
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14
satanic work, the Muslims were broken into pathetic mini-states
ruled by dictators, some servile, some psychotic. All the wealth
and resources of the Muslim lands which once were distributed
to its people through the Islamic Awqaf system were simply
channelled out to the kafir lands, assuring their absolute
hegemony over the lands of Islam.
Once a messenger came to Umar Ibn Al-Khattab with news
of a Muslim victory and Umar asked him, At what time did
you engage the enemy? He replied, In the early morning.
Then he was asked, At what time were they defeated? He
replied, Shortly after noon. Umar exclaimed, We belong to
Allah and to him we shall return! Did kufr stand up to Iman
from early morning until midday? You have made a bida
behind my back!
This is their great bida and they dare not call it a bida hassana.
This is their shame. For half a century they have let the
Palestinians fight under the secular slogans of just rights and
self-determination. With their millions they backed the
disgraceful kafir Arafat who, when he was not attending jewish
funerals or the christian mass, was to be found turning the guns
on his own followers. Never once was the Banner of Islam
raised high, the necessary condition of true Jihad. The Rasul,
blessings and peace be upon him, had declared the land of
Hebron a waqf in the ownership of an Arab family still alive to
this day. Such an order by the last of the Prophets abrogates any
biblical claim the jewish tribes have to the area. But the anti-
ulama of the wahhabites had abolished abrogation on the
instruction of their kafir rulers. If they had abolished it in the
Quran how could the Sunna survive? And why have they
abolished it?It is time to face up to these matters. Why has the
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teaching of the Nasikh-wal-Mansukh been removed by these
people?Because the new religion they are founding, I refer to
the collaborative activity of the Arab heads of state and regimes,
is based on the claim that the jews, christians and Muslims are
people of the Book, that all the religions derive from Ibrahim
in other words superiority devolves from the jews and that
there is no compulsion in the Deen. In the Ahkam of Qadi
Abu Bakr ibn Arabi, the judgment is decisive:
La ikraha fid-Deen is abrogated by the ayat of
fighting. This is the position of Ibn Zayd. The
second position is that it is particular to the
People of the Book who are excepted when they
pay Jizya. According to this it applies to every
category from whom Jizya is accepted.
In the wahhabite programme of the kuffar the destined end of
Islam is as follows: a personalised religion, a pseudo-Islam with
a pseudo-Tasawwuf offering not Marifat-ullah but tranquillised
niceness, a triadic relationship with an equally reformed
judaism, ironically stripped of its land claims and inward-
looking, only concerned with the building of the Temple of
Jerusalem and the world distribution of kosher meat from its
sanctuary, and a bankrupted papal christianity given to
harmless mass rallies in football stadiums. In order to prevent
the rise and restoration of true Islam a radical, fundamentalist
movement, itself completely orchestrated from Madinah
University, is already up and working, siphoning off the young
Muslim repelled by everything he sees in the Arab lands,
monitoring him in acts of terrorism and the killing of
innocents which can only shock and repel the discontented
masses who might otherwise turn to Islam as a means of rescue.
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16
Are you aware of what has been done with the Quran itself?Do
you realise that never once has the wahhabite regime produced
one edition of the Quran printed and bound to a high
standard for mass usage?While the kafir jews and christians
honour their altered, fragmented and invented texts in series
after series of excellent editions, not once has the Khalif-
rejecting house of Saud seen fit to honour the Quran, even in
the one version whose recital they are prepared to permit.
The Seven Recitations have been banned and only one
recitation tolerated. At different times the wahhabite regime of
Arabia has confiscated whole shiploads of the Warsh Quran. A
shipload of Warsh Qurans, the personal gift of King Hassan II
of Morocco, was unceremoniously dumped into the Red Sea
and never reached its destination at the Haramayn. The
impeccable Warsh edition produced by the Algerian state in an
unexpected moment of nobility was forbidden distribution in
Makkah and Madinah. The universally accepted Shattibiyya
which delineates the Seven Recitations had been rejected by the
anti-ulama from the dark palace corridors of Riyadh, and the
wholesale confiscation of the Readings used by Tunisia,
Morocco and so on continued. Finally, under pressure from
King Hassan of Morocco and some influential Indian ulama, a
typically hypocritical compromise was found: they would insist
on the uniform Hafs edition of the Quran throughout Arabia
but would institute a Royal Quran recitation competition
where the Seven Recitations could be employed, a kind of
Quranic Olympics.
Another Arab ruler ordered the omission of the Divine
Command Qul from Quranic recitation, a final modernist
attempt to remove the presence of the Messenger, may Allah
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bless him and grant him peace, throughout the whole Quran.
This was not successful because the people still had the
resonance of a great Sufic tradition and knew that such an act
was abhorrent. We have spoken already of the importance of
the Nasikh-wal-Mansukh. From various quarters, in harmony
with the directives of world organisations like Unesco, the so-
called inter-faith dialogue movements are spreading and more
deeply affecting the diseased Arab polity. You cannot
underestimate the implications of the deliberate attempts to
dismantle that intellectual defence system which the great
Muslim ulama through the centuries have perfected in
accordance with Allahs own naming of the Quran as a
Protected Book. Look carefully at what I am about to tell you.
This is more serious and more tragic than any cataclysmic event
caused by the hand of man in this dark age.
After completing the Visit in Madinah I fulfilled my intention
to visit a most distinguished Mauritanian alim who at that
time, as far as I knew, was a professor at the University of
Madinah. It should be noted that Madinah University is not
inside Madinah but is outside its precincts, for the Rasul has
declared, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that
Shaytan cannot enter the city of Madinah. Rather it is built in
a valley overlooking the Jabal-al-Jinn where the Churchill-
appointed king of Arabia appropriately has built his palace. I
arrived at the alims house only to be told by a servant that he
was not receiving anybody. I insisted I had come a long way on
an important matter. The message came back that he was in a
distressed state and asked to be excused. I insisted that the
matter was of great importance and if at all possible I begged
him to see me. The servant showed me into his library, four
walls floor to ceiling, lined with books. Tea was served. After a
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18
time the alim came in and was clearly in a troubled state. I tried
to bring the matter to the subject that concerned me but he
could no longer contain his anguish. At last he blurted out his
shocking story.
He had been brought from the deserts of Mauritania where he
taught in a humble madrasa to students who came from far and
near because of his high learning. The wahhabite agent who
turned up in his madrasa informed him that he was required to
serve Islam by coming to Madinah to teach in that prestigious
University. He insisted that he had absolutely no academic
qualifications that would be acceptable in a university while he
was completely versed in the fiqh by his own traditional
madrasa training. He was told that that was why he was needed.
In order to make Muslims with doctorates in Islamic Studies it
was necessary that their papers were studied and accredited by
a qualified expert. They would appoint him a Doctor of Law in
order to permit him to activate production, as it were, in their
factory of ulama.
Already unsure of this transaction, and not fully grasping its
implication at that time, he set out for Madinah where he was
ensconced in his pleasant villa. After a time, which had been
spent sitting with his students instructing them and correcting
them, he was visited by officials of the University. They
explained the nature of the PhD system, that is the secular
rationalist methodology by which the kafir intellectual
leadership is formed. They explained the student would take
up a thesis, quoting prior experts in the field, following their
concepts and in some cases making critical analysis of their
conclusions, submitting the subject of their studies to their own
opinion and critical analysis to arrive at a new and modern
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viewpoint of the object under examination. The alim could no
longer hide from the terrible implications of the trap into which
he had been led. He looked across the room at me, his face a
mask of rage, with tears in his eyes. Do you realise what they
were asking me to do?They were asking me to licence students
as Islamic teachers, on the basis of their approaching the Quran
as an object which could be analysed, dissected, confirmed and
rejected in its details. In the process they would be giving equal
weight to the view of classical Muslim scholars as well as the
jewish, the christian and the orientalist writers. They were asking
me to participate in the process of making Dhalikal-Kitab into
just another of those man-made books. He realised immediately
that there was no personal dimension to his teaching that could
get round or subvert the methodology and system of critical
deconstruction which was the foundation of kafir belief. He
realised he had walked into the valley of the jackals.
Do you know that there is now a faculty called Advanced
Islamic Studies?Now what do you think that might be?Would
Sayyidina Umar Ibn Al-Khattab think it meant a body of men
setting out on Jihad fisabilillah?For what could be Advanced
Islamic Studies to the Sahaba if it was not fearlessly advancing
on the enemy to witness the Angelic support from the Unseen
and strive fearlessly to achieve the maqam of Shahid?
The wahhabite anti-ulama, in the first heady days of their
massive financial and technological collaboration with the kafir
forces of the oil Titans, began a programme of mosque-building
across the world. They launched a propaganda project called
the Mosque Message. It was openly clear that Islam was to be
reduced to a puritanical piety of scrupulous prayer and fasting
practice, but it was in no way, in absolutely no way to impinge
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20
on the social nexus through the trying business of having to
fulfil the Sunna and the Amal of the Rasul, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, and the Ahl-al-Madinah. Once they
had removed the practice of Islamic ulama in their respectful
approach to Quran, even the mosque itself posed no threat.
The Nasikh-wal-Mansukh gone! The distinction between the
Muttashabihat and the Muhakamat ayats also gone. Then the
Shahadatayn itself was shattered.
Once the Madhhabs had been abolished, the fiqh was
abolished. What need for distinguishing the Muhakamat ayats
when there was no Islamic Hukm?Do you not see what they
were doing?Now you cannot fail to see. Abolish the Madhhabs.
Thus, abolish the fiqh. Thus, destroy Sunna, wal Amal wal
Ijma. The Divine Hukm set alongside the metaphoric ayats.
What did it add up to?The end of Islam, the establishment of
kafir rule. And what did all that add up to?The assurance to
the kafir world system that there would never again be an
Islamic Khilafa with Amr ordering the Hukm to be applied to
the legal case, to be judged by the Qadis, and to be executed by
the Amirs forces. And all this in a land which had categorically
denied the existence of the practice of Rasul, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, in collecting the Jizya and in thus
guaranteeing the safety and submission of the Dhimmis. In
Arabia today the taxed and submitted people are the Muslims,
and the American occupying forces are above the so-called law
of the land and may not be brought to trial before a judge in the
country for any crime. In short, once our foot was on their
necks, and now their foot is on our necks.
In Muslim lands vast amounts of money have been spent
covering up the utterly shameful record of the treacherous Saud
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family and its servile collaboration with the European and
American kafir rulers. From its sordid beginnings in the
modern age with Abdalaziz ibn Saud the historical record of
their perfidy is available to those who take the trouble to
research it, yet it is hidden behind a veil of cheap propaganda,
in particular exalting the myth of King Faisal as an Islamic hero,
a hero who could not enter the Haram of the Kaaba until a
brigade of armed guards had preceded him. I recall standing at
the Bab Ar-Rahman and watching men with automatic
weapons stream over the Haram. Recalling the Divine Ayats
forbidding weaponry during the sacred months I asked what
their purpose was. I was informed that it was to guard King
Faisal. Against the Muslims? I enquired, adding, You will see,
one day he will be killed, but not by the Muslim people. He will
be killed by one of his own family, standing right next to him!
A few years later I was to see that spiritual insight confirmed.
Muslims are not enemies to each other, but the kuffar and the
munafiqun are enemies to themselves.
The devious and hypocritical character of Ibn Saud was not
only due to the low and dismal character genetically encoded in
their destiny, but also to the powerful motive of greed which
bubbled up in them with the same intensity as the black gold
gushed out of the desert sands. Documentation shows that Ibn
Saud was simultaneously sending dutiful and loyal messages to
the Khalif in Istanbul to whom he had made an oath of
allegiance, let it not be forgotten while at the same time
following the dictates and counsel of high-ranking British
agents and spies like Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell. When
the British offered to prop him up as Khalif he cynically said to
Sir Percy Cox, No-one cares in the least who calls himself
Khalif. He insisted that the wahhabites did not recognise any
Letter to an Arab Muslim
22
Khalif after the first four. This means that the wahhabites
consider the Muslims without legitimate rulership and without
Islam for over a thousand years. What this indicates is the
rejection of historic Islam, the Muslim Ummah, the content of
the Quran and the great body of Hadith which encodes the
Sunna of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.
Since he could even have been Khalif under British tutelage it
showed that he was already ideologically committed to the
disappearance of Islam as a world religion.
All matters concerning correct aqida revolve around and
return to the confirmation of effective and governing Amr.
Amr authorises the collection of Zakat, and to permit this the
minting of the Islamic Dinar and Dirham with its weights
assured by the ruler. Al-Qurtubi in his monumental Tafsir
defines this as one of the essential obligations of the Khalif. Just
as the rebel Saud family betrayed their Khalif, so too over the
last century they can be seen to involve themselves more and
more with all those forces working for a revision of Islam into a
new anti-Islam which would prove totally acceptable to the kafir
system. In the second half of the last century it always seemed
strange to me that the so-called conservative Islamic monarchy
should finance and support Maududis pseudo-reformism in
India as well as the Ikhwan in Egypt. Later the puzzle became
greater as they brought the false sufi kafir Titus Burckhardt and
the other European Gunonians who followed their masonic
leader Frithjof Schuon into significant academic recognition in
collaboration with anti-Islamic UNESCO. The extremities met,
and the kafirisation of Islam was reaching its final formulation.
Once you have removed Tasawwuf which is Ihsan, and once you
have removed love and recognition of the Rasul, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace, then you have shattered
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Tawhid, which is Iman, and once you have negated the
Madhhabs and thus rejected the total Islamic procedure of legal
practice then, the Amr abolished, the whole body politic of
Islam becomes medically dead. There is nothing left.
Oh Arabs! I cannot but believe that you experience, looking at
these matters, the shock of recognition. This is the beginning of
your cure. Perhaps the most offensive element of this must now
be confronted. I refer to the wahhabite hatred of Allah forgive
me for having to write these words, and you for having to read
them and denigration of, our most beloved master and guide,
Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. With the
victory of wahhabism this rage of hatred cooled into solid stone
which became the foundations of the modernist anti-Islam, so
that you can trace a line from the ferocious passions of the
wahhabite tribes to the insidious and trivial re-assessments of
the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, like
that of the Nasserite modernist, Muhammad Heykal, who saw
in the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace,
only the prototype of a modern statesman. Rumi explains the
nature of the kufr of Abu Lahab as follows: when the Sahaba
looked on him they saw the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, but when Abu Lahab looked he saw
only the son of Ibn Abd al-Muttalib.
A resident of Madinah told me that his father was witness to an
incident so appalling that it had haunted him for the rest of his
life. In their old mud palace Abdalaziz Ibn Saud was impatiently
and uncomfortably trying to bring to an end the visit of a
delegation of ulama from the Subcontinent of India. Before he
could bring the meeting to an end one of the ulama
confronted Saud and asked openly, I still do not understand.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
24
What is the cause of your hatred of the Rasul, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace? Fixing his gimlet eyes on the alim
he replied, He started it! Stunned, the ulama took their leave.
He was of course referring to the renowned Hadith which recent
Arabian editions have removed from the Sahih. The Hadith
recounts that during a visit in the Year of the Delegations the
Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, made duas on
the different lands whose representatives were present. And
Najd! said the visitor from Najd. May Allah bless him and grant
him peace remained silent. He repeated his statement, which
was again greeted with silence. The third time the Messenger,
may Allah bless him and grant him peace, declared that from
there would come Shaytan! As the ulama returned to their
residence the almost unthinkable truth dawned upon them. The
primitive tribes of Najd saw themselves locked in an ancient
tribal rejection which set them forever against the Quraish. Here
in fact lies the root of the implacable enmity to the Hijazi
families which resulted in the mass slaughter of the Utayba after
the uprising that tried to seize the Haram of Makkah, the
Utayba being the purest of the Quraishi Arabs. In every aspect
of the record of this dreadful family their primary passionate
evils can be seen planing out into a rigid and total post-Islamic
set of doctrines in the service of the kafir system and authoring
a terrorism to ensure the marginalisation and rejection of
resistance by young intellectual Muslims.
The event of the uprising against the house of Saud in Makkah
revealed every aspect of the perfidious nature of their rule.
When warned of the possibility of an uprising in public majlis,
the kafir-appointed king swept the matter away cynically, saying,
What will they fight us with their siwaks? When the uprising
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25
did in fact take place the abject cowardice of the Saud military
quickly became apparent. In a panic of hysteria the now
terrified monarch called in the French elite commando unit to
the immense delight and amusement of the kafir President of
France. Swiftly and efficiently they carried out the necessary
slaughter with their expected tactical brilliance and unbridled
use of automatic firepower. Not content with the depths to
which he had sunk, the wahhabite ruler then declared himself
the Guardian of the Haramayn. This, at the very point when he
had so disastrously failed to be just that. More significantly, that
had been a Khalifal title, so he thus formally declared the
abolition of Islam in his kafir-protected Kingdom by separating
the religion from the state. As often happens in history an
apparent defeat is in fact a turning point in the fortunes of the
victor, since this brought out into the open what had long been
the kafir-dictated doctrine of the wahhabite sect.
It was because they had apparently got away with both the
desecration of the House of Allah and its Haram that they were to
find the confidence to plunge their regime into a greater disaster.
In neighbouring Iraq another form of the kafir virus had been
festering and spreading from its brutal leadership throughout
the whole people. Two dangerous symptoms of kufr, as they
became more marked, presaged a crisis to the illness. On the
one hand the Baath Socialist Party which united the military
elite had grown arrogant and ambitious for more wealth, that is
more oil, and more territory. With the stupidity that is a
characteristic of thuggishness they indulged in an orgy of
purchasing an arsenal of military technology. They were the
most honoured guests at the arms fairs of Britain and America.
When later arms inspectors from the U.N.O. opened up the
Letter to an Arab Muslim
26
suspected sites which held weapons of mass destruction they
were shocked to find that the weapons were there, but that they
bore U.S. markings. Allied to the belligerence of this kafir
dictatorship was the inevitable corruption and degradation of
the civic population, who from the day that this regime had
taken over from the miserable puppet monarchy appointed by
the British had lived in a world where Islamic courtesy and
adab slowly and inexorably disappeared. The mass of the people
became grossly materialistic, vulgar and amoral. It must be
understood that all this was only possible because the ethos of
Islamic teaching lay in the hands of those same reformers, the
so-called modernists who were the bonded allies of wahhabism.
Here was a historic demonstration of the intimacy and even
identity between the modernist post-Abduh and Ikhwan
religion, and that of the anti-Islamic and anti-Khalifal, because
anti-Rasul, doctrines of the wahhabite sect.
While we from the outside all reacted in a normal Islamic
manner feeling outraged at Muslims attacking Muslims, the
reality was that two rebel Khawarij peoples had turned on each
other in a battle over material wealth. The stupid brutality of
the cunning dictator met in headlong conflict with the
decadent and cowardly puppet of the oil Titans. It must not be
forgotten that only some months before, the two protagonists
had been locked together, united in purpose, to destroy the
Iranian regime. A high official of the Iraqi Ministry of Islamic
Affairs (to them, births, marriages and deaths) told me in Abu
Dhabi, This is not a battle between Sunni and Shia, but an
ancient battle between Arabs and Iranians. So it is that if you
remove the Islamic ethos of brotherhood which divides people
neither by race nor by class but uniquely by Islam and kufr, the
matter at issue descends to the materialist conflicts that are the
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political destiny of the kuffar. Arab peoples can no longer
categorise themselves as Muslim simply by the act of a genetic
inheritance that places them with a Muslim name in a land that
was once ruled under Khalifal authority under Muslim law. In
the same way the Sufic Tariqas cannot claim shaykhdom by the
simple factor of the son inheriting a title from a father who was
an Arif billah, although in this matter the exception may prove
the rule. The time has come to face up to the fact that as we are
so we have people set over us. False leadership cannot be
blamed, and the usurping of false leaders in the land of the
Arabs has in every case resulted in a more dismal regime.
So it was, that when the Iraqi dictator was tricked into attacking
Kuwait in a simple game plan which he was too stupid to
decode, the trap was sprung and a brilliant and terrible double
victory was achieved by the Oil Titans of the kuffar. One, Iraqi
oil was taken out of the market and placed under sanction.
Two, a massive occupying force then took over the Arabian
Peninsula. This final, and for this regime insoluble dilemma
could not have happened simply through the foolish judgment
of a decadent ruler. If Shaykh Bin Baz, the doyen of the
wahhabite leadership had not given his official Fatwa their evil
doctrines might still have remained hidden and survived. The
pathetic judgment of Bin Baz, which gains him a name in
history under the flag of Abu Lahab, revealed that the leader of
this sect, who for decades had droned on about the importance
of Kitab wa Sunna while they opposed the noble millions of
Muslims who followed the fiqh of the Great Imams, was either
totally ignorant of the Sunna of our beloved Messenger, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, or hypocritically turned
his head away from it. It is recorded in a perfectly well known
Hadith in the Sahih that despite the pleadings of his Sahaba,
Letter to an Arab Muslim
28
Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, turned away a
renowned fighter from fighting under the flag of Islam because
he was not a Muslim. Only after his Shahada was he allowed to
participate in the Jihad. This inescapable Sunna wedded to the
strict order of Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him peace,
that there should be no two Deens in the land of the Arabs,
marked the end of the historical right of the wahhabite sect to
lay any claim to an Islamic aqida.
How abysmal the collapse of the wahhabite regime. Within a
few years of the war they saw in astonishment that their massive
wealth had almost miraculously become massive debt. They saw
their country swarming with literally thousands of American
intelligence officers, an occupying force that they were not
permitted to bring before their own courts in cases of criminal
activity. They had not heeded the Quran. They had mocked
the Sunna. They had not even educated themselves in the
culture of their masters, for the great medieval moralist La
Fontaine could have told them what happened when a rich and
weak princeling invited a mighty ruler to flush out a local
enemy. In one of his fables he tells the tale of how a small
landowner calls in a mighty Lord of the Manor to flush out a
hare that is troubling his fields. The Lord arrives with his
servants and friends and dogs, feasts on their land, takes the
women, and then in hunting the hare rides roughshod over his
fields, destroying his crops and leaving a wasteland behind. The
poet ends with his famous moral:
Petits Princes, videz vos dbats entre vous:
De recourir aux rois vous seriez de grands fous.
Il ne les faut jamais engager dans vos guerres,
Ni les faire entrer sur vos terres.
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(Little Princes, give up fighting among yourselves: you will be
great fools to have recourse to kings. Never let them take part
in your wars, nor let them enter your land.)
The wahhabite-Saud alliance which had begun in infamy ended
in total disgrace. In the early days Ibn Saud courted the
wahhabites for his own ends, honoured them. The Ikhwan as
they were called, a title to be taken up later by the naive
Egyptian reformer Hassan Al-Banna, were allowed to
distinguish themselves by wearing a twisted strip of white
material around their head-covering instead of the twisted black
wool iqal worn by other Arabs. In 1929 two important Ikhwan
leaders, Faisal ad-Dawwish and Sultan Ibn Bijad, rose in
rebellion against the forces of Ibn Saud. They were defeated and
Faisal ad-Dawwish was taken prisoner and brought before Ibn
Saud, apparently mortally wounded. Pardoned, he then
recovered his strength and fought all over again. In the end he
fled for refuge to Iraq. Sultan Ibn Bijad was captured and
thrown into prison at Riyadh to die a lingering death. The
Ikhwan main colony of Ghut-Ghut was razed to the ground.
After these battles the Ikhwan were disbanded and their two
settlements Ghut-Ghut and Artawiyya ceased to exist. From the
very beginning therefore, it was clear that the wahhabite
deviation from Islam could not survive and could only be a
seeding-ground for dissension and conflict among the Muslims.
Properly speaking they had no doctrines. In place of Tawhid
which is a vibrant, profound and rich teaching containing many
aspects, they had placed a cheap rationalist monotheism, made
inexorable and ugly by its denial of the nature of the Revelation
and thus a failure to understand the distinction always
made by Muslim ulama between the Muhakamat and the
Muttashabihat ayats. A primitive phenomenon commanded by
Letter to an Arab Muslim
30
primitive men, they found themselves taken up by the
sophisticated, highly cultured and scheming kafir elite of the
British Empire. Their servile and sentimental attachment to
Britain remains to this day. The so-called King of Saudi
Arabia, as they insist on calling it, has been photographed with
the Queen of England while wearing round his neck the large
enamelled cross of an English chivalric Order.
Our Shaykh and teacher, Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Al-Habib in
his great Diwan lists in his song of the Doctrines of
Unification sixty six attributes which make up the differing
elements of a pure Tawhid.
THE DOCTRINESOF UNIFICATION
The slave of his Lord, Muhammad ibn al-Habib,
says, declaring the absolute oneness of his Lord:
We begin all things with the Bismillah
to Him belong their beginning as well as their returning.
The meaning of god is That which has no need of
other-than-Him, while anything other has need of Him.
This That which has no need of other-than-Him
possesses thirteen Attributes, do not forget it!
Existence, then pre-existence (qidam), then going-on, absolute
difference from the creation, and absolute independence.
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Hearing, sight, speech and inherent being
these all have their own judgments
Acts devoid of desire, and similarly
in judgments, lack of self-interest.
Total freedom of action and of non-action
persevere with what we have told you and realise it!
Then the poverty of all that is other-than-Him
has twelve attributes in the end:
Knowledge, power, and will,
then life grasp the lesson intended here!
Also capability, transformation, knowledge and life
but do not be content with the inherent attributes!
Unity of action and attribute and Essence with rejection of
number seek it then, you trustworthy ones!
The time-nature of the universe and the negation
of effect either by nature or by force so take note.
These are twenty-five attributes.
Their opposites are the same in number count them!
Iman in the Messenger also
has sixteen attributes which are:
Sidq, tabligh and Iman,
letting ordinary events teach wisdom.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
32
Iman in the Books and the Prophets,
and the Messengers, and the Angels, O man of intellect!
And Iman that the Last Day must come.
Be aware of their opposites and struggle to reject them.
These are sixty-six Attributes
which are contained in the noble Kalimat.
So busy yourself with them in the Awqat of the Presence,
and joyfully you will rise to their meaning.
Their proof lies in contemplation of the Quran
and in reflecting on created beings with the intellect.
O our Lord, bless Muhammad, and his family
and every slave of Allah who copies him,
And, O Lord, let the educated and the unlettered,
whoever reads or hears this, benefit from these attributes,
Help our amir with miracles
and preserve his offspring and all of his family.
Make him one of the founts of Allah,
a source of benefit in all the lands of Allah,
Support all who support him with the best
as well as those who help him, without disappointment.
Assign to him from the scholars of the Community
those who are sincere in their advice and intention.
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Grant success to the leaders who help
everything in which there is right action.
And grant us a seal, O Lord, of serenity
and be kind to us when the Hour arrives.
It is clear from this that it is not possible to have a correct
Tawhid which does not significantly feature faith in the
Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. As the
Shaykh of our Shaykhs, Moulay AbdasSalam Ibn al-Mashish
said, Were it not for the means the end would have escaped us.
It is therefore neither an aberration from some primal doctrine
of Islamic renewal, which is what the wahhabites claim
themselves to be, nor is it a pure doctrine held by the elite yet
betrayed by the masses that we confront in Arabia. It is an anti-
Islam, devoid as we have indicated, of all those political
elements which permit of a living and dynamic Islam that had,
therefore, inevitably to turn towards the kuffar for support
since it had already turned its back on the great Muslim
Ummah. We are facing an anti-Islam born in the Arabian
desert under the shadow of British guns and the darker
shadows of their agents, T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell,
then grown to maturity under the still darker forces of the oil
Titans and the unified kafir order dedicated to the abolition of
all religion. Do not for a moment imagine that the policies,
pseudo-doctrines and practices that have stemmed from Arabia
and been disseminated all over the world have done so simply
under a misguided Arabian policy. No, every move that has
been made from there has been under the command of the
collaborative American-Israeli system whose elite are the leaders
of the banking and commodities corporations. Ibn Taymiyya
Letter to an Arab Muslim
34
said that if you wish to find what had gone wrong in the Islamic
polity it was necessary to look at Islams beginning, for you
would simply find now, repeated, what had once stood there in
opposition to the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him
peace. The regime of Najd, it can therefore truly be said, is a
Khawarij phenomenon.
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II
Oh Arabs! I sat with a group of ulama from different Arab
countries. First the Syrian told us of the iniquities of their
dictator and why we had to lend ourselves to the urgent task of
overthrowing this murderer of his people. The Egyptian alim
intervened to tell us that the source of the trouble lay in Egypt
and the disastrous nature of its kafir leadership and the helpless
obedience of the state to the powers of banking and American
policy. The Tunisian intervened to say that little was known of
the dreadful tyranny of their dictator who had overthrown what
had seemed the worst possible leader by declaring him insane,
even although the man had been appointed by the former
president, presumably therefore in a state of insanity. The
Jordanian alim rushed to tell us of the terrible plight of Jordan
under its masonic English puppet king. The Algerian scholar
insisted that the ghastly slaughter of the innocents in his
country was without equal. They vied with each other in
claiming that their national situation was the greater tragedy. In
37
a sense, each had a right to that claim. None of them seemed to
grasp that you could not liberate one of these countries without
increasing the misery and suffering of all the others on whom
repression would fall to prevent them following suit. The
former colonial masters had long ago packed their bags and left.
They were French, English, and Italian, but they were not
divided, they were kuffar, and kufr is one millat. They withdrew
their armies and left behind their Trojan Horse, the kafir
banking system. To show their generosity and distract from this
vital ploy they gifted to the Arabs their much-vaunted
educational system. Now every Arab, if he wanted, could
become a Doktur. With their methodology the reformist work
of Abduh and Reda could be completed.
In every case these countries can trace their disastrous modern
history to their unreasoned and desperate treachery and their
rush to betray the Khalifate, and by that token their own
honour, as all their leadership had solemnly given bayat to the
Islamic ruler. These low Hollywood gangster-like presidents of
Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq and Syria did not come to power by any
inner talent or capacity. Rather, after a century of betrayals,
capitulations and abandonment of Islamic teaching the Arab
world set about obediently and enthusiastically erecting
socialistic kafir models for their new mini-states. They left their
Deen. Some rushed to christianity to be accepted by the new
system and to be well placed in its administration. They
changed their names. They shaved their beards. They turned
away at the sound of the adhans of Ramadan. They sipped their
cognac in cafs from Tangier to Damascus. The Great Mosque
of Zaitouna in Tunis was turned into a third-rate secular
university. Its respected director, Shaykh Shalabi, broken-
hearted, resigned his post at this destruction of a great historical
Letter to an Arab Muslim
38
centre of Islamic learning. In many North African countries the
beard was banned in the state administration, unless, ironically,
you claimed you were a marxist imitating Lenin. One by one
the great Islamic colleges which had produced ulama for
hundreds of years were stripped of their educational role. They
were told it was modernisation. It was the modernisation that
had been called for by the Islamic reformists, and now they were
getting it. The Islam was stripped of its social and political
content, and certainly that of its financial and welfare
obligations. The new modern reformed Islam, glowing with the
purity of abolishing and abandoning the Sufic zawiyyas, began
to teach its new peripheral Islam. This was an Islam devoid of
all that Islam had been as we have shown in the case of Saudi
Arabia, only here in the rest of the Arab world the effects were
more disastrous. Given the wholehearted and enthusiastic
approval of interest, usurious institutions, paper money and the
banking system held by the founders of the modernist
movement it was axiomatic that once the political regimes were
established in all their kafir glory they then set about protecting
an Islam, of course this means an anti-Islam, firmly founded on
the kafir usury system. It was an unmitigated triumph. Within
the shortest time each of these little kafir nations had
appointed a Minister of Awqaf, and his purpose was to
dismantle the Awqaf properties and hand them over to the
voracious bankers, as was most dramatically demonstrated in
Sadats Egypt, or more arrogantly to name the ministry by the
grandiose title of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs.
Do you not see what this means?Under the Islamic Khalifs up
until the arrival of that great ally of the reformers, Mustafa
Kemal, every affair was an Islamic affair. Now it had been
reduced to the same status as the religion of the mushrikun,
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39
births, marriages and deaths. Islam was a matter for the
mosques. Trade, commerce, finance, welfare, and warfare had
been placed in the hands of the ill-formed kafir machine state.
In all of this the role of the Islamic so-called Reformers is quite
extraordinary. Having actively and passionately worked for the
destruction of the Islamic Khalifate, having maintained a face-to-
face relationship with the Young Turks from the masonic circles
of Salonika, they not only witnessed but participated in the
handing-over of the Muslim lands to the expanding kafir
colonists. They expressed their desire for independence by
imagining that the differential had been reduced to their
sovereignty for themselves from the colonists. An Islamic polity
over and against a kafir one became a kafir polity over and against
an Arab national kafir one. Thus, you can perceive the narrowing
social expectation of people who had abandoned the Deen.
Al-Afghani, who was in fact Iranian, had taught his student
Abduh to drink the heady wine of modern social revolution
with its inevitable and implied outcome, the collapse of the
unified Islamic Khalifate. They were dismantling the Deen,
hence their attraction to Renan in Paris who was busily
employed doing the same thing with what was left of
christianity. In turn, Redas role plunged the new generation of
Muslims over the abyss. By the time you arrive at the Ikhwan Al-
Muslimun, the modernist version of their wahhabite
counterparts, you find them still headily convinced that they
could make a concordance with power, like the wahhabites had
done with the Saud family. To fully grasp the abject failure
of the Ikhwan movements it is necessary to face the inescapable
reality of the social nexus that their futile policies brought
about.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
40
Let us briefly summarise all that lay prior to that series of tragic
and bloody incidents which ended up with the defeat of the
Egyptian armies and the Camp David surrender to the Israeli
occupation of that former waqf that once flourished under
authority from Istanbul. Napoleons Alexandrine fantasy of
ruling Egypt and the road to India ended with his ignominious
departure on 23rd August 1799. While he slaughtered many
Muslims, more of his own troops died either in battle or from
disease. The mercy of Allah permitted Gnral de Menou to
remain in the country, embrace Islam and take the name of
Abdullah. Following the teaching of Rumi one would say that
these thousands of men were displaced in boats to invade
Egypt, and thousands were to die in the ensuing conflicts in
order that this one man should meet his destiny, become a
Muslim and enter the Jannah, this triumph dazzlingly more
important than those defeats. The great Albanian, Pasha
Mehmet Ali, was placed in command of Egypt on 9th July
1805. Here was another key element in this continuing collapse
of Muslim society before the upheavals caused by the utterly
new and unknown type of invasion, that of the jewish bankers
in every place setting up a national bank and by their cunning
manipulations acquiring all the assets of that country through
the issuing of series of bonds in a system which the local
populace simply did not understand.
It is not an accident that one of the key moments in the
collapse of the Khalifate was the decision to abolish the
Yeniceri, which had been the army of Jihad. Instead of
cleansing it of its corrupt Bektashi element, European counsels
prevailed and it was crushed and disbanded. A Napoleonic
western style army without spiritual allegiance replaced it. In
the same way Mehmet Ali eliminated the Mamuluks in Egypt.
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41
It then followed that he took on the role of a puppet Bonaparte.
He was to put in place precisely all these social reconstructions
that the bankers needed to take over virtual ownership of the
massive wealth of Egypt. He was surrounded by European
advisers and financiers. Independence was in fact in every case
to be what would now be called in commercial terms a
leveraged buyout.
The building of the Suez Canal is the classic example of an
apparent technological triumph being in fact a transfer of
power from the political zone to that of financial institutions,
financial institutions run and controlled by the great jewish
banking houses of Europe. The first manifestation of this quite
un-Islamic concept of territorial integrity and self-
determination, the miserable thesis which has ruined the
Palestinian people, was to be seen when the Egyptian Minister
of War, Colonel Orabi Pasha rose up to overthrow the British.
He was savagely defeated at Tel Al-Kabir. This event gave the
English full powers to govern Egypt, placing a new Khedive on
the throne with the title of Sultan, making a definitive break
with the Osmanli Dawlat. The ferment for this new type of
secular state did not stop from that moment on. In the 1920s
Saad Zaghloul emerged as the hero of the independence
movement. Already, the Islamic element was merely a unifying
rhetoric rather than a political imperative. With Saad Zaghloul
exiled to the Seychelles, the ineffective British administration
had to yield to the triumph of the Wafd Party in the legislative
elections. King Fouad was obliged to bring Saad Zaghloul back
as Prime Minister from 27th January 1924. In 1934 the young
Gamal Abdelnasser was at school writing an essay on Voltaire.
At this time remember, Turkey was in the grips of the Kemalist
dictatorship and great ulama were hanging from trees in the
Letter to an Arab Muslim
42
cities of Konya and Istanbul. Syria and Lebanon were under
French mandate. Iraq had become independent. Eritrea was
under Italian control while the Sudan and Egypt remained
under British mandate.
On 22nd April 1936 the terrorist Ben-Gurion met with
Georges Antonius, a Greek orthodox Palestinian nationalist, to
plan the creation of a jewish region inside a Greater Syria which
would include Palestine. At the same time the famous Amin Al-
Hussaini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, struggled against the odds
to have the issue of zionism measured by Islamic Law. In the
same year Faruq became king of Egypt at the age of 16 and
under Regency. On 26th August 1938 in Jaffa, Ben-Gurions
terrorists exploded a bomb in the Souk killing 24 people, a
practice which fifty years later the Arabs would in turn direct
against the Israelis. So it was that on the eve of the Second
World War two profound turmoils were shattering the life of
the Middle Eastern Arabs. On the one hand, the ferment of
resistance against the jewish invasion, and on the other hand
the growing public passion for national sovereignty, which
internationalist institutions like the Olympic Games did not
fail to confirm, resulted in an increasingly dramatic situation,
whose inevitable outcome had to be revolution.
Another step in the degradation of Arab self-esteem came when
the European powers decided to use the Egyptian and North
African littoral as a war ground for their own conflict. By 1940
Italians, Germans and English tanks were moving across the
desert. On 19th December 1940 in Jerusalem, Yossef Weitz, a
director of the Jewish National Fund, declared that in order to
create the jewish state, No other means existed except to displace
the Arabs into the neighbouring countries all the Arabs.
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43
By 1943 Nasser had abandoned the fez and adopted the military
cap of the European soldiery. With 1945 and the ending of the
War the condition of the Arabs became more critical and more
vulnerable. The cost of living had risen 195 percent, while in the
same period annual salaries had only risen 61 percent. The
French, having promised to leave Syria, bombed Damascus
killing over 500 people. On 22nd March 1945 in Cairo, Egypt,
Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen drew up the
constitution of the Arab League. At that point it can definitely
be said that the Arabs of the Middle East utterly lost any concept
of their Islamic identity at a social and political level. The work
of the modernist self-styled reformers of Islam had in effect
marginalised any idea of an Islamic polity governed by the
Shariat. Since their intellectual inspiration from the beginning,
and that at the behest of their Islamic teachers, had been
motored by the ideas of socialism, nationalism and self-
determination, the result was that they had submitted to the
kafir concept of the state as a machine with its subsequent
doctrine of the enslavement of its own masses, as in both sides
of the false kafir dialectic of totalitarianism and democracy.
The Nasserite version of King Faruq as a decadent playboy king,
while tragically true after his abdication, covered up his very
significant activity while ruling Egypt. The main opposition to
Faruq, apart from the simple fact of his being the ruler, was that
he embodied in himself a basic principle of the Osmanli
Dawlat which was that any Muslim with the right capacity could
hold power by virtue of being Muslim without reference to his
racial background. In the atmosphere of fervent nationalism
which had been created in Egypt there was bitter resentment at
being ruled by a young Albanian prince. This grew to a more
serious issue when it became clear not only to the nationalists,
Letter to an Arab Muslim
44
but the British and the jews, that King Faruq had determined
to take upon himself the responsibility of Khalif of all the
Muslims. Turkey having been enslaved by Kemalism, Egypt was
the logical place for the re-establishment of Khalifate. Make no
mistake. It was this and not the political errors he subsequently
made that assured that he would be treated to the same fate by
Nasser and Sadat that had been meted out to the last legal
Khalif of Islam. The silhouette of King Faruq boarding his boat
to go into exile mirrors exactly the photo of the last Khalif
departing Istanbul, taking with him the mantle of Khalifate,
fully preserved and untouched, in full readiness for its inheritor
to place it on his shoulders.
On 7th April 1947 an even darker day dawned for the
unfortunate Arab people as their last understanding of Islam
slipped away and their reformist ulama stood helpless before
the more powerful and indeed more glamorous forces of kufr
took over. In the Caf Rashid of Damascus a young christian
orthodox professor of history, newly returned from Paris, his
head buzzing with a pottage of Sorel, Bergson, Nietzsche, Marx
and Lenin, declared the official creation of the Baath Party. His
name was Michel Aflaq. He called for the unification of the
Arab world from the Gulf to the Atlantic into an Arab nation
that was to be based on socialism. He rejected communism on
the one hand and the Islamic movement on the other, placing
Islam in the role of fascism in his dialectic. He likened the
Islam he was prepared to tolerate to the allegiance people hold
towards a leading football team. Every year until the Gulf War
the Pope sent an annual message of congratulations to the
leaders of Syria and Iraq for following the path of Michel Aflaq.
In the same year in Palestine on 17th September, Golda Meir
met with King Abdullah of Jordan who was sympathetic to the
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45
creation of a jewish state. In that fateful year the U.N.O.
declared Israel to be a state. Five months later the jews
massacred 254 men, women and children at point-blank range
in the village of Deir Yasin, in order to terrorise the Palestinians
into a massive flight from the new territory of Israel. What
Hitler had done in Lidice, the jewish state, which claimed its
right to sovereignty because of the persecution it had suffered,
had copied at Deir Yasin. They had become their own Nazis.
On 14th March 1948 a Baathist revolution was bloodily
crushed in Yemen. On 16th May 1948 King Faruq sent his army
against the new state. Israel with its now famous world support
through the banking system was more than a match for the ill-
trained army of the King. By September the King sought to
negotiate a peace with the Israelis. Through February to July of
1949 an armistice was signed separately with Egypt, Lebanon,
Jordan and Syria. On 8th December 1948 the Egyptian
government dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood. On 12th
February 1949 its founder, Hassan Al-Banna, was assassinated.
On 28th December the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated
Nokrashy Pasha, holding him responsible. In May of the same
year Nasser met with Ibrahim Abdelhadi the Prime Minister,
and the Chief of the Secret Police. He was able to convince
these high officials that he had no links with the Muslim
Brotherhood, while at the same time he was able to hide his
other secret activities. By the end of the year he was putting out
propaganda from a group calling themselves Dhabat al-Ahrar,
the Free Officers.
In 1951 Palestinians assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan.
During the next two years the role of the English became
increasingly savage and increasingly unacceptable. To the
Letter to an Arab Muslim
46
horror of the jews and the Americans, King Faruq had
appointed a German general to modernise the Egyptian army.
By 1951 the kafir secret services succeeded in getting him
dismissed. In Ismailia the British had massacred over eighty
members of the Bouluk Nizam, the auxiliary police. Two days
later Cairo was in flames. As a result of the chaos let loose on
Cairo thanks to the dreadful policies of the English occupying
forces, on 23rd July 1952 the inevitable happened, a coup
dtat by the Free Officers led by General Nagib. Behind him
in the shadows, the brains of the operation, Gamal
Abdelnasser, waited his moment to take power. Three days later
King Faruq abdicated and set sail towards that limbo reserved
for kings without kingdoms.
By 1953 Nasser was putting into practice his youthful studies of
the life of Napoleon. He drew the new leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood, Hassan el-Hodeiba, close to him, all the better to
keep him under his eye. It is at this point that the disaster of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which in their long years have caused the
deaths of thousands of excellent young men who naively
followed their inaccurate and deviant version of Islam, must be
faced up to and acknowledged. The absolute pragmatism of the
materialist, Nasser, met head on the absolute idealist and
tactical pragmatist el-Hodeiba. The Brotherhood had chosen
the Shia role of perpetual rebellion against an unjust
leadership and they were to pay a terrible price. Hodeibas
attempt to snuggle up to the ruthless Nasser was as misguided
as Al-Bannas clandestine meetings with the British in the
forlorn hope that the Brotherhood had a role to play. Nassers
book, Philosophy of the Revolution, which he wrote with the
journalist Muhammad Heykal laid out his political theories.
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47
This type of book has proved popular with the upstart dictators
who have climbed to power on the ruined Islamic social
structures of the Osmanli Dawlat. It is no better, nor no worse
than Gadaffis comical Jacobin tract, the Green Book. Nasser,
like his Libyan disciple, was convinced that he had come up
with an original idea, but of course in both cases they were the
textbook philosophy of the masonic lodges.
So it was that in place of the majestic revealed Book of Allah,
Nasser offered the Egyptian masses his Theory of the Three
Circles: the Arab World, the African Continent and the Spirit
of Islam! In the first circle Nasser declared that the factor of the
progress of the Arab people was dependent on the importance
of petrol. Of the second circle he declared that Egypt had to
take the leadership in the continuing struggle of the Africans to
be free of white colonial power, because, in a generous
extension of Egyptian nationalism he declared, We are all
Africans! Finally the third circle was defined as a space, that of
the spiritual community whose centre was Makkah, the
solidarity of which was to provide the gigantic scaffolding of
our power. This was the new religion, and Islam in it had
effectively vanished. In its place there was a kind of sentimental
mist, a space for a spirit which somehow was supposed to make
Uzbek, Indonesian and Indian feel a strange vibrating sympathy
with his Arab brother. Since the Muslim Brotherhood had itself
been founded on somewhat similar principles, Egypt did not
need Mr Hodeiba on the palace balcony when it already had
the materialist Colonel Nasser.
About ten years ago I met with the leader, at least the intellectual
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the light of the terrible
situation of the Muslims I turned to him and said, We need a
Letter to an Arab Muslim
48
leader who will speak on behalf of all the Muslims. You have an
organisation. You have people placed in every country. Call your
leadership together. Appoint from among you one man and let
him declare Khalifate. The whole Muslim world will follow you.
A look of genuine fear crossed his face. He looked over his
shoulder as if there was someone behind him. We cannot do
that, he said. We are having a meeting in six months. I will put
your proposal to them and they will appoint a committee to
decide. He became even more uncomfortable as he added, This
is not the moment. Indeed, it will never be the moment. It has
not been the moment since the last Khalif boarded his boat and
folded the robe of Khalifate.
As for this great socialism into which the Arab world plunged
with such blindness, enthusiasm and often greed, it has
vanished without a trace. Well, not altogether, for they still have
the state apparatus acceptable to the capitalist world, and they
have excellent secret police organisations with the latest torture
technology imported by them from the state of Israel.
It must be understood, and this is not a subtle matter but a
painfully clear one, that Nasser believed in Allah. He was in the
language of our fiqh a Muwahid, believing in the oneness of
Allah, but in harmony with the wahhabite background of all the
reformers he saw the second Shahada as merely the
confirmation that it was through him, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, that the Quran had been revealed. That Islam
was a social system and indeed a welfare system, vastly superior
to socialism because it functioned under Divine and Prophetic
instruction, was a fact of which he was completely ignorant. In
an interview with De Gaulles biographer Jean Lacouture he
declared that you could not govern by the Quran because it is
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49
susceptible to so many interpretations, and being a very open
book the Quran did not seem to him to have the capacity to
serve a political doctrine. Now, the fragment of Islam that
Nasser had learned had come from the same sources that guided
the Muslim Brotherhood, and they had done away with the fiqh
and that framework of social justice which was based on the
Amal of Madinah and which was nothing other than the civic
embodiment of the Deen. So it was that on the 14th January
1954, the same month in which the fateful interview was given
to France-Soir, el-Hodeiba and hundreds of the Muslim
Brotherhood were put behind bars. The rebels had rebelled
against the dictator who was a rebel who had rebelled against the
king who was the inheritor of a rebellion against the Khalif.
An attempt was indeed made to assassinate Nasser. Arms caches
were found and the leadership identified in the plot. This time
the Brotherhood was declared illegal and 18,000 members of
the quasi-secret society were arrested on 31st October. By 1955
Nassers complete and absolute commitment to materialist
socialism became openly declared by him, confirming it in an
important discourse that he gave to the Military Academy. He
flung himself into Third-Worldism and met one by one all the
great socialist leaders in those days when socialism did appear
to be making its impact on the world. He became the friend of
the Soviets, of Tito, Che Guavara and Sekou Tour. He was the
darling of the Third World and yet could still give a warm
embrace in Madrid to General Franco. By 1956 he was urging
the abolition of the Islamic Laws on marriage and divorce.
Do not forget, oh Arabs! Your abandoning of the Islamic Law
of marriage, far from being an advance in moral values, is
simply nothing other than embracing the kafir view that the
Letter to an Arab Muslim
50
family should be abolished and that man, who is not by nature
monogamous, should at best set up mistresses in secret or
simply have intercourse wherever he desires without sanction,
which is the kafir norm. The Islamic Shariat decrees that there
should be no sexual pleasure that is not accompanied by the
guarantee of social responsibility. Instead of driving the woman
out uniquely for extra-marital pleasure, other women partners
are integrated into an extended and economically unified
family system, thus giving emotional and human security to the
children of such unions.
The two great events of Nassers life from a geopolitical point of
view are the nationalising of the Suez Canal, which was a
brilliant and deserved success, and the Six-Day War, which was
a disaster from which Egypt never recovered. In the aftermath
of the Suez crisis Nasser pursued his fantasy of Arab unity. In
1957 he held important talks with the Syrian kafir Michel
Aflaq, and over the following years Egypt was to unite with
Syria and separate with Syria and repeat the experiment with
Iraq, each event inspired by the materialist and socialist dream.
In Baghdad on 15th July 1958 Nuri Said, disguised as a woman,
fled through the streets of the city until he was caught by the
crowd who in the exaltation of their revolutionary fervour tore
his body to pieces. The British-invented monarchy of Iraq was
finished and General Abdalkarim Kassem, to the chanting of
the Marseillaise, celebrated their revolution. It was the 14th of
July! Nassers dream of the U.A.R., the United Arab Republics,
from an ideological point of view was simply a U.S.A., a Union
of Socialist Arabs. In 1961 the Cairo Tower, an ultra-modern
construction which gave views as far as the pyramids, was
financed with a gift of three million dollars from the C.I.A..
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51
On 9th February 1963 General Kassem was shot dead following
another coup dtat in Baghdad which brought to power
General Arif, a convinced Nasserite and Baathist. In Damascus
Salah Al-Bitar took power and declared himself ready yet again
to try to unify the Arab nations. Yet within a few months the
Nasserites had lost control of Damascus leaving five hundred
dead in its streets. By the end of the year the effect in Iraq was
felt and the president had to step aside for his brother Abdar-
Rahman Arif. The following year Nasser could definitely claim
he was the leader of the Arab world. With Ben Bella in Algeria
and the notorious kafir Bourguiba in Tunisia, Sallal in Yemen,
Abboud in Sudan, Amin Al-Hafiz in Syria and Arif in Iraq,
Nasser could count on varying forms of socialist support. On
the other hand the legitimate monarch of Morocco stood apart,
observant, while the illegitimate monarchs of Arabia and
Jordan sat grimly in opposition. With the sole exception of
Hassan II of Morocco, not one of these leaders could be seen as
upholding the Deen of Islam inside his country. In this year of
Nassers triumphs Khrushchev awarded him the Order of
Lenin. He received this Order proudly while millions of
Muslims inside the Soviet Union were persecuted, thousands
were still in the Gulags, and only a handful were permitted to
attend the Hajj. Not one voice was raised to plead their right to
fulfil their fifth Islamic obligation.
Despite the world acclaim for Nasser, every year revealed how
impossible it was going to be for the new religion, with its twin
pillars of nationalism and Arabism, to succeed. By 1965
Bourguiba was howling insults across the desert on Egypt.
Never, he declared, have the Arabs been so divided, that is
from the day that Egypt took on its sacred mission to unify us.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
52
At the beginning of 1966 the trial of the Muslim Brotherhood
members accused of attempting assassination opened. Over
356 separate judicial cases were filed in the courts.
Disturbingly, military officers were among the accused and
even a member of the presidential guard. Put in evidence
during the trials was the complicity of Arabia and its Saudi
rulers. The trials were to last into the following spring. On 1st
May at an industrial centre in Mehallah Al-Kubra, Nasser
delighted the workers by attacking those who in the name of
the defence of Islam wished to restore a feudal economy in
Egypt. He denounced King Faisal, calling him the Bearded
One, and accused his proposed plan to set up a permanent
Conference of Islamic States of being an American plan
intended to isolate the progressive and socialist Arab nations.
The growing confidence and financial expansion of the new
state of Israel was backed by its conviction that the capitalist
system would triumph over the socialism that still staggered on,
having emerged from the ruins of World War II in what was
clearly only a temporary revival of energy. In 1967 Israel
launched its Blitzkrieg, devastating the entire army of Nasser.
The disaster was overwhelming. 20,000 Egyptians dead, 700
tanks destroyed, and the Air Force virtually wiped out. In the
wake of the disaster, to ease the interior tensions in the country,
he announced his intention to liberate the Muslim
Brotherhood prisoners, partly in recognition of their
undoubtedly heroic performance during the brief and
overwhelming conflict with the enemy.
In 1968, when you might imagine things could not get worse
for the post-Islamic Arab world, the sinister figure of Michel
Aflaq turned up in Baghdad to join the leader of the new
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53
Baathist coup dtat, this time bringing to power the even more
menacing figure of Saddam Hussein.
In 1969 Sudan Radio announced that a democratic republic
had been created, and that its sovereignty belonged to the
people who were now represented by the Council of the
Revolution. Colonel Numeiri, a passionate admirer of Nasser,
had been plotting the coup for six years. Years later I met with
him in the Sudanese Embassy of London, having been invited
by some Sudanese Sufis, much to the distaste of the reformists
who had been assembled to greet the Sudanese ruler. They were
all in fact those very people who upheld the post-Islamic
doctrines of the first Egyptian reformers and their Indian
counterpart Maududi. It must be emphasised that their view of
Islam was based on a total acceptance of the banking system
and the mythical idea that socialism could dialectically
dominate the injustices of capitalism at some future date, and
that within that framework an Islamic political governance
could function, in other words a Shariat which put in place a
consultative assembly, but one which was prepared to slot in
alongside the kafir world system of democracy, international
institutions, and the bankism which already dictated the limits
of their actions.
As I sat opposite Numeiri it came to me that he was not among
friends, and the more they spoke the more I knew that their
ambition was to remove him from office and replace him with
their man, one who was backed by the Arabian wahhabite
regime. In other words there only existed the dialectic that
Nasser himself had defined in his talk to the workers of the
textile factory. When I spoke with Numeiri I said, I
congratulate you on your announcement that you are going to
Letter to an Arab Muslim
54
introduce the Islamic Shariat into Sudan. I urge you that you
begin by the closing of the banks and the abolition of paper
money. He smiled a benign presidential smile at what he
considered my unreal naivety, and so I added what was in my
heart. Remember, if one day you are in need of help, you can
call on the Muslims to come to your aid. He hesitated, gave a
nervous laugh, and excused himself. Two weeks later there was
a coup dtat in Sudan and he was forced into exile. Within the
shortest time the coup leader was in turn expelled and the
country fell into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only a
few decades before, Sudan fed all its people from its rich soil
and exported food to the desert lands of the east. The new
regime continued in its disastrous path of Third World debt,
the destruction of its agricultural base, the flight of
intellectuals, and all of this established firmly on a kafir
financial system. Personality politics and the coup dtat not
only were proving to be useless but with each new change of
personality governance the Arab countries plunged deeper and
deeper into social degradation.
Not to be outdone, on 1st September Colonel Gadaffi
abolished the Sanussi monarchy and joined the Lobster
Quadrille of Arab nationalist socialist dictators. By 1970 the
war of attrition in the Sinai came to an end and a cease-fire was
formed. To add darkness to darkness General Hafiz Al-Assad
took power in Damascus and a democratic republic was
declared in South Yemen. One of Nassers last acts was to
mediate between the puppet king of Jordan and the former
Ikhwan al-Muslimun member, now leader of the Palestinians,
Arafat, who from the point of view of Islamic Law was legally a
dead man, having shockingly insulted the blessed Aisha, wife
of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.
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Over the years Arafat had been showered with millions of
petrol dollars to buy arms, as much to assuage the guilt for the
inactivity of the house of Saud as in the hope that the
Palestinians could ever put right their humiliating situation.
Arafat, in case you have forgotten, had stock-piled masses of
arms in southern Lebanon, hidden in tunnels under the
ground. He had never used them in any frontal confrontation
with the Israeli enemy. In what came to be known as Black
September this dreadful man turned these guns on the
Jordanian Palestinians. They were killing each other. This was
Arab brotherhood. Exhausted from the mediation which he
succeeded in bringing about through his undoubted personal
charisma and prestige, on the 28th September Nasser had to
accompany the Emir of Kuwait to say his farewells at the
airport. It was the kiss of death. At six fifteen that evening he
collapsed with a massive heart attack.
On the subject of Arab unity General de Gaulle gave eloquent
summary.
Nasser would really like Algeria to be the fourth star of the
United Arab Republic. But that cannot happen. Neither
Bourguiba nor the King of Morocco are willing to disappear.
Algerian domination would not profit the Maghrib, nor would
a United Arab Republic under the direction of Nasser. And
what could Nasser bring to Algeria? Nothing! Money?
Technicians?He needs them himself. How would he be able to
give them to others?
And then, Nasser has begun a project which is against the
nature of things. Reason is against it. Egypt has always had its
unity. In every age the valley of the Nile has unified Egypt. On
Letter to an Arab Muslim
56
the contrary, countries like Lebanon, Iraq or Syria have always
been divided. The Druse have always fought the Maronites,
who have never got on with the Alawites. Nor in Iraq have the
Sunnis got on with the Shia or with the Kurds. These are
countries condemned to division because they carry groupings
of people who are completely different, do not have the same
language, the same religion, the same past, and they cannot
tolerate each other. To try to unify them under a single sceptre
is a super-human pretension. These people never want to be
governed by anyone but one of their own. To try it is to speak
and to say nothing. Nasser makes as if to unify, but the unity
has no profound reality. It is just a wind which blows.
That was the great kafir statesman analysing the actions of
Nasser who, when he abandoned Islam, decided to rule by the
kafir system, and by that submit to what de Gaulle, echoing his
great predecessor Napoleon, called the nature of things. For
without belief in the absolute and destining power of Allah,
glory be to Him, you must submit in Napoleons phrase, to La
Force des Choses. For the mass of Arabs who have followed
this dreadful and tragic path, every year has brought greater
disaster than the preceding one. However, it is time for those
who have mistakenly believed that they still had Islam to face
the reality. All that was left of the Five Pillars was the Prayer and
the Fast, and all that remained of Dhikr Katheeran was the
muttered dua of the smallest sura in the Quran, the Surat Al-
Asr. It was as if they recognised in these sublime ayats, with a
bitter realisation, that they would require enormous patience as
all their political activity dragged them further and further from
what they declared was their goal. Had they taken Islam from
its source in the Rasul, may Allah bless him and grant him
peace, and from the Amal of the Ahl-al-Madinah, they would
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57
have raised high the Banner of Islam and taken the people with
them, and turned them away from socialist kufr and called for
Khalifate which automatically implies the establishment of the
Gold Islamic Dinar of blessed Sunna and Madinan practice, in
one blow freeing the Muslims from the perpetual downward
spiral of economical degradation in the magical system of world
banking which at this moment has total control over the
Muslim lands. This cannot be the end of the story because the
Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, has
declared, My people cannot go entirely wrong.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
58
III
If the wahhabite mode of operation is to licence its authority
through an attack on other Muslims, then it follows that it has
allied itself by the very nature of its doctrines to the enemies of
Islam. The notorious allegiance of the reformist movement in
India to the British crown is well documented, as is the active
and intricate connection between the Ismailis and the British
government, and between the Qadiyyanis and the British
government. On 16th April 2000 the Independent on Sunday
gave a detailed account of how Denis Healey, then Britains
Defence Secretary, had headed an organised and effective
campaign to destabilise President Sukarno of Indonesia. One
specialist at the Foreign Office told that his brief from London
was, To do whatever I could do to get rid of Sukarno. The
report states: Newly discovered cabinet papers show that British
agencies, including MI6, had supported Islamic guerrillas and
other dissident groups in an effort to destabilise Sukarno. The
disorder fostered by the British led to General Suhartos take-
over and dictatorship and a wave of violence unseen since the
59
Second World War. The cabinet documents and the
confessions of the Foreign Office specialist were put together by
a historian who has published his evidence in the journal
Intelligence and National Security. His research shows that the
head of MI6 was asked to draw up plans for covert operations in
1964 and these included supplying arms to separatists in Aceh
and Sulawesi. Lord Healey stated, I think that, to my horror on
one occasion, they put forged documents on the bodies of
Indonesian soldiers. His excuse for these policies was that they
feared a coup against the Sultan of Brunei.
Evidence such as this forces us to ask whether it is possible to
imagine that the kafir forces would not have infiltrated the
Arabian world to constantly destabilise and destroy any
manifestation of an emergent Islam. What has to be grasped
and this is the very heart of this message is that given the
enormous importance of this issue and the high stakes in the
oil commodities market, that the kuffar would never be naive
enough simply to employ physical acts of subversion and not
undertake profound spiritual and intellectual subversion in
making war against true religion. Historically, this
confrontation of kafir society with Islam begins with
Napoleons invasion of Egypt. It was accompanied by ruthless
campaigns which involved the slaughter of whole populations,
and alongside that a sophisticated, and, for its day, quite
investigative examination of the Deen of Islam. Napoleon
adopted the masonic doctrine, play at being believers, and so
he claimed that he was a Muslim among the Muslims. Just over
a century later Mussolini was to make the same insulting claim
during his invasion of Libya. With the western kafir nations
struggle to get their hands on the oil supply it must be noted
that from the beginning of these imperialist operations not only
Letter to an Arab Muslim
60
military agents were employed, like Shakespeare and Lawrence,
but there grew up the Orientalists activity with the precise task
of briefing the political activists in how best to control and de-
activate the Muslims.
However unpleasant this may be, the matter has to be
confronted because only then will you grasp how profoundly
you have been tricked. You have to realise that to recover your
honour and your self-respect you must return to that ongoing
and vibrant historical Islam which was dealt these almost lethal
blows by the so-called reformers and purifiers of the Deen.
* * * * *
Mention must now be made in greater detail of the
Subcontinent of India. To understand the corrupting influence
of the modernists, and the subsequent breaking-up into
conflicting schools of Islamic teaching, one must not lose sight
of that key element which is paramount in correct Islamic
understanding. From the kafir point of view the destruction of
the glorious Mughal Islamic rule was necessary. Once Amr had
been removed from the Indian polity, then from that moment
Islam as a total phenomenon ceased to exist. However, a gifted
and vibrant Muslim nation remained, but leaderless and devoid
of those imposed elements of the Shariat which grant not only
nobility but security to the Muslim community. The British
moved their capital from Calcutta and set up their rule from
Delhi. Calcutta-based, the British still saw India as a
commercial enterprise, but once the great Mughal had been
defeated, imprisoned, and his family murdered, the jewish
Prime Minister back in London, dIsraeli, convinced his
adoring monarch to declare herself Empress of India. The
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creation of the Raj was to result in the establishment of a new
group among the countrys elite alongside the landowners.
Bankers, merchants and money-lenders came to make up ten
percent of the landlord class, drawn largely from hindu bania
castes. In Bareilly, the largest town in Rohilkhand, the British
imposed a house tax. Mufti Muhammad Ewaz declared that
where once the Muslims imposed Jizya on the kuffar, now the
roles had been reversed. This meant, he said, that India was no
longer dar al-Islam but had become dar al-Harb, opening the
door to Jihad. This was in 1837. Thus, for the first half of the
nineteenth century a ferment of debate and urgent
examination of the condition of the Muslims resulted in
contradictory Fatwas and dramatic personal ijtihad leading to a
variety of responses, from open collaboration with the British,
through positions which attempted to rescue something of the
Deen, to outright conflict and the raising of the Green Flag of
Jihad. For example the son of the great Shah Wali Ullah, Shah
Abdalaziz Dehlawi gave an ambiguous judgment on the matter
of naming India dar al-Harb, yet one which inspired a Jihad
movement in the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab.
The Maharajah of Mahmudabad, having seen at close quarters
the terrible events of Lucknow, became Shia, in the conviction
that their path was more militant. Dudhu Miyan Ibn Shariat
Ullah tried to set up a series of local Khalifates to replace the
imperial Mughal. Other ulama, in despair, made hijra to the
Hijaz, among them Hajji Imdad Ullah who was Pir to both
Mawlana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Mawlana Rashid
Ahmad Gangohi, founders of the Dar al-Ulum at Deoband.
In the face of the British government setting its administration
in Delhi, the great Muslim capital of India, the ulama retreated
to small towns where the ruling presence of the British seemed
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62
to interfere less with the life of the people. So it was that some
settled in Deoband, some in Gangoh, and some in Bereilly. The
result of this was that the ulama in the coming generations
who lived under the Raj, that is under kafir rule and law, were
taught an Islam that before anything was acceptable to the now
well-briefed kafir government and would pose no threat.
Significantly, the modernist and Ahl al-Hadith movement
represented no challenge to the British. There never had been
a social entity that could call themselves Ahl al-Hadith in the
historic record of Islam. It was a satisfactorily non-political
movement, which in the end could only produce academics
and an educated minority following. The great madrasas of
Deoband and Bereilly still contained within them the threat of
revolt and the call for independence. The reason for this was
that both these schools correctly held that their ijtihad should
be based on a committed taqlid to the fiqh of Imam Abu Hanif.
The proof that the path of taqlid did not result in apathy, as the
anti-Islamic dialectic claimed, was that men of both these
schools made varied, relevant and significant ijtihad in
confronting the terrible implications of British kafir
dominance and persecution. As we can now observe on a
world-wide basis, alas, the shock to a Muslim people of losing
the authority of Khalif, Sultan or Amir is the greatest of shocks.
Correctly, a Fatwa is something produced by protected ulama on
the orders of an effective Amir. The legal and political
implications of this mean that the legal judgment will then be
ratified by the Amir and carried out under his command. A Qadi
giving judgment under these circumstances is a very different
thing from an alim simply voicing his opinions on a matter as a
personal response or when requested by other disenfranchised
Muslims. Most importantly, this tensile energy produced by fear
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of Allah through giving judgments that will be acted upon
produces a very special and high calibre of human being.
Imam Malik, may Allah be pleased with him, would sit always
where Khalif Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, sat in the
Haram of Madinah, maintaining a grave and intense
expression. After hearing the evidence he gave judgment. The
moment the judgment was given, the accused was taken out
and the relevant punishment, if such was the case, was
administered. Malik sat, silent and unmoving, until news was
brought that the sentence had been accomplished. He then
raised his eyes upwards and said in a strong voice, Oh Allah!
The judgment has been effected. Justice has been done. The
innocent are protected and Madinah is safe. This is a different
social phenomenon from the alim giving his opinion from a
mimbar or a minzah. The active Qadi is a man whose character
increases in profundity and awe of Allah. The alim who talks
into the wind without seeing the imposition of his judgment
retreats from the vital issues facing his people and turns more
and more to elements that do not impinge on the social nexus,
until he ends up completely trivialised.
The ulama of Deoband and Bereilly, standing firm as they did
on all the essential elements of the Deen, yet avoiding the
uncomfortable and humiliating reality that stared them in the
face, could not do other than turn to secondary matters to give
them a local authority, a limited power, and a politically
impotent constituency. The question they avoided embodied
the profoundest element in the Deen of Islam as it had been
laid down through the Revelation and the Sunna. How can we
defend Islam without Amr and not become a Shia, viewing the
community of Truth as an exiled, persecuted and powerless
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64
remnant? Or viewed differently they could say, What are the
means that will restore Delhi to us, that is effective governance,
an Islamic coinage, and a dar al-Islam? Avoiding the issue of
Amr they were unable to respond correctly to all the questions
posed to them. The loss of the Amir means, legally speaking
unless you abandon Islamic fiqh that the Dinar and the
Dirham, and the weights and the measures will not be valid and
guaranteed. If there is not the Madinan Amal of Gold Dinar
and Silver Dirham, then Zakat cannot be paid. If there is no
Amir the Zakat collectors cannot be appointed nor can it be
distributed according to the rules. In one blow vital Faraid are
abolished. The direct consequence of this is that the banner of
Jihad will not be raised high and kafir rule remains assured.
You cannot fail now to see the pattern. Remove the Muslim
Sultan. Disband the army of Jihad. Close the Sufic tekkes and
khanaqas. A twofold attack on the Sufis. Accuse them of
primitivism from the modernist point of view, or accuse them
of bida with the myth of purification from a wahhabite point
of view. Look at the historical record. An Islamic Sultan ruled.
Zakat was collected. The Shariat was imposed. The Tariqas
unified the people, imbued them with love of the Messenger,
may Allah bless him and grant him peace, gave the people pride
in Islam, and engendered loyalty to the Sultan, an ever-ready
army for Jihad. After the kafir incursion into Muslim lands an
identical social de-construction can be identified. Deposition of
the Sultan. Dismantling of Awqaf. The secularisation of
education once the tekkes and madrasas were closed down. The
transfer of Islamic studies to universities, awarding secular
doctorates with masonic ritual. The abolition of Zakat. The
introduction of worthless paper money to replace the
real-money system of Islam. The introduction of usury banking
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call it Islamic Banking, what does it matter, the institutions
and the instruments are themselves usurious. Abolish Jihad
do the new Islamic Doctors not tell you that Islam means peace
and tolerance?
Under the Amr of the Mughals there was no Deobandi school.
There was no Bereilly school. There were no wahhabites. Both
the Deobandi and Bereilly leadership belonged to Tariqas and
were united in their holding to obedience to the Sultan,
following their Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Chisti Shaykhs in
upholding the Deen. They fought Jihad against the hindus and
the sikhs. The British Raj, the Kemalists and the wahhabites
held an identical agenda, and ruthlessly carried it out under the
approving eye and rewarding hand of their kafir masters.
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66
IV
Oh Arab people! It follows from this that it would be most
unjust to suggest that it is only you who have grossly betrayed
their Deen, and quite incorrect to suggest that only the Arabs
were infiltrated and then betrayed by their kafir overlords. If we
examine other parts of the Muslim world we find the same
story repeated. Inescapably it must be admitted that the same
methods, procedures and evaluations of the kuffar are applied
to the Muslims. The destiny of the Arab peoples is however of
special importance to all the Muslim Ummah.
It is significant when one surveys the world scene of the Muslim
community that only two regimes can claim a social identity
that is based on legitimacy. The United Arab Emirates,
although bearing a modern political morphology designed to
guarantee that oil production remains in the hands of a
controllable because small political and military entity, is
nevertheless governed by the natural leadership of its own
people. The rulers of each Emirate are the legitimate rulers and
67
inheritors of their local territory and for this reason can boast a
harmony and internal social integrity compromised only by the
exigencies of the kafir financial system under which we all at
present function, and which do not leave them free of the icy
controlling hand of the worlds bankers.
This qualification also applies to a historically more ancient
and culturally more distinctive society, that of the Kingdom of
the Maghrib. There, the legitimacy of the king stretches over
centuries. Not only is the ruler a Sharif, but his grandfathers
restoration to power marked a devastating blow to French kafir
colonial rule. The characterisation of King Hassan II as a tyrant
may, indeed, be proven, yet with the passage of time the
Moroccans become increasingly aware of his achievement in
preserving both the nation and significant portions of its Deen
and its Islamic scholarship. The King bore a relationship to
Shakespeares Henry V, that is to say that the model of young
Prince Hal as the playboy who is slowly transformed through
the duties and struggles of kingship into the heroic leader
Henry V, can be seen patterned in the life of King Hassan II.
His father, after a great conflict, had won back Morocco for the
Muslim people. The young King was the secure inheritor of
these battles. The first picture we have of him is the Playboy
King surrounding himself with courtiers who, while fulfilling
his desires, begin to build for themselves a wealthy power base.
As the years progressed and the natural authority of the King
developed, the ambitions of his courtiers increased also. The
historically inevitable happened when the very men closest to
him tried to overthrow him. Stunned by the violence of the
attempted coup dtat, the King took an undoubtedly ferocious
revenge on those closest to him, although he wisely amnestied
the junior officers concerned.
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68
The King came to realise that the only protection Morocco had
was its Islamic heritage. The last years of his life proved quite
remarkable. He began to strengthen the role of the ulama and
gave them a voice in a way that has not happened in any other
country. Ramadan was celebrated with Moroccos ruler every
night on television in his palace, having lined up before him the
leading ulama of the country face to face with all his military
high command, his government, his provincial governors and
representatives of the people. The palace became a Zawiyya.
The King led the dhikr, and every night a different alim would
give a discourse on the fiqh of Madinah. A young Turkish
Muslim watching this observed with tears in his eyes, Imagine
this happening in Turkey! During the last Ramadan Gathering
of the Kings life the Sufi leader of the indigenous Spanish
Muslim community presented to the King their newly minted
Gold Islamic Dinar and Silver Dirham and Five-Dirham pieces,
minted according to the command of Umar Ibn Al-Khattab,
may Allah be pleased with him, and thus having the correct
weight for the legal calculation of Zakat payment. The King
examined the coins carefully and expressed his heartfelt joy at
receiving this significant gift. At the following days Ramadan
Gathering before all his court and all the people of the
Kingdom of Morocco, the King declared that the time had
come to restore the fallen pillar of Zakat to the Deen of Islam
in Morocco. He informed his people that instructions would be
given to the ulama and his government to examine the way to
apply its legal obligations.
There is no Muslim society without its errors, conflicts and
betrayals. What must be recognised is that whatever King
Hassan may be accused of, the achievement of his reign has
been, despite massive financial attempts by the bankers to
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topple him and permit the purchase of the nations assets in a
post-revolutionary Fire-Sale, as is their world-wide practice, that
he warded off the modernist Islamic threat. That threat and its
policy are that same slippery slope which we have identified in
this review of Muslim affairs throughout the Middle East and
North Africa. The King saved Morocco from being Algeria. The
republic is the kafir mode of government preferred by the world
banking hegemony, and the abolition of religion, or its
anaesthetising, is its preferred mode of social evolution.
In the Emirates the modernists and wahhabites who attack and
most shamelessly slander Sufis are even more outspoken in
their attacks on the ruling families, yet all that is done in
private, while at every public occasion they rush forward to kiss
the hands of the rulers in the hope of the preferments they may
receive. They also maintain a disturbing relationship with the
significant American intelligence presence in the area. So in
Cairo. So in Islamabad.
What King Hassan II undoubtedly saved Morocco from was the
descent into hellish slaughter and civil war that became the
destiny of Algeria, when it plunged into a spiral of events, one
of the motor forces of which was reformist and wahhabite
Islam. The present consensus of opinion on the beginning of
the National Algerian Movement is that it was the work of a few
men in particular, a revolutionary, an Islamic leader, and a
bourgeois. Without them it would not have been possible
although the character and the thesis of each one was very
different, forming a triad of opposing positions. The first,
Messali Hadj (1898-1974) was a native of Tlemcen and a
militant Third-Worldist who, like Ho Chi Minh and the
notorious Michel Aflaq, received his political education in
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70
Paris. In his head fizzed that intoxicating cocktail which
together spelled disaster: authoritarian centralism, the
application of the term Jihad to a national struggle, a
communistic view of the state, and a rhetoric of the Ummah.
He was a believer in Pan-Arab nationalism. His party, the P.P.A.
(Parti du peuple algrien) became the M.T.L.D. (Movement
pour le triomphe des liberts dmocratiques). During the war
with France he formed the autonomous Organisation Spciale,
O.S., which prepared the armed insurrection. By 1954 the
F.L.N. had separated from the M.T.L.D.. Messali Hadj then
formed the M.N.A. (Mouvement national algrien) which fell
into bloody rivalry with the F.L.N.
The bourgeois was Ferhat Abbas (1899-1985). Married to a
Frenchwoman, he was that modern phenomenon, a secularised
Muslim who longed for assimilation into French society. In
order to taste of these delights he first had to win the
emancipation of the indigenous people. Do not forget that so
complete was the social humiliation of the Algerians in their
own country that they were unable to sit on the terraces of the
cafs, and so one of the small but sweet fruits of their
emancipation was to be able to sit at a caf watching the crowd
go by. On 10th February 1943 he launched the famous
Manifeste du peuple algrien, which in 1946 became the
charter of the U.D.M.A., Union dmocratique du Manifeste
algrien. This group still sought a negotiated settlement, but on
21st April 1956 he joined with the F.L.N. in Cairo.
The Islamic leader was Shaykh Abdelhamid Ben Badis (1889-
1940). He led the reformist movement and was a direct
inheritor of that dismal philosophy which had spread like a
virus from Cairo throughout the Muslim world. His bitter
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opposition was to the Maliki madhhab. Nowhere is it more
clear that the reformists represent an anti-Islamic movement
than when it manifests in a country which follows the madhhab
of Imam Malik. Imam Maliks Muwatta represents a detailed
record of the practices of the people of Madinah under the
tutelage of Khalif Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased
with him, and the judgments of Sayyedetna Aisha, may Allah
be pleased with her. Properly speaking, the so-called madhhab
of Imam Malik is by and large an extension of and
extrapolation from the Umm al-Madhahib, defined by Ibn
Taymiyya in respectful confirmation of its superiority over all
legal judgments, as the Madhhab of the Ahl al-Madinah. Badis
bitterly opposed the Muftis, the Imams of the mosques of
Algeria, and the Sufi Zawiyyas.
In 1936 the much respected Mufti of Algiers, a renowned
Maliki scholar, was assassinated. Shaykh Taieb el-Okbi was
arrested. He was one of the reformers. The French colonial
writer Albert Camus rose to his defence in a series of articles.
Camus was an atheist and nihilist who believed in an
independent and secularised Algeria. What must be seen is that
these three men worked together to a common end for an
Islamic movement whose motto is Kitab wa Sunna, yet whose
capacity to ignore the Sunna would be remarkable were it not
matched by their capacity to disobey the Quran. The refusal of
the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to
have the best of Arab fighters fight alongside him because he
was not Muslim remains an inescapable limit to alliances.
A significant part of the tragedy of modern Algerian history has
been that the Muslims who had taken on the whole Deen of
Islam allowed themselves to enter the independence movement
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72
which, although it used a rhetoric of Jihad, never could and
never did raise high the Banner of Islam. The war was directed
by its communist core, but the war could not have been won
without the active and heroic participation as well as enormous
suffering of the practising Muslim population, of whom only
some of the city elite had deviated towards the modernist thesis.
When the war was over the victorious F.L.N. set up its
government under their communist leader, Ben Bella. The
result of this was that a situation similar to Nassers Egypt
emerged, that is a socialist leadership with a so-called Islamic
system that was bonded to two doctrines which are anti-Islamic:
Nationalism and Arabism. Under the communists the leading
ulama who were the inheritors and followers of Ben Badis were
given the responsibility of running Islam under the new
centralised leninist state. The true Deen of Islam did continue
to be taught in Saharan madrasas and in some mosques, but it
was now renamed as if it were a strange sect the Malikis! In
the very centre of Algiers there is a small mosque which came
to be known as the Maliki mosque, and this in a country which
had maintained a vigorous Islam for centuries following the
Madhhab of the Ahl al-Madinah.
In all of this you must understand that with this transition from
historical Islam to revised modernism there came a change in
the power base of the society. Under the rule of Islam Algeria
was basically self-governing, but with the Khalifate based in
Istanbul both as its protector and its Court of Last Appeal in
judicial matters. As the great jewish banking houses of Europe
began their brilliant, original and magical method of
expropriation of whole countries, the Islamic identity and
capacities of the Osmanli Dawlat began to fall apart. The
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French acquisition of both Algeria and Morocco, while
accompanied by military activities, as we have said is best
described in modern bankist language as being leveraged
buyouts. Before examining the issue of that wealth and its
transference to the kuffar we must remain for the moment with
the issue of governance and power.
The truth is that the reformist ulama who suddenly found
themselves with their own country in their hands, and the
colonial tyrants defeated and gone, made not the slightest effort
to establish an Islamic polity. The false Ben Badis doctrines left
them in the same helpless position as the one in which the
Egyptian Ikhwan found themselves in the socialist Egypt of
Nasser. In both cases the masses overwhelmingly embraced the
new regime because the doctrines of national pride and Arab
identity filled them with effulgence and took from them fear of
Allah and love of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant
him peace, since those two inextricably bound teachings had
been swept aside in their Islamic reformation. As in
everywhere that this insidious anti-Islam was established, the
organic system of social welfare that was Awqaf was swept aside
and its properties and wealth expropriated by the centralised
state. So it was that the Ben Badis educated ulama underwrote
the atheist materialist system of the communist F.L.N.
dictatorship and happily participated in submitting to its
education of a whole generation who, but for the remaining
Sufic enclaves and independent madrasas, frankly had no idea
of Islamic teaching of Tawhid, or love of the Messenger and
following him, let alone the proper Muslim adab. The question
that must be asked is why, in the euphoria of victory over the
French and in the first flush of independence, did these ulama
not raise high the Banner of Islam and establish a powerful
Letter to an Arab Muslim
74
Islamic state securely founded on the Shariat?In other words,
why did they not appoint a Sultan, set up empowered Qadis,
mint the Islamic Gold Dinar and Silver Dirham of the correct
Madinan weight, and restore the Zakat that they had blamed
their French masters for denying them?Now, certainly, they
could sit on the terrace of the caf and drink their cooling
drinks, but that was the only kind of freedom they had gained
for all that bloodshed. In fact, the whole Badisi gang of ulama
submitted to Ben Bellas order commanding them to attend
courses in marxist-leninism. If the reformist Muslims had in
fact possessed the formula of Islam in its Madinan splendour,
Algeria would have been the model of the Islamic world. More
importantly, the ghastly massacre of the innocents that has
taken place in our time would have been prevented.
The cause of the massacres has to be understood firstly, before
an accusing hand is pointed at the perpetrators of them. If the
wahhabite Islamic movement had not degraded the Deen of
Islam by putting it forward as a political programme, with the
Muslim leadership seen as standing on a political platform,
thereby suggesting that the Islamic model could be arrived at as
a matter of majority choice, and thus accepting that they would
submit to its being rejected as a minority choice if they had
not participated in the sorry circus of democracy they would
not have initiated with the materialist state the terrible cycle of
violence. For this reason the primal responsibility falls on the
head of this profound deviation by the wahhabites and
modernists. As for the perpetrators of these terrible crimes,
committed not against kuffar remember but against innocent
Muslim men, women and children, their identity is a cause for
bitter appraisal. Since I have fuqara in various cities and deserts
throughout Algeria, I have been able to get as close to the truth
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as anyone can until this tragic affair has come to an end and it
can be more fully investigated. The reports I have, and these
sometimes from victims relatives, state that there is no doubt
that the atheist regimes military did commit some of the
massacres. However it seems that in large part they were
committed by wahhabite forces, some of whom had served and
been trained in the war of Afghan national resistance. In this
whole period of guerrilla warfare and set-piece massacres, one
very disturbing fact emerges. The declared end of the rebels was
to take command of the state, so why is it that in all this time
not one single oil installation or pipeline has been targetted?
This brings us to that recurrent theme that has haunted the
Arab peoples throughout the last century and still does today. I
mean, the protocols and passions that surround the wealth of
the oil industry.
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76
V
Allah, glory be to Him, in His Book asks us: Do you think that
because you are muminun you will not be tested? There is no
doubt that the great test of the Arab people, and indeed the
whole Muslim world community, has been the presence and the
role of petrol in our territories. Allah in His wisdom placed a
significant majority of the worlds oil reserves under the feet of
the Muslims. This was His test. Had the Muslims held to the
path of historical Islam they would have recovered their senses
and realised the astonishing trick that the kuffar were playing on
them. Khalifate, Khums, Jizya, Zakat, Islamic Dinar and
Dirham, and Jihad on the frontier these would have unified
the Muslims and transformed their enormous wealth through
Halal instruments of exchange, commodities and real -value
currency. Once the Muslims had turned their backs on their
noble Imams, Imam Malik, Imam Abu Hanif and Imam Shafii,
then by that token they had accepted an ulama without fiqh
and without a political leader. The Muslim world was put in
77
chains and the Sword of Jihad was taken from them, and then
the kuffar bound them in slavery, yet the chains were made of
paper, and they called it money. The issue of oil ownership was
originally considered a political matter, but even that illusion
was firmly removed as the kafir system evolved to the point that
they could declare it uniquely a commercial matter. Once the
kuffar had designed the democratic political system for nations,
power became vacuum-packed and unmenacing. So it was that
that set of miserable little nations with its dictatorships which
held out the evolutionary promise of being raised up to be
democracies became so preoccupied with this process, that they
failed to realise that the wealth system was no longer in the
hands of the political class. Socialism was finished and
dictatorship was no longer needed, so the kafir power could
turn over each little nation state when it was ready to impose the
curse of democracy on it. What is the curse of democracy?It is
that the currency and commodity markets are no longer in the
hands of the elected government which is now simply in charge
of policing and national shopping.
The kafir elite live by absolute control of the paper currency
system, itself a commodity, and all the other commodities like
oil, diamonds, and heavy metals. These govern the world today,
but only for the moment. Once you have grasped this essential
matter and returned to acknowledging in dynamic existential
terms that Allah has power over everything, and that for Allah
bringing down their rule is easy, for while it seems total it is in
reality more fragile than any tyranny before it, then with His
help you can change everything.
The manipulation of the oil market, which is entirely in the
hands of the great oil corporations, has to script political
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78
scenarios in accordance with the needs and crises of that
market. When Kuwait had the temerity to try to join the kafir
club by opening a stock exchange it was cruelly punished, and
in the shortest time, so that by simple manipulation it was
brought to ruin. Unsure of market control, the Titans, as
Jnger defined the new non-national power elite of banks and
corporations, determined to take a more powerful grip on the
petrol flow from the desert nations. It was a simple and overt
gamble, far less complicated than many an imperialist war, and
it was totally successful. Firstly, get Kuwait oil to practice lateral
drilling across the frontier into Iraq. Allow an increasing
dialogue of friction between the two countries, fuelled by
Intelligence activity. At the point that the predictable ruler of
Iraq threatens war, give diplomatic assurance at the highest level
that he could get away with it. The moment he makes his move
strike! Desert Storm! In one highly successful kafir operation
new weaponry was tested, Israel was released from the threat of
Iraqi aggression, and Kuwait oil, in flames, was out of action for
several years. Iraqi oil sales were blocked, first in punishment
and then with the invention of the myth that the ruined nation
was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. The kingdom
of the rebel Saud family was bankrupted by the cost of the war,
which they were forced to bear, and a massive military presence
there was permanently established.
Take out your map of the world. Sanctions against Iraq.
Sanctions against Libya. Algeria paralysed by civil war. Nigeria
blocked from commercial activity by power struggles. Indonesia
mercilessly beaten into paralysis by agents provocateurs. A
wahhabite infiltration plunging Afghanistan into an endless
cycle of bloodshed and thus blocking a crucial pipeline. Last,
but not least, the true story of Chechnya.
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Chechnya, more clearly than anywhere, exposes the twin
strands that make up the enslaving rope that binds Muslim
peoples, imperatives of oil in the kafir evaluation, and the
abandonment of the imperatives of Islam in the face of an
imposed wahhabism. Why was it, you must first ask, that the
Russian kuffar were so desperately concerned to guard the
remote mountain stronghold of a small people who had done
nothing but cause them trouble for two hundred years?The
maps reveal what the kafir political discourse tries to hide.
Grozny was a vital stopping place on the great Caucasian
pipeline. In the first Chechen War its heroes and its leadership
were derived from families with a strong Sufic background,
proudly boasting the Shaykhs in their ancestry. It was the sight
of a villageful of women standing in a circle performing the
Qadiri Hadra with profound intensity that made the Russian
soldiers blood turn to vinegar. They had reason to be afraid.
In 1985 Alexandre Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush, in a
well-researched study entitled Mystics and Commissars, laid
bare the kafir communist states battle against Islam as
manifested by the Sufic Tariqas. Stalins regime, with the
enthusiastic approval of the christian orthodox church, had
tried to scatter communities bound by the Sufic Tariqas, and
had sent hundreds of thousands to the Gulags, until in despair
at the failure of his persecution, he simply moved a significant
portion of the Chechen population to Siberia. In the Eighties
the communists reckoned there were half a million Sufis in the
Caucasus. The communist scholar Bazarbaev, in a detailed
survey of the Muslim population, defined the Sufis as
intolerant, militant and missionary. They refused any dialogue
with atheists, and somehow evaded the soviet psychological
environment. It should be remembered that the official
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80
Islam, that is the one accepted by the kafir dictatorship, sent a
small hand-picked delegation every year to Hajj. This
scandalous refusal to allow the Muslims of the whole of then
southern Russia to fulfil their religious obligations was accepted
in absolute silence by the wahhabite rulers of the Haramayn.
Not only did they fail to use their enormous wealth and
influence to allow the enormous numbers who would have
made Hajj to do so, but they fted and honoured the
communist apparatchiks who presented themselves as the
official Mullahs. With the end of the Khanate linking the
Caucasus to Istanbul, the Sufic Shaykhs would set up a court of
Shariat and give rulings which were scrupulously obeyed by
their people. The Jadidis, or wahhabite ulama, as in every
place, were happy collaborators with the kafir regime, and in
some cases were K.G.B. agents. Bennigsen and Wimbush
reported: Soviet anti-religious propaganda is targeted
particularly on the dhikr, which is thought by the propagandists
to be one of Sufisms more odious aspects. It is frequently
attacked as being anti-Soviet and anti-Russian, unhealthy, and
anti-social. The family of Saud would, of course, agree.
The authors tell a charming tale of a Chechen village,
Kurchaloy, holding five dhikrs simultaneously, one Naqshbandi
and four Qadiri. On the same evening, three soviet dancing
parties were held and one socialist realist movie, attended by
ten to fifteen people. Perhaps even more encouraging was the
report of another Russian social scientist investigating the Sufis
of the northern Caucasus when he noted: After the dhikr
ceremony an adept is unfit for normal working activity. The
Sufic rituals are the most nefarious of all social evils, and it is
necessary to fight the Sufi organisations until their final
extermination. This was the viewpoint of a society based on an
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atheist doctrine which has produced, according to the careful
and conservative demographic study entitled The Black Book
of Communism by the distinguished historians Stphane
Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Pann, Andrzej
Paczkowski, Karel Bartoek and Jean-Louis Margolin, a
death-toll of 25 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in
China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and so on. Kufr is one system.
Another Russian social scientist, Aliaskerov, in analysing the
Sufis said that they were anarchic and petit-bourgeois and
proclaimed the primacy of individual freedom. According to
this theory, a believer is responsible to God alone, and because
the government the Soviet government, not a bourgeois
power does not come from God, because it limits Gods will,
it must not be obeyed. Bennigsen and Wimbush end their
important monograph quoting a Russian scholar, E. Mallitski,
who wrote from Tashkent in 1898: Given the immobility of
official Islamic dogmas, all intellectual movements in the
Muslim world must cover themselves with the flag of Sufism.
The renaissance of Islam can take place only under its
influence.... Every new idea, any movement, political or
religious, reactionary or revolutionary, will cover itself with the
flag of Sufism. The authors then note: These observations,
although written in the last century, should command our
attention today. The puppet regime which governs the Arabian
Peninsula today is completely subservient to the Titans who
make up that small multi-national community which wields
supra-national power. That leadership is in turn obedient to a
now well-defined and widely practised philosophy which derives
from the atheist ethos of the last two centuries and whose main
achievements were the French and Russian Revolutions.
Wahhabism is one of its strategies.
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82
What happened in Chechnya? That Sufic army and people
fought against the second greatest military power in the world,
and won. As the victory came nearer, the kafir forces became
seriously concerned and ordered the wahhabites to move in to
de-fuse the implications and effect of a Sufic-Islamic victory.
Within the shortest time after the accords were signed with the
Russians ending hostilities, in meetings held in Paris with the
then Vice-Premier Hodjakhmed Noukhaev, during which we
had gained the generous support of the great French advocate
Matre Jacques Vergs in order to lay down in international law
those elements which could produce a final document of
complete independence, I was shown a very disturbing
document which had been prepared for the Chechen
government. It contained many clauses which were to appear
later in the humiliating Dayton Agreement that wiped out the
Bosnian Muslims chance of self-government after their heroic
victory. The document had been drawn up by one of Frances
most famous jewish bankers. It laid out a Constitution and a
series of political obligations which, when listed, totally secured
the abolition of any political and financial Islamic identity to
the Chechen people. The very first elements in the document
included the anti-Islamic doctrine of Human Rights, a national
bank, parity of all religious groups, the establishment of secular
education at a state level, with the built-in assurance that if
these principles were established, there would be an automatic
and immediate request for a massive loan from the World Bank
or the I.M.F., which most certainly would be granted. It was the
Chechens Dayton Agreement.
As can be directly verified from the Beniggsen-Wimbush
references above, kafir society knew this could not be achieved
without the destruction of the Sufis. A swift and increasing
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influx of wahhabites entered the Caucasus, setting up conflict
among the excellent Chechen leadership, and at the same time
recruiting young men to be taken to Madinah University for
indoctrination. The result was that the Chechen people and its
fighters were tricked into a second Chechen War.
The Second Chechen War was in itself a concerted plan by the
wahhabites to eliminate the power base of Shamil Basayev and
the Sufic units loyal to him. It must be remembered that while
Basayev was a dedicated Sufi, at the same time he saw himself as
the defender of his own persecuted people. A so-called Jihad
Group was formed to activate the conflict and also to entrap
Basayev, who could be counted on not to abandon his men, the
aimed intention being to wipe them out completely. So it was
that in the command group, Basayev was not only outnumbered
but obliged to carry out wahhabite strategies. Riyadh had
infiltrated into the command structure the wahhabite Shaykh
Umar, from Riyadh and in its pay. The Dagestani based
wahhabite, Shaykh Bahauddin, was one of the key authors of the
Second War along with another spokesman, operating out of
Istanbul. In three separate operations the wahhabite leadership
entrapped Shamil Basayev and betrayed him. No member of the
Arabian regime, that is neither minister nor diplomat, has been
challenged by the media to explain the overt role of their
government in a continuing series of tragic incidents involving
the deaths of innocent people from Mindanao to Grozny. The
result of wahhabite practice is clearly genocidal.
The world knows the result, but it prefers to look away
uncomfortably at what that result exposes. It exposes the unity
of the kafir system. The European Union let the Russians see
that they could complete the genocidal destruction of the brave
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84
Chechen people. The American president openly flirted with
Yeltsin at an international conference, indicating thereby that
he had a free hand in the continued slaughter. The
Organisation of Islamic Conference, as ever, remained
supremely irrelevant. The Titans insisted that the Russian
president be replaced by a man that they could quickly brief to
fulfil their complete financial and commodities programme for
the Russian Federation. This new president gave orders for the
total destruction of the city of Grozny, and only some days later
was received with honour by the British Prime Minister. Almost
the first act of the new Russian president was to order the
destruction of the oil installation outside Grozny. The War was
over, yet this was his first policy statement. Again, for a
moment, the curtain was lifted on the new realities of power.
The destruction of Grozny was a serious blow if you still held to
the illusion that there was something called a Russian national
economy. If what was at issue was the carving up and sharing
among the Oil Titans their part in the revenues, research and
development of the Asian pipeline system, then the Titans had
won, and Riyadh could be congratulated on a further
strengthening of their contribution to the Titans programme,
and the success of their doctrinal commitment to the wiping
out of Sufism, and therefore prevention of the continuance and
revival of the true Islam that had survived since the foundation
of Madinah al-Munawwara.
It follows from this that the Islam that maintained a historic
world reality from the time of the Messenger, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, until the fall of the Khalifate with its
full splendour of Shariat and Tariqat, sustained by Sultans who
governed according to the Book of Allah and the Amal of the
Messengers Madinah, may Allah bless him and grant him
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peace, and may Allah soon set Madinah free, it follows that the
true Islam remains the greatest fear of the kafir hegemony. It is
also clear that the scenario of the wahhabites and the
reformers pseudo-Islam presents absolutely no threat to them.
It assures the splitting of Islamic activity into two separate and
controllable phenomena. At the one extreme a limited purist
rebellion characterised by savagery and terrorism which can
only attract a desperate and socially rejected minority. At the
other extreme there is the castrated version of a sweet Islam
which on close examination is nothing other than a kind of
theistic humanism, able to embrace Rights of Man and a
tolerance of every form of shirk and kufr, obediently
confirming that jews, christians and Muslims are really all one.
The significance of these two kafir-licensed Islams, and by that
I clearly mean anti-Islams, is that neither one posits the
intention and obligation to found a new society, and eventually
civilisation, in obedience to the Divine and Prophetic
commands, such as existed in the Eastern Khalifate, the
Osmanli Dawlat, the Mughal Dawlat, the Sultanates of the
Malay Archipelago, the Maghribi Kingdom, and the European
Islamic civilisation of Andalusia.
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86
VI
It is now possible, as has been demonstrated by this review of
Arab affairs and their impact on the total Islamic world, to
confirm that the wahhabites and reformers, whether by their
false aqida or their outright negation of the double shahada,
had plunged Islam into defeat and achieved the abolition of the
historical Amal of its people. As a pure minority in Egypt they
were utterly rejected by the masses in favour of a socialistic
materialism, only to see the people end up the slaves of kafir
bankism. In Sudan they took power and managed to reduce
this once wealthy country to helpless dependency on the kafir
debt system, by which it acquired power over political
government. The Arab illusion that government is power has
been one of the results of their false aqida.
During a recent uprising in Fiji an American State Department
official openly admitted the new doctrinal basis of the kafir
87
hegemony. He said, We do not recognise governments. We
only recognise states. This brings to an end a historical method
and practice that had been the foundation of all kafir civic
discourse up until now. In real terms he was quite correct in
confirming that now governments do not govern. However, the
second part of the kafir shahada may at first appear
metaphysical until one remembers that they are atheist
materialists. What then, to them, is the state?It is neither a
culture nor an amorphous polity. It must represent those
boundaried institutions which control the wealth of that
territory and its interface with the world outside. This means
that the state is, de facto, its legal currency, and the utilisation
of it by financial institutions. Since the webbing and
networking of such institutions does not retain a national
zoned characteristic, it follows that the states power is a two-
faced reality. To the people, it presents a face which tells them
that these institutions are national and their property, but its
other face, which looks out on the world, assures that world of
the wealths location inside the archives and storage vaults of
the world banking hegemony.
Against this utterly new historical situation a coup dtat put
power in Sudan into the hands of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun
faction. As I have indicated with detailed analysis in Technique
of the Coup de Banque, taking the seat of political power and
then sitting on it does not empower the one who is enthroned.
Sudan remains an emaciated, starving, and debt-ridden society
totally at the mercy of the bankers. When we proffered the path
of true application of Islamic Law, and that does not entail
either the shrouding of women in black bags or the sinister
surgical activity of the modernists version of the cutting of
hands, but rather putting into practice the Divinely and
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Prophetically ordained obligations of Zakat and Halal trade
with the gold and silver Madinan currency, the Sudanese
modernist leaders simply preferred to deal with the bankers.
This meant that they preferred the Sudanese people to have
their barren ideology rather than a chicken in the pot.
In surveying the disaster of the Second Chechen War and the
debacle achieved by the wahhabite insurgents who wrecked the
Islamic society which was being formed by the victorious Sufic
Muslims, and then condemned their people to a still
undocumented horror that saw the total destruction of their
capital, one disturbing factor of the equation remains to be
assessed. Chechnya boasted a world-famous history of Islamic
resistance against the kuffar over centuries through the power of
the Sufic Tariqas which maintained the dynamic activism of the
Deen through both kafir monarchy and dictatorship. Yet within
a few months of wahhabism rearing its face actively in the
Caucasus, a nation was plunged into its worst tragedy. Strictly
speaking, it should be remembered that a form of wahhabism
had in fact been actively supported by the kafir communists
which found their Jadidi Movement absolutely no threat to the
socialist programme. The question therefore remains, where did
the wahhabites come from and who paid the bill?
It is not difficult to understand what has happened, indeed
much of the evidence comes from the corpses on the ground,
which in every place where the wahhabites activity can be
identified, are Muslim. Let us define the kafir version of events
as overtly taught by the state media of the kuffar and the super-
bank spokesman. Foremost there is, to them, the mass of two
billion disempowered Muslims for whom they hold out the
promise of investment programmes, emergency relief, and the
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occasional dam project. They also recognise those states built
on that false aqida which has been laid bare in this text. The
Organisation of Islamic Conference is their cynical solution to
deal with unforeseen crises, that is to say an inter-governmental,
ambassadorial arena for long speeches. Its members prefer to
ignore the kafir shahada, We do not deal with governments.
We only deal with states. The kuffar gained access to the
Muslims wealth by the abolition of Awqaf and Zakat and the
introduction of the meaningless term Islamic Banking and
Investment. This kafir model, if we politically apply the current
theories of kafir cosmology, recognises the reality of disruption.
By the application of Chaos Theory they can in real terms pre-
empt any uprising of an Islamic group of people by the
activation of a counter-disruption which is both designed and
controlled. In the same way that a dangerous volcanic eruption
is prevented through a nearby underground explosion which
opens up a vent for the lava to escape, so political scenarios can
be set up to short-circuit any possibility of the empowerment of
the Muslims in a specific place. Not for a moment should you
imagine that this is conspiracy theory. On the contrary it is
exactly as I have indicated, a response to a major explosion
through a minor disruption. It is both pragmatic and posterior
to a political event. The event can be an independence
movement. The event can be an insurgent group. The response
in every instance situates that event in the realm of extremism,
fanaticism and terrorism.
Because these policies of the kuffar often involve underground
channels across nations and the recruitment of dubious
personnel, the whole affair of what was once the broad social
activity in which Muslims participated by founding the highest
civilisations known has become reduced to the sordid intrigues
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90
and acted-out fantasies both of the radical groups and the secret
services involved. In this matter it would be naive to fail to
recognise the sameness between the Intelligence agents and the
terrorists which is completely analogous to the relationship
between the warders and the penitentiary prisoners. It follows
from this that there has to be organised production of those
active agents which can wipe out the possibility of the
reappearance of Islam in all its glory. There has to be a source
which manufactures both the theoretical system, the dynamic
application, and the agents of the insurgency. It must now be
faced that that centre of both theoretical and practical activity
is the University of Madinah. The face these so-called radicals
present to the Muslims is simplistic but remarkably effective.
They say, The regime in Arabia is corrupt, they are agents of
the Americans, but we are struggling to establish the true Deen,
and in due course they will be dealt with, meanwhile this
military operation or this civic outrage must be implemented.
The full nature of this effective Nifaq is that their programmes
can be carried out all over the world and yet never are applied
inside Arabia.
To grasp this simple duplicity a useful historical metaphor may
be applied. In the nineteenth century, in order for the British
to take out the wealth of China while leaving its populace
bereft, it was necessary to find a social method to guarantee
there would be no powerful uprising of the masses. The
imperialist solution was twofold, one which would prevent
rebellion and at the same time bring further wealth to the
colonists. The British created a trade in opium, planted and
harvested the poppies, extracted the opium gum, and sold it in
the great cities of coastal China. As a result the urban
communities were infested with opium dens, and addiction
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became a social reality. Politically this meant that the British
were giving opium to the Chinese to drug them into passivity,
yet it was a poison which they did not permit their own elite
community to take. In exactly this way the wahhabite, kafir-
appointed ruler permits the export of wahhabite subversion
and military adventure. It should be remembered that this same
ruler, prior to the second Presidential elections to reinstate
Reagan, sent a message begging the President to grant him
American citizenship in order that he could cast a vote for him
in the coming election.
I know of one Chechen leader who went to Madinah University
thinking he would acquire the Deen, but who left disgusted
when he found out the true nature of their programme. Recall
the Mauritanian alim who resigned from the University in
anguish. What he had foreseen was now in full operation: the
indoctrination and guidance in the dismantling of historical
Islam in a place, and the introduction in that place of some
form of violent insurrection which would end in the
destruction of that place, the slaughter of many of its people,
and finally the successful and pacifying intervention of a world
banking institution which would generously grant them a loan
for reconstruction at generous interest rates.
* * * * *
In the Sahih Muslim, in the Kitab az-Zakat, we find the
following Hadith coming through various chains of
transmitters:
Abu Said Khudri reported that Ali, may Allah
be pleased with him, sent some gold alloyed with
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92
dust to the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, and the Messenger of
Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace,
distributed that among four men, al-Aqra bin
Habis Hanzali and Uyaina bin Badr al-Fazari and
Alqama bin Ulatha al-Amiri, then to one
person of the tribe of Kilab, to Zaid al-Khair at-
Tai, and then to one person of the tribe of
Nabhan. Upon this the people of Quraish felt
angry and said: He gave to the chiefs of Najd and
ignored us. Upon this the Messenger of Allah,
may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: I
have done it with a view to conciliating them.
Then there came a person with a thick beard,
prominent cheeks, deep, sunken eyes, a
protruding forehead and a shaven head. He said:
Muhammad, fear Allah. Upon this the
Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, said: If I disobey Allah, who
would then obey Him?Have I not been sent as
the most trustworthy among the people of the
world?Yet you do not repose trust in me. That
person then went back. Someone among the
people then sought permission for his murder.
According to some it was Khalid bin Walid who
sought the permission. Upon this the Messenger
of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him
peace, said: From this very persons posterity
there will arise people who would recite the
Quran but it would not go beyond their throats.
They would kill the followers of Islam and would
spare the mushrikun. They would pass through
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the teachings of Islam as hurriedly as the arrow
passes through the prey. If I were ever to find
them I would kill them like Ad.
Abu Said al-Khudri said that the Messenger of Allah, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, made mention of a sect
that would be among his Ummah which would emerge out of
the dissension of the people. Their distinctive mark would be
shaven heads. They would be the worst creatures or the worst of
the creatures. The group who would be nearer to the truth out
of the two would kill them.
The shaven head is the well-known mark of the wahhabites and
the reformers, something which up until then was abhorrent
to the Muslims because of this well known rescension.
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VII
Oh Arab people! It is time for renewal and beginning afresh.
The cure lies in Amal. And the best Amal is the Amal of
Madinah. Now we know. Now we know that the Salafi
Movement was a deception because it was not the way of the
Salaf. The way of the Salaf was the way of the people of
Madinah. Khalifate. Amirs in every land governing under the
Shariah. Awqaf, the functioning social welfare system of the
Islamic society. Zakat, taken in obedience to the Quranic
command by its Collectors, and immediately distributed to the
poor and the designated categories. The Islamic golden Dinar
and the silver Dirham the only Salafi currency history records
and Halal trade from unrented premises, and only the limited
taxations of Kharaj and Jizya as existed in the days when Allah
gave us power to govern, rule, and conquer. There is no power
but from Allah, the Mighty, the Great. All these necessities are
based on the Muslim people learning and knowing their
individual worth and importance before Allah, glory be to Him.
95
The Islamic society is not founded on an imposition of rules to
create justice which is unaccompanied by guidance and rules to
teach men to be just and behave in a way pleasing to Allah,
glory be to Him. Shaykh al-Alawi, the Shaykh of my second
Shaykh, Shakyh al-Fayturi, may Allah be pleased with both of
them, said:
Sufism comes from cleaning the inward. The end
is not realised except by correcting the beginning.
Ibn al-Ashir, in his noble summary of Islam, Imam, and Ihsan,
defined Sufism thus:
Immediate and open turning from every wrong
action that has been committed is obligatory, and
it is regret with the condition that he leaves it and
does not persevere in it, and he must hurry to
seek forgiveness. The summary of Taqwa is
avoidance, and obedience in the outward and in
the inward. So the categories come in four, truly
it is the path of benefit for the traveller.
He lowers his eyes from what is forbidden, he
stops his ears against wrong speech, like slander,
backbiting, false testimony, and lies. His tongue is
under more pressure to leave what has been
mentioned, he protects his stomach from the
forbidden and leaves what is doubtful
conscientiously, he protects his private parts, and
he fears the Recorders when it comes to the grasp
of, or movement toward, something forbidden
which he might want. He stops matters until he
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knows what Allah has decreed to be done in
them. He purifies his heart of showing off,
jealousy, vanity, and every sickness.
Know that the root of these disasters is love of
leadership and avoidance of responsibility for what
comes. The fountainhead of faults is love of this
world. There is no cure except to be in need of Him.
He keeps company with a Shaykh who knows the
paths, who will protect him from perils on his
road. He reminds him of Allah when he sees him
and he takes the slave to his Lord. He takes the
self to account for its breaths and he weighs the
inclinations in the scale. He guards the
obligatory, which are the capital, and extra acts of
worship are his profit, by it he befriends. He
increases invocation by his pure core, and has
help in all this by his Lord. He fights the self for
the Lord of the Worlds, and he delights in the
stations of certainty. Fear, and hope, and thanks,
patience, turning from wrong actions, doing-
without, reliance, contentment, and love. He is
sincere with the witnessing angel in his dealings,
and he is content with whatever Allah has
decreed for him. He then becomes a free Gnostic,
and other-than-Him has left his heart, so the Lord
has loved him and chosen him for the presence of
the perfectly pure, and has attracted him.
My Shaykh, and the Shaykh of my suluk, the renowned Shaykh
Muhammad ibn al-Habib, gives proof of this obligation referred
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to by Ibn al-Ashir, in His word, may He be exalted: Oh you
who have Iman, fear Allah and be with the Sadiqun. He also
referred to His saying, may He be exalted, Follow the path of
whoever turns away from self to Me. In the Introduction to his
blessed Diwan he declared:
By Allah and by Allah we have not passed
through a city, a village, or a desert, but that the
people testified that love had come to them and
life flowed in their hearts. Such is the secret of
Allahs Idhn. Praise be to Allah, no faqir has sat
with us without gaining a knowledge that was not
his before, and getting from it humility and a
contrite heart. No murid of the Tariqa has sat
with us without a strengthening of his innate
condition and the heightening of his himma in
the quest for gnosis of Allah. There has been no
Shaykh of the Shaykhs of the age who has not
increased in his immediate tasting and gained
something of benefit which he did not have
before. All that is from the secret of the Idhn and
its baraka.
It is known to all of you that the Messenger, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, told his Companions that there was
a piece of flesh in mans body which, if it could be guaranteed,
would assure a man his place in the Jannah. He referred of
course to the heart. It is by assuring that the hearts are sound
that the great victory is achieved, and Allah, the Mighty, the
Great, has told us that it is by Dhikr that the heart is made
tranquil. The heart in tranquillity can reflect on the splendour
of the creation which glorifies the Creator and can recognise
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98
that all the actions, despite their multiplicity, belong to the
Actor, that all the attributes, both the outward and the inward,
unify in His Attributes. Then the one who desires knowledge is
filled with yearning and with longing to realise his secret and to
enter the Presence of Lordship, until he comes to the unveiling
of the oneness of the Essence which cannot be contemplated
but which depends on the disappearance of the lover. All this
affair is a matter of tasting and recognition by experience, and
not by text and information and memory.
Shaykh Moulay Abdalqadir al-Jilani declared, He who does not
have a Shaykh as a master will have Shaytan as a master. Thus,
first in the struggle against the nafs, the appetites and Shaytan,
the seeker needs a Shaykh to remind him of Allah and guide him
to his own knowledge that awaits him. Later he guides him, in his
inward journey to the King, to prevent him staying in any station
of unveilings and secrets which might lure him from arriving at
the true Tawhid which leads him to the knowledge of his non-
existence in the Light of His Existence, the Ever-Continuing.
We have seen a century of rulership in the Muslim lands, and
unthinkable though it is, also the Arab lands, in which the ruler
has had Shaytan as a master. We call on the Arab people to
begin the path to recovery of Islam, and that is only possible by
the recovery of their own individual hearts. That in turn is
dependent on recognising that Islam is not just a series of rules
and personal discipline, but something much greater and
glorious because of the generosity of Allah, glory be to Him,
and the compassion and concern of our Master, Muhammad,
may Allah bless him and grant him peace. He has given us the
capacity to have knowledge of Him, directly from Him, and He
is the One with nothing associated with Him, neither you nor
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I, for He is One without partner. It is this one who has grasped
the true Tawhid, immersed in the love of the Messenger of
Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, fearing Allah,
and loving with His love and hating with His hate, it is this one
and his brothers and sisters who can build a great Islamic
civilisation in this world, of justice and honour, which in itself
is the evidence of the great gain awaiting in the Unseen, and the
Certainty which is the victory of the meeting with our Lord,
glory be to Him.
To begin the path of recovery, we pray the dua of Shaykh
Muhammad ibn Nasir, the renowned Nasiri Dua.
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100
THE NASIRI DUA
In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, Compassionate
May Allah bless our Master Muhammad and his family.
O You to Whose mercy one flees!
You in Whom the one in need and distress seeks refuge!
O Master, You Whose pardon is near!
O You Who help all who call on Him!
We seek Your help, O You who help the weak!
You are enough for us, O Lord!
There is nothing more majestic than Your immense power
and nothing mightier than the might of Your force.
Kings are humbled to the might of Your domain
and You lower or elevate whomever You wish.
101
The entire affair returns to You,
and the release or conclusion of all matters is in Your hand.
We have presented our affair before You,
and we complain to You of our weakness.
Have mercy on us, O You Who know our weakness
and continue to be merciful.
Look at what we have experienced from people!
Our state among them is as You see.
Our troops are few and our wealth is little.
Our power has declined among groups.
They have weakened our solidarity and strength
and diminished our numbers and our preparation.
O You Whose kingdom cannot be pillaged,
give us shelter by Your rank which is never overcome!
O Succour of the poor, we trust in You!
O Cave of the weak, we rely on You!
You are the One on Whom we call to remove our adversities,
and You are the One we hope will dispel our sorrows.
You have such concern for us that we cannot hope
for protection which comes through any other door.
We rush to the door of Your bounty
and You honour the one You enrich by Your gift.
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You are the One Who guides when we are misguided.
You are the One Who pardons when we slip.
You have full knowledge of all You have created
and encompassing compassion, mercy and forbearance.
There is no one in existence more lowly than we are
nor poorer and more in need of what You have than us.
O You of vast kindness! O You Whose good encompasses
all mankind, and no other is called on!
O Saviour of the drowning! O Compassionate!
O Rescuer of the lost! O Gracious Bestower!
Words are lacking, O Hearing, O Answerer!
The cure is difficult, O Swift! O Near!
To you, our Lord, we have stretched out our hands
and from You, our Lord, we hope for kindness.
Be kind to us in what You decree
and let us be pleased with what pleases You.
O Allah, change the state of hardship
for ease and help us with the wind of victory.
Give us victory over the aggressors
and contain the evil among those who asked for it.
Overpower our enemy, O Mighty, with a force
which disorders them and crushes them.
The Nasiri Dua
103
Overturn what they desire and make their efforts fail,
defeat their armies and unsettle their resolve.
O Allah, hasten Your revenge among them.
They cannot stand before Your power.
O Lord, O Lord, our protection is by Your love,
and by the might of Your help.
Be for us and do not be against us.
Do not leave us to ourselves for a single instant.
We have no power of defence
nor have we any device to bring about our benefit.
We do not aim for other than Your noble door, and
we do not hope for other than Your encompassing bounty.
Minds only hope for Your blessing
by the simple fact that you say Be and it is.
O Lord, O Lord, arrival is by You
to what You have and seeking the means is by You!
O Lord, You are our high pillar of support!
O Lord, You are our impregnable fortress.
O Lord, O Lord, give us security
when we travel and when we remain.
O Lord, preserve our crops and herds,
and preserve our trade and make our numbers more!
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Make our land a land of the Deen
and repose for the needy and the poor.
Give us force among the lands as well as respect,
impregnability and a polity.
Appoint it its might from the protected secret,
and grant it protection by the beautiful veiling.
By sad, qaf and nun,
place a thousand veils in front of it.
By the rank of the light of Your noble Face
and the rank of the secret of Your immense kingdom,
And the rank of la ilaha illallah
and the rank of the Best of Creation, O our Lord,
And the rank of that by which the Prophets prayed to You
and the rank of that by which the Awliya pray to You,
And the rank of the power of the Qutb and the Awtad
and the rank of the Jaras and Afrad,
And the rank of the Akhyar and the rank of the Nujaba
and the rank of the Abdal and the rank of the Nuqaba,
And the rank of every one worshipping and doing dhikr
and the rank of everyone praising and giving thanks,
And the rank of everyone whose worth You elevated, both
those who are concealed and those whose renown has spread,
The Nasiri Dua
105
And the ranks of the firm ayats of the Book
and the rank of the Greatest Supreme Name,
O Lord, O Lord, we stand as fuqara
before You, weak and lowly.
We call to You with the supplication of the one who calls
on a noble Lord who does not turn aside those who call.
Accept our supplication with Your pure grace, with the
acceptance of someone who sets aside the fair reckoning.
Bestow on us the favour of the Generous,
and show us the kindness of the Forbearing.
O Merciful, extend Your mercy over us
and spread Your blessing over us, O Generous.
Choose for us in all our words
and select for us in all our actions.
O Lord, make it our habit to cling and devote ourselves
to the resplendent Sunna.
Confine our manifold desires to You
and grant us full and complete gnosis.
Combine both knowledge and action for us,
and direct our hopes to the Abiding Abode.
O Lord, make us follow the road of the fortunate
and make our seal the Seal of the Martyrs, O Lord!
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Make our sons virtuous and righteous,
scholars with action and people of good counsel.
O Allah, remedy the situation of the people
and, O Allah, make the reunification easy.
O Lord, grant Your clear victory to the one
who takes charge and empowers the Deen,
And help him, O You Who are forbearing, and help his party
and fill his heart with what will make him pleasing to You.
O Lord, help our Muhammadan Deen,
and make it end mighty as it began.
Preserve it, O Lord, through the preservation of the scholars,
and raise the minaret of its light to heaven.
Pardon, grant well-being, make up for our deficiency and
forgive our sins and the sins of every Muslim, O our Lord.
O Lord, bless the Chosen One
with your perfect prayer of blessing.
Your prayer is that which grants success in his business
as befits his lofty worth.
Then bless his noble family and glorious Companions
and those who have followed them.
Praise belongs to Allah by Whose praise
those with an aim completely fulfil that aim.
The Nasiri Dua
107
POSTSCRIPT
INTRODUCING
THE DINAR
AND THE DIRHAM
by Rais Umar Ibrahim Vadillo
109
From the beginning of Islam until the fall of the Khalifate the
Dinar and the Dirham were the Shariah currency of the Ummah.
THE HISTORY OF THE ISLAMIC DINAR AND DIRHAM
In the beginning the Muslims used gold and silver by weight and
the Dinar and Dirhams that they used were made by the Persians.
The first dated coins that can be assigned to the Muslims are
copies of silver Dirhams of the Sasanian Yezdigird III, struck
during the Khalifate of Uthman, radiallahu anhu. These coins
differ from the original ones in that an Arabic inscription is
found in the obverse margins, normally reading In the Name
of Allah. From then on the writing in Arabic of the Name of
Allah and parts of Quran on the coins became a custom in all
mintings made by Muslims.
Under what was known as the coin standard of the Khalif
Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the weight of 10 Dirhams was equivalent
to 7 Dinars (mithqals).
In the year 75 (695 CE) the Khalif Abdalmalik ordered Al-
Haddjadj to mint the first Dirhams, thus he established
officially the standard of Umar Ibn al-Khattab. In the next year
he ordered the Dirhams to be minted in all the regions of the
Dar al-Islam. He ordered that the coins be stamped with the
sentence: Allah is Unique, Allah is Eternal. He ordered the
removal of human figures and animals from the coins and that
these be replaced with letters.
This command was then carried on throughout all the history
Letter to an Arab Muslim
110
of Islam. The Dinar and the Dirham were both round, and the
writing was stamped in concentric circles. Typically on one side
was written the tahlil and the tahmid, that is, la ilaha illallah
and alhamdulillah, and on the other side was written the
name of the Amir and the date. Later on it became common to
introduce the blessings on the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa
salem, and sometimes ayats of the Quran.
Gold and silver coins remained official currency until the fall of
the Khalifate. Since then, dozens of different paper currencies
have been made in each of the new post-colonial national states
created from the dismemberment of Dar al -Islam.
THE QUESTION OF PAPER MONEY
Allah says in Surat AlImran:
Among the People of the Book there are some who,
if you trust them with a pile of gold,
will return it to you.
But there are others among them who,
if you trust them with a single Dinar,
will not return it to you,
unless you stay standing over them.
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
111
Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, the greatest authority on Quranic
Law, wrote in his famous Ahkam al-Quran about this ayat:
The benefit that can be taken from this is the
prohibition of entrusting the People of the Book
with goods.
Qadi Abu Bakr said: The question concerning entrusting
property is legislated by the text of Quran. This means that the
ayat is a legal judgment of absolute validity and of the greatest
importance to the Deen.
Entrusting wealth to non-Muslims is not allowed, but
furthermore, taking a non-Muslim as a partner outside Dar al-
Islam (where we stand over them) is extremely restricted,
because they might cheat or might use our wealth in forbidden
transactions.
Since paper-money is a promise of payment, can it be permitted
to trust the issuers while they hold the payment (our property)
outside our jurisdiction?
History has also demonstrated repeatedly that paper money has
been a permanent instrument of default and cheating the
Muslims.
In addition, Islamic Law does not permit the use of a promise
of payment as a medium of exchange.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
112
WHAT ARE THE
ISLAMIC DINAR AND DIRHAM?
Accordingto Islamic Law...
TheIslamic Dinar is a specific weight of gold equal to
4.25 grams.
TheIslamic Dirhamis a specific weight of silver equal
to 3.0 grams.
Umar Ibn al-Khattab established the known
standard relationship between them based on their
weights: 7 Dinars must be equivalent to 10 Dirhams.
Howcan I use them?
1. I can save thembecause they are wealth in
themselves.
2. I can pay Zakat and dowryas they are requisite
within Islamic Law.
3. I can buy and sell with them since they are a
legitimate medium of exchange.
IBN KHALDUN ON THE SHARIAH CURRENCY
The Revelation undertook to mention them and
attached many judgments to them, for example
Zakat, marriage and hudud, etc., therefore within
the Revelation they have to have a reality and
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
113
specific measure for assessment [of Zakat, etc.]
upon which its judgments may be based rather
than on the non-Sharii [other coins].
Know that there is consensus [ijma] since the
beginning of Islam and the age of the
Companions and the Followers that the Dirham
of the Shariah is that of which ten weigh seven
mithqals [weight of the Dinar] of gold. ... The
weight of a mithqal of gold is seventy-two grainsof
barley, so that the Dirham which is seven-tenths of
it is fifty and two-fifths grains. All these
measurements are firmly established by
consensus.
Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah
HOW TO USE THE ISLAMIC GOLD DINAR
TO SAVE
Gold and silver are the most stable currency the world has
ever seen.
From the beginning of Islam until today, the value of the
Islamic bimetallic currency has remained surprisingly stable in
relation to basic consumable goods:
A chicken at the time of the Prophet, may Allah bless him
Letter to an Arab Muslim
114
and grant him peace, cost one Dirham. Today, 1,400 years
later, a chicken costs approximately one Dirham.
In 1,400 years inflation is zero.
Could we say the same about the dollar or any other paper
currency over the last 25 years?
In the long term the bimetallic currency has proved to be the
most stable currency the world has ever seen. It has survived,
despite all the attempts by governments to transform it into a
symbolic currency by imposing a nominal value different from
its weight.
TO PAY ZAKAT
Zakat cannot be paid with a promise of payment
Zakat can only be paid with tangible merchandise, called in
Arabic ayn. It cannot be paid with a promise to pay or a debt,
called in Arabic dayn.
From the beginning the Zakat was paid with Dinars and
Dirhams. Most significant is that the payment of Zakat was
never allowed in paper money during all the Osmanli period
right up until the fall of the Khalifate.
Shaykh Muhammad Illish (1802-1881), the great Maliki Qadi,
said that if you were to pay Zakat with paper-money, only its
value as merchandise (dayn), that is, its value as paper would be
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
115
accepted. Therefore, its nominal value is irrelevant in payment
of Zakat.
The return to the payment of Zakat in gold and silver is an
essential part of the re-establishment of Islam.
If the Zakat was obligatory by considering its
substance as a merchandise, then the nisabwould
not be stipulated according to its value but
according to its substance and its quantity, as is
the case with silver, gold, grain or fruits. Since its
substance [paper] is irrelevant [in value] in respect
to the Zakat, then it should be treated as copper,
iron or other similar substances.
Shaykh Illish
TO BUY AND SELL
The Dinar and the Dirham are the currency of the Islamic
Ummah. No more hundreds of different paper currencies
diseased with inflation.
A piece of gold is equally valid wherever you are in the world.
In the past, Muslims were able to travel throughout the Islamic
world and trade with Dinars, as they could at home. From the
15th century onwards the Europeans started to introduce the
banking promissory note into Muslim lands. Paper money gave
European traders an incredible purchasing power that
Letter to an Arab Muslim
116
overwhelmed and eventually surpassed the Muslims
superiority in world trading.
Gold was money well into this century, and for at least two
centuries before, most bonds, including governmental ones,
were gold bonds. But after the First World War, since the
financial demands of the war had led governments to print
paper money in excess, the convertibility to gold was at first
suspended for the most part, then finally terminated.
HOW IMPORTANT ARE THE DINAR AND THE
DIRHAM TO THE DEEN OF ISLAM?
Al-Qurtubi (d. 1273), one of the greatest commentators of
Quran, wrote in his renowned Tafsir about the following ayat
of Quran,
O you who believe!
Obey Allah and obey the Messenger
and those in command among you. ...
that the ayat is an order to obey the Sultan with respect to
seven things: the minting of the Dinar and the Dirham, fixing
weights and measures, legal judgments, Hajj, Jumuah, the two
Eids and Jihad.
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
117
The minting of the Dinar and the Dirham is therefore the first
obligation of the Sultan to be commanded and to be followed.
RELIABILITY
Gold cannot be inflated by printingmore of it. It cannot be
devalued by government decree, and unlike paper currency it is
an asset which does not depend upon anybodys promise to pay.
Portability and anonymity of gold are both important, but the
most significant fact is that gold is an asset that is no-one elses
liability.
All forms of paper assets: bonds, shares, and even bank
deposits, are promises to repay money borrowed. Their value is
dependant upon the investors belief that the promise will be
fulfilled. As junk bonds and the Mexican peso have illustrated,
a questionable promise soon loses value. Gold is not like this.
A piece of gold is independent of the financial system, and its
worth is underwritten by 5,000 years of human experience.
FATWA ON PAPER MONEY
Paper Money is not a legal medium of exchange.
If paper money isa debt representinga merchandise (dayn):
The debt must have a definition of what is owed. But even if it
is defined as a proper debt, a debt cannot be used as a medium
of exchange. Concerning paper-money as wealth entrusted to
non-Muslims, this is not allowed.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
118
If paper money istangible merchandise (ayn):
Its value corresponds only to its weight as paper. Equally we
take the value of the Dinar by its weight not by its nominal
value.
Either way, paper money cannot be accepted as a medium of
exchange.
AN INSTRUMENT OF TYRANNY
We have heard economists saying:
We need a flexible currency, We need a currency that can be
expanded or contracted according to the needs of the
economy, An increase in currency will quicken industry.
These are all fallacies to justify the insolvency of the issuers of
the notes in order to avoid their obligations to pay. There is, in
truth, a great charm in the idea of being able to pay off all our
needs, satisfy all the government expenses and to make the
whole community prosperous, just by printing a few characters
on bits of paper. But when a man is capable of believing that,
he will believe anything.
Another fallacy to justify theft is to say: It is an emergency
indeed a war can influence anybody to accept what appear to be
solutions. After the emergency comes the semi-emergency of a
crisis, or an almost-emergency time or an almost-normal time.
In every case our individual rights are no longer in our hands.
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
119
Any failure to repay in whole or in part what is due by the
promissory note is but a form of theft.
THE RING - The trap and decay of the Khalifate
Up until the 15th century the Muslims were in total charge of
world trading. From then on the Europeans started to take over
by the power of the ring.
The ring is a simple mathematical equation, which, as
mentioned by Richard Wagner in his famous opera, gives total
power to the person who uses it, although it contains a curse:
Whoever uses it will never be loved. Power was not wielded by
gold, but by storing it in a guarded cave. People slaved to mine
it, but were ruled by whoever possessed the ring.
This mathematical formula attached to debt and symbolic
money destroyed the Muslim Khalifate.
This mathematical formula is what banking is all about.
The formula needs a pre-condition: the existence and
acceptance of symbolic money. Then it consists of lending at
interest symbolic money they [the banks] do not have. By
lending 20 times more than they have, all repayments of 10%
become in accounting like 200% (20x10%).
We pay 10%, but they collect 200% of what they originally
had.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
120
But if everyone seems to win, who is the loser?
The losers are all passive holders of the currency who will suffer
the inflation originated by the money created out of nothing.
That is it! Once the Muslims accepted their symbolic money
they inadvertently authorised the magical system which gave the
banks a previously undreamed of world dominion.
The ringdid not just conquer the states, its power was so
fascinating, that it transformed the states into banks.
And the statesbecame banks
This convenient method of coining credit was soon discovered
by the governments and they issued their own promissory notes
in payment of their expenses; a resource all the more useful,
because it was the only mode in which they were able to borrow
money without paying interest, their promises to pay on demand
being, in the estimation of the holders, equivalent to money in
hand. The governments, incapable of containing their own
expanding deficits, then created the legal money. The law of
legal tender established that all money issued by the issuing
authority must be accepted by force in payment of any debt.
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
121
Real Profit = 200%
1 Dollar
20 Dollars
x 20
2 Dollars
10% nominal interest
The legal money abolished the contractual law that
guaranteed the freedom of the people to choose and imposed
on the citizens an artificial currency with a legal value
established by the government.
THE RETURN TO GOLD
In the beginning there was gold
then paper was issued as a promise to pay in gold
and finally the issuers broke their promise and transformed
paper into a non-redeemable official note.
We should now reverse the process...
governments should freely convert their currency,
and finally eliminate all paper currency.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
122
=
=
MONEY, A COMMODITY OR A SYMBOL?
Until the beginning of the 20th century the most popular and
universal medium of exchange was gold and silver coins.
Currency was considered to be as flexible as any other
merchandise. People responding to their own particular needs
demanded the coins and also offered them, thus their market
value was established daily.
Today money is represented by pieces of paper as non-redeemable
official notes whose quantity can be increased at will.
This symbolic money originated from private contracts or
promises to pay issued by goldsmiths and later by banks.
The debate that divides the defenders of gold and silver and
their adversaries is not new, it has been going on for more than
three centuries.
TWO VIEWS:
1) Money isa symbol and not a commodity:
It is the denomination of the currency of the money
that men regard in bargaining, not the quantity of
silver. It is the public authority upon the metal that
makes it money. (Nicolas Barbon, 1696)
Money is a symbol of a thing and represents it.
(Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, 1748)
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
123
Money is the symbol of all commodities. (Franois-
Veron de Forbonnais, 1776)
All monetary functions which are usually performed
by gold and silver coins, may be performed as
effectively by a circulation of inconvertible notes
having no value but that fictitious and conventional
value... they derive from law. (John Fullarton, 1848)
2) Money is a commodity and not a symbol:
Silver and gold, coined or uncoined, though they are
used for a measure of all other things, are no less a
commodity than oil, tobacco, cloth or stuffs.
(Josiah Child, 1689)
Money is not a mere symbol, for it is itself wealth; it
does not represent values, it is their equivalent.
(Guillaume-Franois Le Trosne, 1777)
Gold and silver have value as metals before they are
money. The coins which today have a merely ideal
denomination are in all nations the oldest; once upon
a time they were all real, and because they were real,
people reckoned with them. (Fernando Galiani,
1803)
The false definitions of money may be divided in two
main groups: those which make it more and those
which make it less, than a commodity.
(Wilhelm Roscher, 1858)
Letter to an Arab Muslim
124
SOME COMMON FALSE OBJECTIONS
TO GOLD & SILVER AS A MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE
In any debate about gold and silver, certain objections are
repeatedly raised by opponents of monetary freedom, even
though those objections have been refuted many times before.
Some of these objections are:
There is not enough gold.
Russia and South Africa, since they are the principal
producers, will benefit.
Gold is subject to undesirable speculative influences.
Gold will produce instability in prices.
The first objection, that there is not enough gold, is based upon
a misunderstanding of the price of gold. It assumes that the
present exchange ratio between a weight of gold and notes is the
exchange ratio that must prevail when the gold is made a
medium of exchange. Such is obviously not the case. To put it
simply, lower prices under gold currency will eliminate the
necessity for larger sums. One could buy a suit that costs 400
paper units with 20 gold equivalents at a different exchange ratio.
The second objection, concerning Russia and South Africa, is
equally groundless. It could be considered an advantage, in the
same way oil or a fertile soil could be, in comparative terms.
The amount of gold already taken out of the earth in the last
two thousand years is already superior to the known but
unminted reserves of Russia and South Africa. The unminted
reserves of Russia are estimated to be about 250 million ounces
which is less than what the United States already has in minted
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
125
reserves. The demand for gold as a medium of exchange will
release the existing hoardings, a process which is already in
vogue in most central banks.
The third objection, that gold is subject to speculative influence
and therefore too unstable to be used as a medium of exchange,
is also false. During the 1970s, gold became a major hedge
against inflation. The run-up in gold prices from $35 to $850
per ounce came as a result of fears about the value of paper-
money and developing international crises. People who object
to gold because it is speculative confuse cause and effect. The
real speculation is provoked by an irredeemable paper-money
system and people who logically want to protect themselves
from it.
The fourth objection says that gold will produce instability in
prices. Comparing prices in gold in the U.S. in 1833 with 1933,
just prior to the abandoning of the domestic gold standard, the
index of wholesale commodity prices increased only 0.9 percent
in one hundred years! Since then the index had increased
350% by 1971, when President Nixon, declaring international
bankruptcy, announced that no more gold would be given in
exchange for dollars. In the last twenty years the index has gone
up around 400%.
Gold is therefore stable and fit to be money, and history has
shown us that there is no money more unstable or unfit than
paper-money.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
126
THE EFFECT OF THE DINAR
AND THE DIRHAM ON BUSINESS
Paper-money, which does not render any service except in
exchange for something productive, is made artificially
productive by interest.
On the other hand, every genuine enterprise, like the use of a
house or a manufacturing process, can only be productive by
the services rendered to society.
Interest competes and wins over genuine enterprises profitable
to society. The genuine business has to pay the interest out of
the profit from a genuine service to society, but the bank makes
profit out of the interest through the artificial expansion of the
money lent.
The final result is that the higher the interest rates the greater
the destruction of less competitive businesses.
THE EFFECT OF THE RETURN
OF THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM WILL BE:
The shift of capital investment from the most speculative areas
to the more productive areas.
As a result a new landscape associated with the Dinars and the
Dirhams will re-emerge, that is, the world of Islamic Trading.
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
127
A new re-start for trading will come about through the
restoration of two of its most representative but lost
institutions:
the market-place which will replace supermarkets
and
the caravans which will replace monopolistic distribution
And the return of the guilds, that is, associated independent
intelligent work-teams, in which the relationship
master/ apprentice will replace employer/ employee
THE EFFECT OF THE DINAR AND THE DIRHAM
ON REAL ESTATE
Today you want to buy a house and a bank will offer you a
mortgage. This is how the ring distorts the operation:
The annual rent of a house is 10% of its value, but, the same
money is offered by the bank at 5%, which considering
inflation is a bargain!
Why would the bank be so generous, when it could rent the
house and obtain the house plus a higher 10% return?
This is the paradox of the ring. Out of that 5% interest the
bank will make a 100% profit with the mathematics of the ring.
Letter to an Arab Muslim
128
The borrower thinks that the interest is better than paying the
rent, the bank makes a higher profit out of expanding money
who loses?
All the holders of the newly inflated currency by its loss of
value (inflation).
A house can be rented, it is a hireable merchandise.
Money cannot be rented, it is a non-hireable merchandise.
Profit and rent come only from real services to society this is
the end of speculative economy and the beginning of real
prosperity to society. This is because investment will have to be
directed towards real services, instead of being drawn by the
artificial profit of the ring which like a parasite lives off real
services.
Without the mortgage, housing prices will simply find a new
stability established by the equilibrium between the offer and a
new demand based on what people can really pay.
Money is something which it is not permissible to
hire.
(Imam Sahnun, in the great Madinan text,
Mudawwana al-Kubra, 12:46)
Introducing the Dinar and Dirham
129
THE DINAR AND DIRHAM
IN CONTEMPORARY USAGE
The Islamic Mint is now minting the Islamic coins in five
different countries, while gold is used as a medium of exchange
by thousands of people in at least 60 countries. In order to
facilitate trading between these people, Islamic Mint created
the first Islamic Wakala. This traditional form of contracting
between a wakil (agent) and a muwakkil (principal) using
modern telecommunications will replace the usurious banking
system as a system of payment.
The e-Dinar www.e-dinar.com
The e-Dinar is a payment system that supports the Islamic
Wakala using digital technology. It allows the Islamic Wakala to
sell Islamic Dinars and Dirhams over the internet and to set up
accounts for users of the coins, thus enabling their use as money.
It offers all the services of the Wakala via internet and networks
the growing number of wakala institutions world-wide.
Money is any merchandise commonly accepted as a
medium of exchange.
Imam Malik
Letter to an Arab Muslim
130
Letter to an Arab Muslim
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The Nasiri Dua
133
Letter to an Arab Muslim
134
The Nasiri Dua
135
Letter to an Arab Muslim
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The Nasiri Dua
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